A Moveable Feast

To write thoughts on a book such as this is to court disaster. Hemingway may be in or out of fashion, but there is not a sentence out of place in A Moveable Feast and this makes the reviewer incredibly self-conscious – as if Hemingway’s ghost sits alongside and suggests, gruffly, ‘all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’ (p.12). Well, here it is: the only disappointing thing about this book is that I have damaged it by leaving a wet towel on top, travelling back from the pool in Nyons in France to the house in Piégon where I write this review.

A Moveable Feast takes its name from the epigraph, and the idea that ends the book, that ‘there is never any ending to Paris’ (p.182). It opens, literally, mid-sentence to provide an early, subtle suggestion of this cycle of eating/feasting/drinking/writing/living: ‘Then there was the bad weather’ (p.3). Hemingway’s memoirs, fiction and fact, were written towards the end of his life, but are all about the twenties, when he was in his twenties, and struggling to make ends meet as a writer who has given up journalism to write short stories and a novel (in the course of the time of A Moveable Feast, he completes the first draft of “The Sun Also Rises”). There are, I think, three main joys to the book (or I have categorised for the sake of Hemingway-brevity).

The first is not my first, but the first of others (one assumes from the blurb at the back) – and that is, the portraits of now famous writers that Hemingway knew in Paris at this time. There is a glimpse of Joyce – dining in more expensive restaurants than the young writer could afford. Of greater importance is the insight into the life of Gertrude Stein and her partner, who explained to Hemingway that she ‘always talked to the wives’ (p.13), leaving the two writers to battle-it-out in the world of ideas and fiction. Hemingway paints himself, largely, as a polite sort of fellow who kept at least quite a bit of his inner-savage to himself; nevertheless his description of a pleading Stein with her partner, which he cannot tolerate to listen to, says enough. Much more developed, and equally damning but also written with obvious tenderness is his recollection of F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. Fitzgerald is already a drunk, and a sort of rich American who lacks appreciation of the French he encounters (such as waiters, who Hemingway gets to know and respects); Zelda is well on the way to madness and self-destruction – and yet on reading The Great Gatsby, Hemingway knows he must join the list of Fitzgerald’s many friends, to help him in any way he can.

Writing, for Fitzgerald, is difficult because of the temptations to drink and a wife who Hemingway sees as jealous of his writing. For Hemingway himself, the book portrays the sort of craftsman’s discipline and habits that allow for words to appear on the page, sentence-by-sentence. The second attraction of the book is thus the insight it gives into the confessions of a writer, about his own craft and how he manages it with the balance of family, and living, something which I think is of real interest in the book.

That is to say, A Moveable Feast is no portrait of hedonism or luxury, nor does it portray abject poverty and suffering. There is something like chipped nostalgia here (apologies for the adjective) with the richness of daily life and the small pleasures of eating, drinking, loving and living celebrated. Thus is it is fitting that the last chapter, the one that leads to the final comment about never leaving Paris, is all about skiing in Austria, and not just about skiing but the earnest climbs up the mountains required to ski down which means that the skier is as ‘true’ as the writer: his legs are strong enough and he is wary and not foolish of avalanches and other mountain dangers. Fitzgerald also draws the memoir to a close by letting the reader know that there are shadows on the horizon, with an affair beginning while his wife still loves him. Thus the last lines, even without knowledge of Hemingway’s own tragic death, resonates: ‘But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy’ (p.182).

(See also my thoughts on For Whom the Bell Tolls).