‘A Moveable Feast’ by Ernest Hemingway

First off allow me to apologise for my review of Jane Eyre being somewhat truncated by my usual standards, but, how is one supposed to go about dissecting such a seminal work without doing it a grave injustice? If you find out, please let me know… In the meantime I will move on to discuss a more recent but no less seminal work - A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I finished reading A Moveable Feast yesterday morning on a flight home from Paris, quite fitting given that the book is an account of Hemingway’s life in the French capital in the years following the First World War. And although Paris has changed considerably since the early 1920s, and is still changing if the slew of soon-to-open flagships on the Avenue Montaigne (Fendi, Saint Laurent, Versace) are anything to go by, certain aspects of the city, la plus belle ville du monde, have not changed a bit since Hemingway’s time. Allow me to explain, and to give an insight into the extraordinary circumstances under which A Moveable Feast came to be published.

In his introduction to this restored edition of A Moveable Feast, Seán Hemingway, the author’s grandson and editor - wow - explains the following: ‘In November 1956, the management of the Ritz Hotel in Paris convinced Ernest Hemingway to repossess two small steamer trunks that he had stored there in March 1928. The trunks contained forgotten remnants from his first years in Paris: pages of typed fiction, notebooks of material relating to The Sun Also Rises, books, newspaper clippings, and old clothes. To bring this precious cargo home […] Ernest and his wife Mary purchased a large Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. I recall as a child seeing that trunk in my godmother Mary’s apartment in New York, and I can still remember its smart leather trim with brass fittings, pervasive Louis Vuitton logo (sidebar: as I said, some things haven’t changed, Louis Vuitton luggage being one of them), and the gold embossed initials, “EH.” The trunk itself was easily big enough for me to fit into, and it filled me with wonder at the grand, adventurous life my grandfather led.' Seán goes on to explain how being reacquainted with this forgotten material reignited his grandfather’s desire to complete a full-length memoir about his early years in Paris, and by November 1959, three years after the trunks were claimed, Ernest Hemingway had handed a draft manuscript to Scribner’s in New York City, excepting only an introduction and a concluding chapter. It was published posthumously in 1964, as A Moveable Feast. 

Like much of Hemingway’s work, non-fiction or otherwise, A Moveable Feast is a study in spare, straight-to-the-point prose seemingly purged of even the most perfunctory adjectives. Yet, for all its succinctness and scanty use of flavouring particles, A Moveable Feast is, as the title implies, positively sumptuous in its presentation of 1920s Paris - its sights, sounds and scents are all put forth to us as though part of some immersive three-dimensional slideshow experience. Or, in plain English, Hemingway’s depiction of Paris is vivid and exact. Many of the places Hemingway frequents in A Moveable Feast are still in business today, including Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where he went for the beer, and Shakespeare & Company, the legendary bookshop which was located at 12 rue de l'Odéon and can now be found at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, just across from the Notre-Dame. For the record, if you find yourself in this part of Paris, the Île de la Cité, be sure to pay Shakespeare & Company a visit. I missed out on doing so this past weekend as I was too busy queuing up for the newly opened Dalí exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, but this is a different story entirely and one that has nothing to do with Ernest Hemingway.

Furthermore, while Paris is of course the main focus of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway frequently sidesteps the travel writing setup and candidly discusses the discipline of writing itself. Many of his observations are strikingly true, and a few are even helpful: 'I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.’ And, 'It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.' Now that is some good, solid, un-preachy advice. The only thing I did not/do not like about A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s unfavourable and often plain nasty portrayal of some of his contemporaries, even those he cites as friends. Gertrude Stein is heralded for her wisdom but in terms of physical appearance is compared to a 'peasant woman’; Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda are portrayed as a drunk and a loon respectively; Ezra Pound, however, is described as a good and reliable friend, while James Joyce is mentioned with uncharacteristic reverence - the way the children of Gotham must speak about Batman. Or something less stupid…

All in all I think we must be thankful that the Ritz Hotel convinced Hemingway to repossess those two Louis Vuitton steamer trunks. Otherwise, an intimate ex-pat insight into Paris at a critical point in its history would be missing, and the Left Bank’s many literary landmarks could be overlooked more often by tourists hellbent on photographing themselves propping up the Eiffel Tower. The Hemingway Bar may be closed for the time being - the Ritz and the Hôtel de Crillon are undergoing major renovations, though two new additions to the city’s already impressive hotel scene, the Mandarin Oriental (on the rue Saint-Honoré) and the Shangri-La (near the Place d'Ièna) should make up for their absence - but you need not be sat at the Hemingway Bar, or be in Paris at all for that matter, to feel as though you are. Reading A Moveable Feast should do it.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in December 2012.