A Moveable Feast

Read book. Recommend for Shea maybe, depending on content due to her love for all things “Paris”, if that's still the case.
Recommended by Nathaniel Drew.

I started reading this 9 years ago, couldn't finish, and then again a couple of years ago - it was the much earlier edition. Though I enjoyed it as I would any Hemingway book, I was not as drawn to it as I did in the third reading. Back then I had no connection to the places and the locales he often uses as points of reference to characters and the silent developments in his inner world. This would explain why I trudged through it. I did not get to finish the book when typhoon Rai destroyed my home and most of my books.

Fast forward to last winter when I visited Paris and bought the restored edition from the Shakespeare and Company. It was a laidback trip and had no company so I had the freedom to walk around mostly in the 5th arr. I didn't realize until later that this area was Hemingway's turf and I had meandered through most of the streets he wrote about. I did not read the book until after I left Paris.

With this new element my second time reading the book hit different, almost intimate, and I think it's because of the impression the city (along with my personal affections) had on me during and after. I finished the book in two sprints. 60% of it in one afternoon.


It was a good thing i got to reread this as the restored edition - the main text was how Hemingway had prepared it for publishing. The chapters are organized differently and some post-humous revisions rolled back. It also has additional sketches/chapters and “fragments” after the main text, that are alternate versions/drafts of some sections found from his manuscript. A bulk of the chapter on Hadley and Pauline which was previously omitted were very powerful in that the reader has access to the his most vulnerable state in that “winter of murder”. All of this provide a better understanding of the author's perspective and process, and a glimpse into the fragility of the mind of the great writer who by that time was already marked for death.

Transports you to Paris as a struggling artist growing in success in the 1920's.

You can't ask for more than that.

A book that will, I believe, connect with everybody who has always been moving or wanting to move but never moved. This book, like many other works by Hemingway, comes to you slow and terse and with the initial resistance. But it comes to you, it comes to you. It is like reading something while being in sync with the life of the book itself, in its most bare form.

the most important thing I got from this book was when Hemmingway said a guy looked like he was from the 90s and he meant the 1890s.

This was an impulse buy. I read this several years ago at the height of my Francophile days when I was able to speak French about half as well as I could read it. Now I can read it okay and speak it only when drunk, and quite poorly.

My mom told me a week or two ago that she wanted me to think about going to Paris again. This is something I have wanted to do for years but I have never traveled internationally and not much domestically. You read Baldwin and Hemingway and Hugo and the others and see Paris as this imperfectly perfect place. Somewhere that a lost person can go to figure things out. I am not convinced any such place really exists outside of the mind, but in the same breath I'll say context matters. Anyway I'm filling out passport paperwork again and maybe I will save enough to go and cheaply.

I thought a lot about tortured artists reading this. Hemingway spends a lot of time beating himself up over his thoughts and actions, in a way I to which I can relate. I struggle to relate to his infidelity and his brutishness. But he is also pretty petty and sensitive to displays of wealth in ways that I understand.

That's beside the point. What I mean is, we have this idea that great suffering produces great art. There seems to be a lot of validity to that. I wonder about the origin of that suffering and the ability for a person to be well and to protect themselves and continue producing. It is one thing to go through external circumstances or to navigate the interior struggles of love and loss and pride and shame. Hemingway talks about people all around him and even to an extent talks about trying to be a friend to people (Fitzgerald et al), and yet we get a sense that he is pretty isolated in his darkest thoughts.

Time and culture are pretty different now, but we still see men struggle to express their emotions and feel badly when doing so. So much great art is the product of suffering, isolated people pouring blood onto the page privately. I don't think you need be unhealthy to produce great art. Surely you don't have to isolate and punish yourself for your feelings under the guise that by virtue of suffering you will write well. Possible that Hemingway would disagree. I certainly haven't written any novels so what the hell do I know? Seems like a raw deal, though.

Not sure where this thought goes, but I am thinking even in films like Michael Mann's Thief or Heat. Mann loves a man on a mission, a man of purpose and work (very masculine stuff here, folks). But in these cases the person has isolated themselves from great love, at least to an extent or at least until the crux of these films. The pain of the isolation and the longing for belonging are the inciting elements. A Movable Feast and Hemingways other works are largely WWI and following years affairs. Thief and Heat were 1981 and 1995 respectively.

We are now in 2024, in mere days 2025. What do these stories look like if the love is not only a vulnerability but a support and strength?

I thought about this watching Whiplash (again) last night. There's a scene in which Teller's character breaks up with a girl he's seeing. Because he believes that to be great – one of the greats – he must do it alone. She says, “and you think I would keep you from that?” And he says some 19 year old version of yep. What a mistake, what a tragedy, to believe that we are stronger alone. That art must be solitary and suffering. It would be a terrible thing to be true.

