Book Review: A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (1964, Restored Edition 2009)

 

My paperback copy of A Moveable Feast. It's by Ernest Hemingway, the author of Islands in the Stream, according to the cover. That's not how anyone refers to Ernest Hemingway. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

My paperback copy of the 2009 Restored Edition of A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. The Paris Wife is next on my list to read.

A Moveable Feast is Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of Paris during the 1920’s. It’s been on my list of books I should read for a long time and watching Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s documentary about Hemingway pushed me to finally pick it up. It’s an entertaining book comprised of short sketches that detail Hemingway’s life as a young writer with his first wife Hadley.

Is A Moveable Feast meant to be read as a work of fact or fiction? In the Preface, Hemingway wrote, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.” What is that supposed to mean? Does that mean that everything in it is a lie? Or is Hemingway referencing the notion that truth is subjective, and his recollections will inevitably differ from someone else’s? It’s an interesting statement to make for a writer as concerned as Hemingway was with getting the truth down on paper, even when he was writing fiction. As he famously wrote at the beginning of A Moveable Feast:

“’Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.” (p.12)

A Moveable Feast was written in the late 1950’s, after Hemingway rediscovered a trunk of his that had been left in storage at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The trunk contained notebooks that Hemingway had kept during his time in Paris in the 1920’s. This fortuitous rediscovery spurred Hemingway on to revisit this material for a possible book. Hemingway worked on the material off and on for the rest of his life, until his suicide in 1961. Hemingway’s provisional title was “The Paris Sketches,” and the book would not acquire its famous title until writer and Hemingway pal A.E. Hotchner recalled a conversation he had with Papa about Paris.

Hemingway used A Moveable Feast to settle old scores, and despite the interest inherent in reading about great artists in Paris, I was left with an overwhelming sense of bitterness after finishing the book. The only people who come off well in the book are Hadley, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach. Perhaps coincidentally, they were the only major characters in A Moveable Feast who were still alive when Hemingway was writing the book in the late 1950’s.

The prevailing attitude of Hemingway’s voice throughout the book is one of a smug superiority. He presents himself as a hard worker who is also very poor. Hemingway hits so hard on the theme of “I was working very hard all of the time.” And maybe he was. But maybe part of the reason he hits this theme so hard is because during the time he was writing this, he was not able to work that way anymore. Being a Midwesterner, Hemingway is very adept at the art of the passive-aggressive half-compliment, half-insult, and these crop up throughout the book.

As you keep reading the book, you wonder what in it is true. You start to wonder if he really was that poor. (According to biographers, no, he wasn’t that poor—Hadley’s trust fund paid some of the bills.) And you wonder if he had any close friends that he actually liked and was he really ever fast enough to catch a pigeon in the Luxembourg Gardens and did he ever learn Alice B. Toklas’s name.

I found it ridiculous how in the chapters about Gertrude Stein, Hemingway very pointedly does not refer to her partner Alice B. Toklas by name, instead calling her “the friend who lived with her,” or “her companion.” I felt like shouting at him, “Her name is Alice B. Toklas! She invented marijuana brownies, Ernest! Her name is in the title of Gertrude’s most famous book, for crying out loud! If you know Gertrude’s name, then you should know Alice’s name! They’re like the Simon and Garfunkel of 1920’s Paris!” (Okay, so the internet is telling me that Brion Gysin actually wrote the infamous recipe for marijuana brownies.)

Hemingway was friends with Gertrude Stein for a while, and then eventually the friendship soured. He writes of Stein in the chapter about the end of their friendship: “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.” (p.115) Ouch.

As a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I can’t help but be annoyed at the way Hemingway has chosen to present Fitzgerald in the pages of A Moveable Feast. Everything Hemingway writes about Fitzgerald is meant to make Fitzgerald look like an idiot. Scott can’t hold his liquor! His wife is crazy! He’s wasting his time writing trashy short stories! He isn’t a good speller! He never drinks wine straight from the bottle! He’s worried about the size of his penis!

