Huntsville-Madison County Public Library discussion

Hemingway’s Parisian beginnings

‘A Moveable Feast’ was the first posthumous work published after Ernest Hemingway’s death, originally in 1964, with editing supervised by Hemingway’s wife at the time of his death, Mary Walsh Hemingway. In 2009, a restored edition was published and edited by Hemingway’s grandson, Sean, with input from Sean’s father Patrick. Apparently, at the time of his death, although Hemingway had not settled on either a proper introduction or conclusion to his memoir, he had been working on how he wanted the book to be presented. This restored edition includes several of the revisions as well as fragments that represent the beginning and the ending of the book.

In 1956, Hemingway was notified of two steamer trunks that had been stored in Paris since 1928. When he reclaimed them, he found remnants of his early fiction, material relating to ‘The Sun Also Rises’, newspaper clippings; in short, Hemingway found voluminous notes on his life in Paris at the time. As the notes brought his life there in the twenties vividly to life, he was inspired to write a memoir of those years.

The book contains plenty of his writing on writing, including the famous quotes about writing one true sentence and stopping before the well runs try so you’ll be able to maintain momentum when you resume your writing the next time. Like other ostensible non-fiction from major fiction writers such as Herman Melville and Mark Twain, Hemingway’s non-fiction is fictionalized.

Hemingway provides a few fascinating character sketches of various people he knew during those years. Sylvia Beach, famous owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, who first published James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, comes across as very admirable and pleasant. “No one I knew was ever nicer to me,” he says about her. She was certainly a very generous librarian, allowing him to take out books for indefinite checkout periods, knowing that he would take them with him on his travels.

On the other hand, Ford Maddox Ford, novelist, critic, and publisher, is memorable for his constant bad breath, which Hemingway always tried to avoid being downwind of, as well as his penchant for lying.

Gertrude Stein, he acknowledges, taught him a lot, although he is a bit vague about what specifically ended their friendship. He overhears her pleading with someone, probably her lover, and tells the maidservant he must leave. On the page he says the only way he could avoid hearing anything more that she said was to leave. He does indicate that she ultimately quarreled with all of her friends eventually.

The most interesting of his portraits to me is of F. Scott Fitzgerald. First of all, Hemingway can’t avoid mentioning that he was pleased that Scott came to the conclusion that he, Hemingway, was a great writer. At the time that he first knew Fitzgerald, he had not yet published ‘The Great Gatsby’.
“I thought of him as a much older writer who had written a very silly, badly written book followed by another book I had been unable to read. I thought he wrote Saturday Evening Post stories that had been readable three years before but I never thought of him as a serious writer. He had told me…how he wrote what he thought were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoreing. He said it was whoreing but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books…He wrote the real story first, he said, and the destruction and changing did him no harm.”

Hemingway and Fitzgerald are indeed an odd couple. They went down to Lyons to pick up Scott’s car that had been repaired and were going to drive it back. The top had been damaged in some way and Scott’s wife Zelda had ordered them to cut it off, forcing them to pull off the road whenever they were caught in rain. The mechanic told them that the car needed new piston rings and had been running without sufficient oil and water. Scott kept insisting that American cars did not need oil like useless French cars. Hemingway’s arguing with him was fruitless. Scott was also a hypochondriac, insisting that Hemingway send for a thermometer at the hotel they were staying at even after Hemingway insisted after touching his forehead that it was cool. He gives us a little insight into Fitzgerald’s peculiarities in the next chapter with the introduction of his wife Zelda. He sees that Scott is jealous of Zelda and Zelda is jealous of the time that Scott spends writing when they could go out drinking somewhere. Compared to the Fitzgerald’s, Ernest and Hadley have a very stable marriage.

All of the descriptions of the things that he did with Hadley and their toddler son they nicknamed Bumby are suffused with poignancy, knowing how the marriage ended and how Hadley was the blameless one. In most of the false starts to the book he says that Hadley is the heroine and that she ended up marrying a much finer man than he could ever be. He intended to end the book with his life with Hadley. He wrote another chapter covering the early days of his second marriage with Pauline Pfeiffer but intended that to be the beginning of another book. That chapter, as well as all the fragments and other chapters deleted from the original publication are included in this edition.

In one of the fragments, Hemingway says that this book is fiction that may shed some light on other books that have been written as fact. If that is a true statement, then much of ‘A Moveable Feast’ may be as fictional as anything included in his novels. Regardless of whether one reads it as fiction or fact, the verisimilitude of life in Paris in the 20’s renders the book as a collection of “true sentences”, to use Hemingway’s phrase, that serve as a true rendering of that Parisian feast when he was still a struggling, mostly unknown writer whose legend had not been fully created.

Enjoying your Hemingway reviews, Brian. In high school I went through a Hemingway period, probably having first heard of him through my Idahoan grandfather, who had worked in Ketchum, where Hemingway ended his life. I devoured several of his short stories first, then The Old Man and the Sea. One of these days I'd like to get back to his novels. Interestingly enough, I just finished Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and Beach, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Zelda are all referenced there too!

David wrote: "Enjoying your Hemingway reviews, Brian. In high school I went through a Hemingway period, probably having first heard of him through my Idahoan grandfather, who had worked in Ketchum, where Hemingw..."

Thanks, David!!