A Moveable Feast

by Pa Rock

Reader

"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 

American novelist Ernest Hemingway cloaked himself in a life that was every bit as exciting and colorful as those lived by the characters who populated his novels.  Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois. in 1899, the son of a country doctor who was an outdoorsman and a culturally refined mother who pushed her son toward the arts.  Young Hemingway tried  to join the US military as an infantry "foot soldier" in World War I, but was turned down because of poor eyesight.  He ended up volunteering as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross on the Italian front, and after serving heroically and suffering multiple shrapnel wounds, he  went on to enlist in the Italian infantry and saw service on the Austrian front.

Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, moved to Paris in 1921 - a century ago this year - where he wrote dispatches for a newspaper in Toronto and did freelance work for other newspapers and journals while honing his skills as a professional writer of stories and novels.  Ernest spent his days holed up in the cafe's of Paris where he did much of his writing, while Hadley explored the city and pursued her own interests.  Together they traversed the Paris cultural scene and managed to see and experience much of Europe.

Ernest Hemingway spent the better part of seven years in Paris (1921-1928) and kept the experiences that he and Hadley had while living there in a series of notebooks.  He had always intended to eventually write about those early years in Paris.  Sometime during the course of the 1920's and 1930's, the author lost track of his notebooks.  Then one afternoon in 1956 while sitting in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Paris and enjoying a drink with the manager, a friend from the old days in Paris, the manager suddenly mentioned that he still had the two small steamer trunks that Hemingway had asked him t safeguard before World War II.    Hemingway retrieved the wayward trunks, and as he was digging through the remains of his youth in Paris, he found his long-lost notebooks.

The last writing project that Ernest Hemingway undertook was the editing and organizing of those notebooks into a book format.  He had not completed the project when he died of his own hand in Idaho in 1961 as he avoided the final ravages of cancer.  Hemingway's third wife, Mary, completed the project.  Not satisfied with her effort, Hemingway's son, Patrick, and his grandson, Sean, reworked the project again after Mary's death.  This is a review of what is now referred to as the "Restored Edition" of Ernest Hemingway's final work.

Hemingway's Paris is alive with the people who were the pillars of twentieth century literature and the arts.  He talks of visits to Gertrude's Stein's apartment and her enthusiasm for his writing.  Stein also encouraged him to spend his money - which was very limited - on "pictures" (art) rather than on clothing.  At one point he confided to Hadley that Miss Stein could be quite a bore, and Hadley replied that she would not know because she was just a wife and she was relegated to only speaking with Miss Stein's friend (Alice B. Toklas).  Hemingway's bent toward snobbishness is hinted at in his recollections of visits at the Stein apartment.  He never refers to Toklas by name - only as Miss Stein's friend - and although he talks of several encounters with Miss Stein's maidservant - and mentions her personal kindnesses to him - he openly admits that he could not even remember her name.

Hemingway in A Moveable Feast focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, more than any of his other Paris literary contemporaries.  He tells a wonderful tale about him and Scott, not long after they first met, going to Leon to retrieve Fitzgerald's automobile - which had broken down - to drive it back to Paris. It turns out that the trip to Leon was the first time Scott had spent a night separated from Zelda since their marriage.   

The car they retrieved was a small Renault that had suffered damage to its top, and instead of having the damage repaired, Zelda had ordered that the top be removed.  Right-on-cue as the two young authors began their road trip back to Paris, the skies opened up and it began raining.  They spent several hours driving in and out of rain before deciding to get a room for the night.    As soon as they settled into a room for the evening, Scott decided that he was sick - and he wanted his temperature taken.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald put his neurotic character on full display as he demanded that Hemingway or a member of the hotel staff produce a thermometer - of which there was not one to be had.    Eventually after much complaining by the author of The Great Gatsby, a staff member showed up with a bath thermometer - with a wooden back and "enough metal to sink in a bath."  Hemingway joked that Fitzgerald was fortunate because it was not a rectal thermometer, and the clueless Scott then asked where it did go.  His quick thinking friend told him that it was for an under-arm reading and proceeded to take his temperature and then announced that it was normal.

But Scott did not trust the doctor's son who had at one time been an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, and he demanded that Hemingway take his own temperature as well so that they could compare the readings.  Hemingway complied and then announced that his numbers were the same and that he was fine - so F. Scott Fitzgerald decided that he must have recuperated.

And then there was the issues surrounding Zelda Fitzgerald.   Scott was totally besotted with Zelda, and Hemingway figured out quickly that Zelda was trying to sabotage her husband's writing through alcohol and a lifestyle centering on partying.  At a point not too long after their first meeting, Hemingway also experienced the sudden realization that Zelda actually was insane.

Ernest Hemingway seemed to show disdain for many of the characters with whom he interacted in the Paris of the 1920's.   A pair of notable exceptions were poets Ezra Pound and Evan Shipman.   Every mention of Pound was almost reverential, and he described in glowing terms Pound's efforts at setting up a charitable foundation to free poet T.S. Eliot from the soul-depleting drudgery of having to work in a London bank to support himself.  Young Evan Shipman was an unpublished poet who earned Hemingway's respect and lifelong friendship by doing things of a practical nature like actually digging in the soil to produce gardens to feed others.

Ernest and Hadley's only son, Jack (later the father of Margaux, Mariel, and Joan), was born during the Paris years while they were home in Canada in 1923.  He returned to Paris with his parents as a tiny infant who had to be barricaded into his ship's bunk during a hard trans-Atlantic winter crossing.  The new parents nicknamed their son "Bumby" and raised him in an unconventional manner.  According to the father's recollection, Bumby, who was a good baby who seldom fussed or cried, was sometimes left in the care of F. Puss, the family cat, while father wrote in the local cafes and mother ran errands.  Bumby and the cat would curl up together and sleep on the apartment floor.  Later, as Bubmy began becoming more mobile, he would accompany his father to the cafes where he knew to sit silently and observe others while his father wrote.

Hemingway and Hadley split up in their sixth year of marriage as he began having an affair with a friend of Hadley's who was living with them.  He describes that slow and very painful transition from one lover to another in a chapter in The Moveable Feast entitled "The Pilot Fish and the Rich."  It is the best writing in the book.

Hemingway's breakup with Hadley clearly impacted him deeply and reached across the decades.  In several "fragments" of his writing that he had penned especially for this effort and that his heirs chose to include at the end of the book, he referred to Hadley as the "heroine" of the stories.  Clearly he never got over her.

And there is so much more to this fine memoir.  Time spent reading it is time that will be savored.

The feast moves onward and continues to nourish.