However, despite all of Hemingway’s slanders against Fitzgerald, I’d argue that Scott is the only character in the book who jumps off the page and resembles a real person in all of his complexity. I’m not going to defend F. Scott Fitzgerald’s behavior during his escapades with Ernest Hemingway. Anyone who has read anything biographical about Fitzgerald is aware that he could behave terribly at times, mostly when he was under the influence of alcohol. But Hemingway makes little attempt to show us other dimensions to Fitzgerald, and he deliberately withholds information from the reader that would paint a fuller portrait of their friendship.

At the end of the first chapter about Scott, Hemingway even needlessly insults the dust jacket of The Great Gatsby. “It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction…I took it off to read the book.” (p.174) Congratulations Ernest, you just trashed one of the most famous dust jackets of all time! Ernest would no doubt be chagrined to know that Scribner’s most recent edition of The Great Gatsby still has that same cover, all these years later.

Hemingway is careful to give Fitzgerald no credit for any assistance during the editing of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway writes that Scott wanted to read a manuscript of the novel in progress, but Ernest didn’t let him see the book until very late in the process. Hemingway makes no mention of the fact that it was Fitzgerald who persuaded Hemingway to switch publishers to Scribner’s, and it was Fitzgerald who alerted the editor Maxwell Perkins to Hemingway’s talent and promise.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Scott Donaldson offers proof of Fitzgerald’s contribution to the editing of The Sun Also Rises in his excellent 1999 book Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. Using Fitzgerald’s letter to Hemingway about the beginning of the novel, and Hemingway’s subsequent letters to Maxwell Perkins, Donaldson shows that Fitzgerald’s criticism convinced Hemingway that the beginning of the novel was flabby and should be trimmed down.

In the “Restored Edition” of A Moveable Feast, published in 2009, there’s an additional passage concerning Fitzgerald and the editing of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway writes of Fitzgerald and the novel’s proofs, “We discussed them. But I made the decisions. Not that it matters.” (p.158) Of course it doesn’t matter, old sport. For whatever reason, Hemingway finds it so painful, if not impossible, to acknowledge anyone else’s talent as a writer. To me, this shows his fundamental insecurity.

In Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, Scott Donaldson also points out how Hemingway’s comments about Fitzgerald became more and more denigrating as the 1950’s went on and Fitzgerald’s literary reputation began to quickly rise. Donaldson writes of A Moveable Feast’s criticisms of all of Hemingway’s friends: “For every fault singled out and satirized, Hemingway by implication assumes the opposite virtue. It is, finally, too much to believe.” (p.271)

The “Restored Edition” of 2009 isn’t that much different from the original version of 1964. I read the 1964 version and then thumbed through the 2009 version page by page to see what was different. There is additional material included in the “Restored Edition,” including an interesting bit about Ernest and Hadley growing their hair to the same length, which is echoed in scenes in Hemingway’s novels A Farewell to Arms, and The Garden of Eden.

The biggest difference in the “Restored Edition” is that part of the last chapter, titled “There is Never Any End to Paris” in the 1964 edition, and now retitled “The Pilot Fish and the Rich,” has been moved to the “Additional Paris Sketches” section of the 2009 book, after the main text of the book. In that chapter, Hemingway writes about a “pilot fish” who led the rich to Switzerland, where Ernest and Hadley were spending the winter skiing. The pilot fish is meant to be the writer John Dos Passos, and the rich are Gerald and Sara Murphy, a wealthy American couple who were patrons of the arts. (The Murphys were partial models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night.)

So, why move the section about skiing in Switzerland to the very end? Well, this is the part of the book where Ernest meets Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy American woman who will become his second wife. And Pauline just happens to be the grandmother of Sean Hemingway, who edited the Restored Edition of A Moveable Feast. However, there is additional material included in this section in the Restored Edition, and that material sheds more light on Ernest’s dilemma as he fell in love with two women, and ultimately decided to leave Hadley for Pauline.

A Moveable Feast is a fascinating book, although it needs to be read with a large grain of salt.