A Moveable Feast was my first foray into the world of Ernest Hemingway. Coincidentally, it also marked two back-to-back debuts for me. I just finished reading Factotum, my first Bukowski. And strangely enough, both books echo similar themes. Bukowski’s Factotum (1975) and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964) are chronicles of the struggle years when success continued to evade both the authors.
Anyways this review is about Hemingway’s book. While the book was published posthumously, it covers Hemingway’s days spent in Paris when he was still an up and coming author.
The book is set in Paris of 1920s, precisely, 1921-26. Hemingway was one of the prominent figures of the Lost Generation literary movement – a cadre of American writers and artists who flocked to Paris in the 1920s.
Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, moved to Paris in 1921. At the time, he was writing dispatches for a Toronto newspaper and freelancing for other papers and journals, all while honing his craft as a professional writer of stories and novels.
Hemingway spent his days holed up in the cafés of Paris, where he did much of his writing. Along the way, you get to know now-famous destinations in Paris where he would often visit like the Latin Quarter in the 5th arrondissement, the iconic brasserie La Closerie des Lilas, the renowned café Les Deux Magots, the legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company and the serene Jardin du Luxembourg, among others.
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Ernest Hemingway
Part of the book reads like a rather pedestrian account of meals and outings in Paris and its surroundings. The rest entails delicious details about Hemingway’s contemporaries – Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot and others.
Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, more than any of his other Paris literary contemporaries. One episode I won’t forget is the road trip Hemingway and Fitzgerald take from Switzerland to Paris. It turns out to be a journey filled with hilarious mishaps and an undercurrent of tension, hinting at a rather strained friendship between the two great authors.
Hemingway also had a close relationship with Gertrude Stein for a while. She helped out Hemingway financially whenever he fell on hard times. Stein also encouraged him to spend his money on art rather than on clothing. The book implies that his friendship with Stein ended rather suddenly. I expected the reasons for the fallout to be revealed, but the chapter on it was quite vague.
Ernest Hemingway seemed to show overt or tacit disdain for many of the characters with whom he interacted in the Paris of the 1920’s. A pair of notable exceptions were poets Ezra Pound, Evan Shipman and the bookseller Sylvia Beach.
Every mention of Ezra Pound in the book borders on reverence. Hemingway describes in glowing terms Pound’s efforts to establish a charitable foundation to free T.S. Eliot from the drudgery of working at a London bank to support himself.
Evan Shipman, a young and then-unpublished poet, earned Hemingway’s respect and lifelong friendship by doing practical, hands-on work such as digging in the soil to grow food for others.
A great writer is also a great reader. Back then, Hemingway was devouring everything he could. Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, had become a lending library to the English-speaking expatriate writers in Paris. Ezra Pound was a regular and so was Hemingway.
Though the book doesn’t mention it, I read somewhere that Ernest Hemingway recorded the experiences he and his first wife, Hadley, had while living in Paris in a series of notebooks. He had always intended to eventually write about those early years.
The last writing project Ernest Hemingway undertook was editing and organizing those notebooks into a book. But he never made it to the finish line. In 1961, with cancer eating away at him and his strength fading fast, he decided to take his own life. Thus, the 1954 Nobel Prize winner bowed out before the illness could strip him of everything he was.
His then wife, Mary, stepped in and finished the project. The book came out posthumously and was, more or less, pieced together from various notes Hemingway had written over time.
This book doesn’t touch on Hemingway’s other relationships, but I got the sense he never stopped loving Hadley, his first wife. The guilt stayed with him and he never shied away from taking the blame. Maybe I am reading too much into his words, but that’s the feeling I walked away with.
A Moveable Feast is one of the great diaries of an American writer. It’s an easy, absorbing read, but don’t mistake that for simplicity. There is depth to it and there is heart. When it comes to intimate reflections, it stands right up there with Bukowski’s Factotum. You will savor the time that you spend reading it.
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