A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

I gave myself a little break from my James Joyce project: a palette cleanser between courses. I’m halfway through Ulysses after having finished Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But I was also eager to get back to Hemingway after having enjoyed A Farewell to Arms so much. I still plan to read For Whom the Bell Tolls. But I’ll finish Ulysses, first.

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s memories of Paris from 1921 to 1926, written at the end of Hemingway’s life and published (1964) after his death (1961). The book consists of 20 short chapters each like a short story. Hemingway is only 22 in 1921, although he has already been to war having served in an ambulance corps in Italy, is married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and soon will be a father. Hemingway had met Hadley back in Chicago and moved to Paris with her on the advice of Sherwood Anderson because of the creative environment and because an American could live cheaply on the good exchange rate. Their baby, Jack, who is called Bumby, will be born in 1923. Hemingway is just beginning his writing career, writing short stories, but nothing is published yet. During the years covered in this book he will write and publish his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway supports the family by writing as an international correspondent for the Toronto Star, continuing a relationship he began back in the U.S.

He includes stories about some of the other authors in Paris at the time: principally Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He briefly mentions James Joyce, who was publishing Ulysses in 1922 out of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop in Paris, “Shakespeare and Company”. But the best part of the book is not the gossip about other writers but the glimpse into the development of Hemingway’s own writer’s life. He writes in cafes and sometimes at home. He records specific details of which cafe, what he ate and drank, the addresses, the streets he takes to walk around town. The details are so exact after a forty year gap I wonder if he is referring to a diary.

He describes the powerful feeling when his work goes well. There’s a wonderful story where’s he’s writing well in a cafe and is interrupted by a bore who won’t leave him alone but he manages to complete another paragraph. In the second story, “Miss Stein Instructs” he explains his aesthetic goal by giving himself a writing instruction that illuminates Hemingway’s own distinctive style but would serve as great advice for any young writer:

“‘Do not worry You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I know about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline. (p. 12). (I read a paperback edition from Scribner’s published 2003).

On the next page he talks about how he learns to build up complex forms from simple materials by looking at Cezanne’s paintings in the Louvre and the Jeu de Plume. “I went there nearly every day for the Cezannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret.” (p. 13).

He talks about what he’s reading, books borrowed from the subscription library that was part of the “Shakespeare and Company” bookshop, and tells us what he admires or doesn’t about the writers.

“In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi” (p. 133).

Several of the stories are very fun. A romantic story when he and Hadley take a day off for a picnic and go to the horse races (“A False Spring”). A funny story of a bothersome encounter with an oblivious Ford Maddox Ford at a cafe (“Ford Maddox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple”). A strange story about a opium-addicted friend of Ezra Pound’s who has to be talked down from a roof (“An Agent of Evil”). In the midst of a different story (“Hunger was Good Discipline”), he refers to, but doesn’t completely tell, the true story about Hadley packing all of Hemingway’s completed stories, and their carbon copies into a valise to bring to Hemingway in Switzerland, so he can work on them, then leaving the valise unattended in the train for a few minutes and coming back to find it gone. The stories were never found and Hemingway had to start over.

In “Miss Stein Instructs”, Gertrude Stein gives Hemingway a lesson in homosexuality, although it sounds like she needs one herself. Hemingway never refers to Alice B. Toklas by name. She’s always Stein’s friend or companion. Hemingway writes:

“Miss Stein thought that I was too uneducated about sex and I must admit that I had certain prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects. I knew it was why you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the pursuit of women.” (p. 18.)

But Stein’s expertise on the subject isn’t much better. She thinks homosexuals are sick and can’t help what they do and should be pitied. Hemingway quotes her saying:

“The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy.”

“I see.” [says Hemingway. Stein goes on…]

“In women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together.” (p. 20).

Stein and Toklas were a lesbian couple, of course. So were Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company and her partner/lover Adrienne Monnier.

The best story in the book is a series of connected stories about F. Scott Fitzgerald which Hemingway sets off by themselves with a little epigraph near the end of the book. The first, “Scott Fitzgerald” tells the story of a road trip Hemingway and Fitzgerald take together to retrieve a car that Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, had left at a mechanic’s shop in Lyon. On the trip, Fitzgerald is silly, disorganized, needy, but at the end he gives Hemingway a copy of the book he’s just published, The Great Gatsby, and when Hemingway reads his friend’s novel he recognizes his genius and commits to supporting him however he can. The second story, “Hawks do not Share”, relates the time when Hemingway realized that Zelda was really insane. And the last, “A Matter of Measurements”, is a humorous story taking place, “much later” about Fitzgerald inviting Hemingway to lunch with an important question. At the end of an awkward lunch Fitzgerald confesses that Zelda has complained, “that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy.” Hemingway takes him to the men’s room to check him out and back at the table says, “You’re perfectly fine.” (p. 190).