A Moveable Feast

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.”