A Moveable Feast, originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in May 1964, is a story of a young writer, Ernest Hemingway, impoverished and living in Paris in the 1920s. It is also a series of portraits, of the author and his friends and acquaintances, but mainly of Paris itself in the 1920s after World War I.
During the 1920s, Paris was one of the greatest artistic scenes in the world. Painters, sculptors, writers, and dancers from America, England, Ireland, Russia and Spain came to Paris where living was inexpensive and it was a time of exciting new ideas and ways of thinking.
Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Illinois. He grew up there, and then he worked as a reporter for a short time. He drove an ambulance during World War I. He was seriously injured and came home. He worked as a reporter in Toronto for a while and then went to Chicago. He married Hadley in 1922.
They moved to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. While they were in Paris, they met many writers and artists, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Picasso.
Gertrude Stein named this community the “Lost Generation” because they were disillusioned about life in their own countries after the war. Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein all encouraged Hemingway as a writer.
Hemingway and Hadley went back to Toronto in 1923 where their son Bumby was born.
Ernest and Hadley returned to Paris in 1924, and Hemingway wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, after a visit to Spain. He had an affair with Pauline and his marriage broke up. He married Pauline. They went back to the States where their son Patrick was born.
They spent a lot of time in Key West and went on safari in Africa. Hemingway did a lot of sailing. There were two more marriages and more children, more writing, more traveling, and a lot of heavy drinking. He was a reporter in the Spanish Civil War, fought in World War II, and ended up in Cuba.
Hemingway published 14 books, short stories and novels. Some of his most famous books are A Farwell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He became depressed and committed suicide by shooting himself in 1961.
In 1956, Hemingway found a trunk left in the basement of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. In this trunk were notebooks Hemingway had kept notes in long ago when he lived in Paris. The notebooks were filled with sketches of the people he had known and the life he had lived with his first wife, Hadley.
Hemingway used these notes to write A Moveable Feast, more than 30 years after that period of his life in Paris. The book was published after Hemingway’s death. So this book is a memoir of a time in his youth, written long after.
He is looking back from the perspective of older age, and seeing things in new ways. For example, Hemingway’s last wife, Mary, helped to edit this book after he had died, and she took out a long apology to Hadley for how he had treated her that Hemingway had written as part of the book.
The main characters in A Moveable Feast are Hemingway and his wife, Hadley; fellow American expatriates such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound; English writers Ford Madox Ford and Hilaire Belloc; Irish writer James Joyce; and the American owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach.
The highest ranking writers in this group were Pound and Fitzgerald, and Hemingway obviously admired them. He says about Fitzgerald:
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
He says about Pound:
His own writing when he would hit it right was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint.
But he didn’t like everyone. He said about Ezra Pound’s friend Wyndham Lewis:
“I met the nastiest man I’ve ever seen today,” I told my wife. “Tatie, don’t tell me about him,” she said. “Please don’t tell me about him. We’re just going to have dinner.”
The book is full of entertaining stories, such as teaching Ezra Pound to box. He frequents many cafes, talking and drinking with his fellow writers, and exploring Paris. Many consider A Moveable Feast some of Hemingway’s best writing. These memoirs are filled with details that make the scenes come alive. The city of Paris is a major character.
In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the wet faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were still shuttered. The goatherd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot.
The character we get to know in this book is not always appealing. Hemingway sometimes seems cowardly, arrogant, and often confused. He is respectful to writers he admires and looks up to, but can be contemptuous and unkind to younger writers who look up to him. Here he is talking to a young writer who has been trying to get his attention and advice while Hemingway is trying to do some writing in a café:
“You shouldn’t write if you can’t write. What do you have to cry about it for? Go home. Get a job. Hang yourself. Only don’t talk about it. You could never write.”
One of the most interesting things about A Moveable Feast is that it gives a picture of the early years in the development of a writer. He is often hungry and worried about money. He has written some stories but not yet written a novel:
I knew I must write a novel. But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel. It was necessary to write longer stories now as you would train for a longer race.
For anyone who enjoys Hemingway’s writing and wants to know more about how he developed as a writer, or who is interested in this period in Paris, or just for anyone who enjoys good writing, A Moveable Feast is definitely worth reading. It makes you wish you were there at the time, walking the Paris streets and hanging out with so many interesting friends. It captures the sense of a time of youth full of possibilities.
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