—

A few weeks ago I was talking Hemingway with a friend and she asked if I'd heard this rumor that he was actually gay. I said no and found it pretty hard to believe. I thought it was possible he was actually a hound.

Then I re-read this and I am not convinced he didn't love Fitzgerald, at least in a way. There are many forms of love. But the way in which Hem describes Fitz on pages 149-150 of my battered Scribner classics edition is quite affectionate:

“Scott was a man who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair, and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.”

Listen. I've written a lot of stuff about people that I find very fair, and it sounds a lot like that. This was nuts to read right now. You cannot tell me that Hem didn't feel like kissing Fitz with that description, I simply will not believe it. He even throws in the “on a woman” disclaimer. Hem, you can't fool me, old buddy. I have been there.

Not that I am interested in a straight/gay dichotomy. I find it not useful today and in the 1920's the socio-cultural understanding of gender and sexuality would be so different as to render it even less useful. I believe in love, and lust, and I don't know which Hem had for Fitz but that is some very pretty writing.

Closing with a few lines that stood out to me on this read:

* Not a line but a thought: wrote a big “Fuck you Stein” re: Gertrude's thoughts on “homosexuals.” Fuck off.
* A line about the writing of Sherwood Anderson: “...I liked some of his short stories very much. They were simply written and sometimes beautifully written and he knew the people he was writing about and cared deeply for them.” (emphasis mine; I flagged a lot of Hem talking about his writing style.)
* “We're always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.”
* “Memory is hunger.”

His fiction is masculine in a way I can't really enjoy. This, however, has enough wine and food and sassy descriptions of author friends (and frenemies) to gloss over his less charming qualities. It's a brief 200 pages. There is a lot of a wine, a lot of rain, and more horse racing than is prudent.

One of my favorite parts was a passage that described being on a writing-roll by him narrating from inside the scene, and you don't realize what he's doing until his writing gets interrupted. At first it wasn't clear, but when I realized what he was doing I got excited. I reread the passage, then read it aloud to N, and only then did I get enough of it to continue with the chapter.

Most of his name-dropping was lost on me, save for the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein (whose name I recognize only because she was a friend of Hemingway's); because I didn't know them, his anecdotes and descriptions would fall a little flat. When he wrote about normal people, however, like his favorite waiter, they came to life. And naturally his descriptions of Paris itself were fantastic, written with true love and affection.

I think I am not a big fan of the way Ernest Hemingway writes, but I do truly enjoy what he writes in this book. Fantastic stories about his time in Paris and about all those artists he meets there. Really highly recommend it.

First read October 2011.
Second read February 2014.

Valuable reading for writers. I have to admit, I'm not a Hemingway fan (and by no means a Hemingway scholar), but I found his portraits of life in Paris interesting, and wistful. He only refers to his own approach to work in passing, but I would have appreciated a more in-depth explanation of his writing philosophy.

Also, the F. Scott stuff is bizarre.

First Hemingway I've read; I was very skeptical that I would enjoy his writing and I remain a facetious reader of his but there's something about him. I would have given this three stars just for the ridiculousness of “Secret Pleasures” but I found it in my heart to forgive him it.

—

“In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.”

Quotable.

“”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 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.”

“Memory is hunger.”

“To have come on all this new world of writing [...] was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you travelled too [...] there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems [...] in the daytime, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.”

and,

“People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boring way there was. They knew nothing of our pleasures nor how much fun it was to be damned to ourselves and never would know nor could know. Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean all happiness or can mean the end of the world.

That is the sort of happiness you should not tinker with but nearly everyone you knew tried to adjust it.”

I still can't decide whether or not I actually like Hemingway. I found some parts of this book jarring; his condemnation of homosexuals and his generally petty, unflattering portraits of his fellow writers especially. But it's a very evocative portrait of Paris in the 20s, and it has some good lines. I liked best the bits when he wrote about writing.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

Essentially, though, it reads as a partial and somewhat dishonest narrative; it's clear that he withholds important parts of the story from the reader (apparently much of the manuscript was redacted, and the veracity of some of it has been called into question; for instance, he describes the experience of being poor in Paris, but the truth is apparently that he had access to plenty of money while he was living there). I got tired of the weirdly pretentious way he painted himself as superior to all of his peers.

1999 Finally...I see...Hemingway....

2010 Hemingway's reflections on his time in Paris during the time after the first world war. He encounters and befriends Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach and Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Oddly, this book links rather well with Tender is the Night and Good Morning, Midnight, both of which were written during this time in France, and both of which I am also reading.