A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

Yes, I'm back from the boonies, which means I can resume the Hemingway reading I was doing in July.

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's recollections of his time living in Paris in the years before The Sun Also Rises was published. There's quite a bit about his times hanging out with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, his life with his first wife, Hadley, and their son, Bumby. I suppose the book is written in roughly chronological order, but it reads more like a series of loosely connected anecdotes, which is fine. Most of them are fairly short, and so the book zips along, though it dragged during the stuff about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. But I've never cared about the Fitzgeralds (The Great Gatsby was not one of the books I was forced to read in high school that I enjoyed), so maybe that's why.

There are a lot of small things he mentions, those little details that help the story come alive, or just interest me. For example, French book dealers hated dealing with English books, because they could never tell whether a particular book was worth anything, because they considered the binding to be uniformly terrible. Hemingway and Hadley going to the track occasionally, though for Hemingway it started becoming all too regular. His doubts he could ever write a full novel, because he was having so much trouble even writing one paragraph in the way he really wanted, and his doubts about the wisdom in leaving journalism to focus on prose. Heck, even the fact he hated his first name was interesting, though now that I think of it, how many people are truly happy with their first name? You didn't get to choose it, unless you had it legally changed, but you had to live with the other name for a time. Being Hemingway, he deliberately called someone he knew (and didn't like) with the same name in Paris "Ernest", because it was a private way of expressing scorn.

I was very curious about his discussion of Dostoyevsky with his friend Evan Shipman. He likes Dostoyevsky's characters, but they both thought he was a terrible writer, who somehow wrote wonderful you still didn't want to read more than once. Crime and Punishment was one of the two books I had to read in high school I did enjoy (The Old Man and the Sea being the other, which is probably not a surprise to you), but it's been a long time and I haven't read any of Dostoyevsky's other work, so I couldn't really say. I remember being impressed with his characters, but I don't recall being put off by the writing style.

The book's written with an air of wistful nostalgia, perhaps not surprising since it was written over thirty years after the fact, with a lifetime worth of decisions and mistakes between them. There's a sense Hemingway misses being the struggling young writer living in a crappy apartment with Hadley and Bumby, and the cat, F. Puss. The book ends shortly after he describes making a fool of himself for a bunch of rich people at a place up in the mountains, and around the time he started having an affair. My guess is that's when he thinks things started going downhill, and opted to stop before he had to detail it.

This regret and longing colors everything, and combined with Hemingway's own tendency to self-aggrandize and tear others down, I frequently wondered how much I could take at face value, especially where it involved people he was not entirely kindly disposed to, like Stein or the Fitzgeralds (mostly Zelda, though I think Scott's method of writing a little as well, see the excerpt below). Hemingway would hardly be the first to revise history to make himself seem more prescient or wise, just like Stein would hardly be the first author to look more kindly upon writers who gave her work positive reviews (which Hemingway mentions not so much as a fault of hers, more just a fact of life for talking with her).

Anyway, it's an excellent quick read, if you have any interest in him, or some of the life in Paris shortly after World War 1.

'I was trying to get him to write stories as well as he could and not trick them to conform to any formula, as he had explained that he did.

"You've written a fine novel now," I told him. "And you mustn't write slop."

"The novel isn't selling," he said. "I must write stories and they have to be stories that sell."

"Write the best story you can and write it as straight as you can."'