A Moveable Feast

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast”.
Ernest Hemingway to a friend in 1950

Well, I am not technically a young man. But I have been lucky enough to live in Paris as a young person (to be more politically correct than Hemingway) and also lucky enough to read A Moveable Feast while there. And I do believe that reading this book while in Paris myself meant that everything Hemingway recounts in it resonated a lot deeper with me than it would have done otherwise.

Sitting on the banks of the Seine, book in hand and the sound of Paris life hustling and bustling all around me I could easily imagine Hemingway tucked inside a quintessentially Parisien café writing away. OK, so I might be going a little far with the romanticised view of Paris but that really was what this book made me think of and, it has to be admitted, Hemingway certainly maximises upon building the “poor writer in Paris” persona. And I really do not think that Paris has changed all that much ... for me, it really is like that.

As with other work of Hemingway’s that I have read, the thing that really impressed me in A Moveable Feast was his command of the language he uses - he seems to know just how much description is enough and never includes an ounce more. I’d say his writing is “sparse” but I’m not sure that this is quite the right word. Maybe “economical” works better if we forget the “boring” connotations. It’s been said a million times before, but I’m going to say it again, Hemingway includes just enough information to tell the story without making it ugly or over-descriptive. And that’s what it is that really gets me about his writing.

One, well actually two, more things I’d like to mention. Firstly, I got quite excited about the mention of Katherine Mansfield. Sure Hemingway does not describe her in the most glowing terms, comparing her writing to “near-beer” but he does mention having heard of her as “a good, even a great short-story writer” - that fact that she even registers on his Who’s Who List impressed me, especially considering she is a woman writer who is not Gertrude Stein! And as Hemingway himself writes:

There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.

My patriotic spirit shining through …

And finally, on the topic of Miss Stein. After having read An Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (which frankly drove me up the wall with Stein’s pretentious tone and literary cubism), I couldn’t help but chuckle over Hemingway’s descriptions of her as someone who “talked all the time and at first it was about people and places” and thought that “all I [Hemingway] had to be cured of … was youth and loving my wife”. I think Hemingway summed her up perfectly (in true Hemingway fashion) with the simple sentence “Gertrude is nice, anyway … but she does talk a lot of rot sometimes”.