I'm not a Hemingway fan. In middle school, I attempted to read his The Old Man and The Sea and twenty pages in, swore I'd never try another title by him again. I broke my promise a few years later in high school where I attempted not only For Whom The Bell Tolls, but The Sun Also Rises. No kidding, those titles had me snoring in minutes.
It wasn't that he'd been hyped up and I was afraid I wouldn't grasp the material; my English teacher (who would become the Arbiter of Literary Taste for me) thought he was a hack and had no respect for him. Nope, to her he was the dung on the sole of Thomas Hardy's shoe. But a book report was a book report and I chose Hemingway because his books were shorter (lazy ass that I was). When the deadline loomed, I switched to the Great Gatsby and fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald and never looked back. Even when my Mrs. Helland was aghast that I'd fallen in love with such an unworthy writer who not only basked in the decadence of an era, indeed was the epitome of it. I politely disagreed.
Years later, someone mentioned A Moveable Feast in passing. He wrote a little about Fitzgerald, I was told.
I was sold.
What I find so interesting about Hemingway is how he tends to elicit one of two reactions from his readers: love or hate.
Hemingway is a writer almost everyone I've met has an opinion about. One hand, you have those that glorify him for his eagerness to be the opposite of the sallow-faced quiet, indoor writer boy. On the other hand, you have those that are repelled by his swaggering, bombastic, somewhat misogynistic ways. But who was the real Hemingway? And will be gain some sort of perspective on him through his recollections and observations of Paris and his contemporaries? Or does the memoir only add to the mystery?
During the 90s, the little criticism I'd read discussed the waning reputation of Hemingway. His short stories were considered his pieces of genius, while his novels were important only for the historical context they provided. In recent years, this trend seems to be reversing. For sure, in light of the recent publication of The Paris Wife and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, his name will be on the lips of many people.
A Moveable Feast is a portrait of the artist as a young man, viewed through the passage of many years, and perhaps through the prism of nostalgia. A writer's kind of book, they will hone in on Hemingway's practices: he worked until he had something done and then stopped when he knew what was going to happen next; during bouts of writer's block he'd stick with his motto of writing "one true" simple declarative sentence; he'd refuse to think about writing when he wasn't doing so, hoping his subconscious would be "working on it; he would read so that he wouldn't obsess over his work and "make [himself] impotent to do it. "
Aside from the his practices, A Moveable Feast is also importance for its insider knowledge of other writers. Gertrude Stein is portrayed as a full-of-herself writer who prefers to entertain writers and then shove off their wives on her partner. It was as if she was trying to establish herself as another one of the guys. This is something that I'm sure we'll be discussing further in the novel, as we see and learn more about her. I couldn't help but chuckle when she told Hemingway that she wanted to be published in The Atlantic Monthly, but that he couldn't publish there being that he wasn't a good enough writer. Modesty certainly wasn't one of her finer points. And she's full of advice on other topics as well: she tells Hemingway not to spend money on clothing so that he might have money to spend on art (she has an enviable collection of art from The Masters).
In third chapter, The Lost Generation, Hemingway writes more of his relationship with Stein, and we learn more about her through the information she does and does not want to learn about.
"I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time and Miss Stein liked to hear these. The other things I did not talk of and wrote by myself."
The first thing that strikes me about these sentences-- and of course it's what Hemingway is known best for-- is how these simple lines are so powerful. There are worlds told in these basic sentences. Fitzgerald and he were worlds apart: Fitz was known for the haunting lyricism of his work and Hemingway was known for his stark, economic prose. And it's easy to fall into patterns where we take for granted what critics tell us must be so, but in this sentence, we can see it for ourselves.
More on Stein: she calls Huxley a "dead man," believes that D.H. Lawrence is a bad writer, loves Sherwood Anderson's eyes but won't discuss his work, and won't invite visitors back if they bring up Joyce twice. Hilarious! But when Stein tells Hemingway about the garage incident, and when she tells him that those who fought in the war are all a Lost Generation, he says this:
"I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation...I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been always would be..."
And though he'd decided to be kind to Stein, and to make sure that she was recognized for all the good work she had done, he says to himself:
"...the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels."
Since I started reading A Moveable Feast, I thought it would be interesting to read what some other writers have to say about Hemingway's Paris. I opted for Hemingway's Paris: Our Paris? by H.R. Stoneback, an award winning scholar who also happens to be the director for the American Center for Students and Artists in Paris.
He points out that in his youth, though he never cared for Hemingway's writing, as an expat he found it impossible to elude the spectre of this iconic writer. Americans sought out Hemingway's favorite bars, names of cafes he'd mentioned, and streets, all in an attempt to capture some of what he must have experienced and written about.
When Stoneback finally relented, he was astonished to realize that a casual read more than a decade ago had influenced his subconscious, so much so, that he regarded streets, bridges, and other locations in a nearly identical manner to Hemingway. Why?
"Some of it had to do with style, with the clean aesthetic space and authority that surrounds each of Hemingway's words when he is at his best. But there was something else..."
When the author spoke with Malcolm Crowey (another member of the so-called Lost Generation, and someone Hemingway had written into Snows of Kilimanjaro), Crowey said this:
"It was as if all Paris belonged to him, and what he wanted most was to present it to you, to make an offering of it with great humility and devotion, to give Paris to you as a precious and personal gift."
During the opening chapter, the reader is introduced to a windy Paris, the smell of sewers wafting up to open windows, of drunken sour-smelling crowds. It's interesting that that's how Hemingway would choose to begin a memoir of his most treasured experiences. That's something I didn't notice during my first reading.
And it makes me think of how the passage of time changes us and our perspectives. And I wonder how much of this memoir is affected by Hemingway's longing for a simpler time, for youth, and for maybe not idealism, but a certain hopefulness that he may have lost with age and success.
