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A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemmingway

This is the first Hemmingway I’ve read, and oddly enough the last book he wrote before his death. The preface notes that it concerns the years 1921-1926 in Paris, so I was eager to see how it compares to Tropic of Cancer, which covers the same time and place. Tropic of Cancer is a much better book.

Of course, if I could write this book I would be very happy. There are certainly some very good bits, but as a whole it seems to be not much more than a series of anecdotes connected by context. Granted, the context is very interesting. There were many colorful and ultimately famous characters running around that time and place, and it is compelling reading to visit them. Hemmingway either captures or caricatures some truly fascinating people, as in this dialog with Ford Madox Ford, the English writer and publisher:

“A gentleman,” For explained, “will always cut a cad.”
I took a quick drink of Brandy.
“Would he cut a bounder?” I asked.
“It would be impossible for a gentleman to know a bounder.”
“Then you can only cut someone you have known on terms of equality?” I pursued.
“Naturally.”
“How would one ever meet a cad?”
“You might not know it, or the fellow could have become a cad.”
“What is a cad?” I asked. “Isn’t he someone that one has to thrash within an inch of his life?”
“Not necessarily,” Ford said.
“Is Ezra a gentleman?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Ford said. “He’s an American.”
“Can’t an American be a gentleman?”
“Perhaps John Quinn,” Ford explained. “Certain of your ambassadors.”
“Myron T. Herrick?”
“Possibly.”
“Was Henry James a gentleman?”
“Very nearly.”
“Are you a gentleman?”
“Naturally. I have held his Majesty’s commission.”
“It’s very complicated,” I said. “Am I a gentleman?”
“Absolutely not,” Ford said.
“Then why are you drinking with me?”
“I’m drinking with you as a promising young writer. As a fellow writer, in fact.”
“Good of you,” I said.

There are also some lovely descriptions of bicycle races, horse races, and skiing, of all things, as well as a satisfying amount of talk about good food and wine. There is also much fine writing about Hemmingway’s first wife Hadley. His relationship to her is a recurring theme that runs through the otherwise largely disconnected events of the book. Clearly, he loved her deeply and their marriage and child were extremely important and stabilizing for him. But as with life, it is not so simple. Written many years later, after three subsequent marriages, the passages concerning her are tender and darkly moving, full of innocence and foreboding.

“We’re awfully lucky.”
“We’ll have to be good and hold it.”
We both touched wood on the café table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this café table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.

And so there is more here than meets the eye. In general, his relationship with Hadley is detailed, realistic, and convincingly portrayed, and I am impressed that he could show me how much he once loved her, writing almost forty years later. For that matter, I am impressed that he could show me love at all, which is to me a bafflingly complex emotion to get onto the page. I have to say that reading this book has made me a slightly better writer. In fact, Hemmingway discusses writing directly at great length because that is mostly what he was doing during that period. The book is something of a literary history, given the people and places it deals with, and I discovered many interesting things about writers and writing. I learned that the author would sometimes struggle all morning to produce a single paragraph, that he often came up with solutions to literary problems subconsciously while thinking about other things, and that certain authors would write a good story then deliberately damage it in order that it might sell. Hemmingway also writes that he eventually came to “distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations.” All of these are interesting points for an aspiring writer.

Still, I think the book is not as strong as Miller’s in what one assumes is its basic purpose: to bring an amazing time and place to life for the reader. Hemmingway’s Paris is simply nowhere near as alive as Milller’s, not nearly as immediate and ineffable. Perhaps I am merely projecting my own interests on a work which is complete in some other way, but I couldn’t help feeling that the book as a whole does not quite live up to its very last paragraph:

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

Naturally, I will have to read his other work.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Book Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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