Writing the truest sentence you know

Many readers learned about the American expatriates in 1920's Paris in 1964 when A Moveable Feast was posthumously published a few years after Ernest Hemingway's death. Like many young Americans born in the new century, Hemingway had witnessed the European devastation of World War I and the experience diverted both his path as an artist and his attitudes as a man. As some alcoholic depressive writers return to their past as a way of entertaining others and reinforcing their own self worth, one can do worse than the episodes chronicled and famous personalities exposed in A Moveable Feast. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin makes a good point when dealing with any Hemingway writing touted to be truth, saying projects like "A Moveable Feast are barely more autobiographical than his fiction, and, in many ways, just as fictional." In other words, it's the same old problem with memoirs - there's little emotional distance to vet accuracy.

Some analysts claim Hemingway wrote these remembrances to get back at those he felt had slighted him in the years since he lived in Paris, but A Moveable Feast isn't as tough or mean-spirited as it could have been. Hemingway wasn't known as being particularly woman-friendly or gay friendly. (Even soft straight men like Fitzgerald generally worried Hemingway.) Luckily, as it was Paris in the 20s and not Berlin in the 20s, Hemingway had little to concern himself, masculinity flourished everywhere, including when socializing with women like Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Men like Ezra Pound were able to barter mentoring Hemingway's literary ambitions in exchange for boxing lessons.

If Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Co. bookstore functioned as a sort of 1920s Paris internet, Gertrude Stein's salon was its Facebook. Anybody who was anybody (as long as they didn't piss off the hostess) showed up to be introduced to anybody who was anybody. Stein is credited with telling Hemingway to trade in his journalism experience for the world of fiction, but in reality, it was the vogue for many journalists in the new century to have a book or play on the back burner. During Hemingway's first months in Paris, he didn't have many nice things to say about the poseurs he was surrounded with, as if "the scum of Greenwich Village...has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles" in his new Paris café society.

Hemingway and wife Hadley weren't the first nor last Americans striking a Bohemian pose in Paris, but at least they could write home about all the cheap wine available - the U.S. was in the throes of prohibition, Europe was not. Hadley's fatal mistake was packing a year's worth (some say 3 years) of Hemingway writing into a suitcase and then losing it in a train station. Perhaps she was fed-up with the poverty-crying she endured from her groom, who said they were too poor to "afford a dog...or cat" and who told others he would duck into the Luxembourg Gardens to strangle pigeons for meals when he was "belly-empty, hollow-hungry".

Gertrude Stein – according to Hemingway, they were like brothers – convinced Hemingway to check out the bullfighting scene down in Spain. (This, apparently, he could afford.) Hemingway not only turned on some of his Paris friends to the spectacle, but also wound up writing all about them, and as is so often the case, not all the characters based on real-life friends were flattering. The Sun Also Rises can be considered a fictional account of Hemingway's Paris experience, written as it was happening, contrasted with the memoirs of A Moveable Feast, written some 30+ years after the fact. Not that his eye for sacrificing truth for a good plot wavered much in between those projects. Even though Hadley was with her husband during the real-life events in Spain, she was deleted from the novel so the Hemingway stand-in hero could be free to pursue another woman (Hadley divorced Hemingway around the time The Sun Also Rises was published. Coincidence?) Unflattering portrayals were the literary equivalent of brawling back in the early 20th century. Hemingway withered Gertrude Stein's reputation in A Moveable Feast as much as Stein has shot Hemingway down in her own The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Wife #2, Pauline, appeared around the time The Sun Also Rises was published. In fact, it looks like Hemingway often had a new wife whenever a major literary work of his completed. But first wife Hadley got the bulk of The Sun Also Rises money and Hemingway was back to the bottom rung financially if not for Pauline's help. She was the wife to lead him up to A Farewell to Arms and closed out Hemingway's Paris adventures for the Key West life.

All of this drama really stands as a testament to what happens to projects whose artist dies in the middle of its creation or original material is subsequently discovered (the original "scrolls" of Jack Kerouac's On the Road were recently unearthed and published). By the time of Hemingway's self-inflicted death in 1961, he was married to Mary, a journalist in her own right, whose job it became not only to coordinate the memoirs, but to give it its title – the publisher was just going to title it "Paris Sketches". In 2009 the controversy over a "new" edition of A Moveable Feast came to light when one of Pauline's grandsons didn't like how Pauline was portrayed (blaming her solely for breaking up Hemingway's marriage to Hadley, but otherwise removing her from the narrative) and he launched a campaign to have a different version of the book released. He even claimed that Mary herself wrote the original last chapter of the original publication, Hemingway's apology to Hadley. (Read a denunciation of the whole business by one of Hemingway's friends, A.E. Hotchner in the NY Times). It is also alleged that despite Mary's declaration that the book was completed before Hemingway died and that she didn't add a thing, the original material discovered shows she handled consideration alterations to an unfinished manuscript. In the end, no one will ever be sure whether Hemingway's words wound up being the truest words he knew.









 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Work Cited

Brenner, Gerry. "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?." American Literature 54.4 (1982): 528. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 Jan. 2011.

Burke, David. Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light. Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2008.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1988.

Hotchner, A.E. "Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast'." New York Times. 20 July 2009.


Rich, Motoko. "Moveable Feast is Recast by Hemingway Grandson." New York Times. 28 June 2009.


Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. "Fact and Fiction in A Moveable Feast." Hemingway Review 3.2 (1984): 44. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 Jan. 2011.

Wiser, William. The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties. G.K. Hall & Co., 1983.