I've never been, I have to admit, a massive fan of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). In my late teens/early twenties, I read The Sun Also Rises (aka Fiesta), The Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms. And that was it, until I saw this one recommended in a Five Books article.

Hemingway was based in Paris from 1921 to 1928 (he wrote Fiesta, his first novel, there). But this book wasn't published until 1964 (ie, after his suicide). The story goes that when Hemingway was back in Paris in 1956, he was reunited with a trunk of notebooks. He had forgotten all about them, but they had remained in the basement of The Ritz, in a Louis Vuitton-designed receptacle, since he left in 1928. The notebooks were full of recollections of the events, people, and locations he had known during his time there.



The title is explained by the epigraph: "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."

There are two versions of the text, as a second, "restored" edition came out in 2009 (generating some debate in the process). I read the 1964 version, and having read the discussion I don't think I'm any the worse off for that.

It's the story of Hemingway's years in Paris with his first wife, Hadley; their son; and their cat, F. Puss. It's an idyllic portrait. They're poor, he says, and he's often hungry. Maybe they weren't quite as poor as he makes out, since Hadley had a modest trust fund... But, in any case, they're happy: "We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." Scattered throughout, however, are indications that the idyll is about to break down.

The preface, in words that remind me of Natalia Ginzburg, declares: "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." I imagine that's an invitation to take everything with a bit of a pinch of salt. But whether this stance softens the more unflattering portraits of the famous people of his Paris days, I'm not sure...

The ones who come off best are Sylvia Beach, who ran a rental library called Shakespeare and Company ("No one that I ever knew was nicer to me"), and Ezra Pound, who helped and mentored Hemingway ("a great poet and a gentle and generous man... always a good friend... always doing things for people"). I found the picture of Pound particularly interesting as it so markedly contradicts what Joseph Brodsky says about him. Admittedly, Hemingway is talking about the 1920s, before Pound's pro-Fascist wartime exploits became notorious. But, writing in the 1960s, he would have known about them. Perhaps they made him more determined to be warm.

Others, even those who were once close, are given very short shrift indeed.


Pere-Lachaise cemetery, Paris, 2019. This is, after all, a book about dead people...

Gertrude Stein -- in Hemingway's opinion -- is churlish: "In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Firbank and, later, Scott Fitzgerald... If you brought up [James] Joyce twice, you would not be invited back. It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general. You learned not to do it the first time you made the mistake." Stein never actually talks to Hadley, Hemingway's wife. That task is left to her companion, Alice... Now that's a legitimate complaint. But this is just misogynistic: "She got to look like a Roman emperor and that was fine if you liked your women to look like Roman emperors."

Of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway says: "I had no more loyal friend than Scott when he was sober." Yet he does his best to make him look a little stupid.

And Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, comes off very badly, blamed for encouraging her husband's alcoholism, and stopping him working: "Scott was being the good cheerful host and Zelda looked at him and she smiled happily with her eyes and her mouth too as he drank the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew Scott would not be able to write. Zelda was jealous of Scott's work and as we got to know them, this fell into a regular pattern." It's hard to know how accurate this is (admittedly, theirs sounds like a fairly bizarre marriage), but it seems clear that Hemingway is not presenting the whole story.

Other figures are frankly lacerated. Poet and artist Blaise Cendrars, who returned from World War I with only one arm, is accused of being "flashy" about his disability; Wyndham Lewis looks "nasty", his eyes "those of an unsuccessful rapist"; Ernest Walsh is portrayed as devious... And so it goes on. The worst opprobrium is reserved for Ford Madox Ford: "I was trying to remember what Ezra Pound had told me about Ford, that I must never be rude to him, that I must remember that he only lied when he was very tired, that he was a really good writer and that he had been through very bad domestic troubles. I tried hard to think of these things but the heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence of Ford himself, only touching-distance away, made it difficult."

I don't know how Hemingway thought he was portraying himself, and maybe by that stage he didn't care. But he definitely didn't make me like him any better. Aside from the rather spiteful streak that many of his character sketches reveal, his trademark macho quality is on full display. It's not just all the horse-racing and gambling and boxing and drinking and ski-ing; he's also proprietorial towards women, not to mention homophobic. And the end of his relationship with the lovely Hadley is just annoying. He describes the "oldest trick there is", whereby "an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband". Not his fault, then...



Still, his descriptions of Paris are lovely. I liked the opening, which starts in media res:

"Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over..."

He goes on: "All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops... and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked." (That's the Verlaine, of course, who appears in The House of Doors -- and that's the sort of sentence that really needs an edit, but hey, it works...)

Then there are memorable things like this: "When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason."

Hemingway is also really good at portraying that deep heartache that we all occasionally fall prey to. They stand one day, he and Hadley, on a bridge. They haven't eaten yet. They're hungry. And they conjure up together a whole chain of recollections. After all the reminiscing, there's this little exchange that focuses on the present:

"We should live in this time now and have every minute of it."

"We're watching the water now as it hits this buttress. Look what we can see when we look up the river."...

"We're too lucky..."

Later Hemingway says: "Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, 'I don't know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger... Memory is hunger.'... When we had finished [the meal] and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home... Life had seemed so simple that morning... But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there."

That's a brilliant way of expressing that indescribable ache -- combining all that has been and is no more, and all that might have been, and all that won't be -- that we all find stirring in ourselves from time to time.



I wasn't expecting advice on writing, but he dishes up some very sensible stuff:

"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... I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it." In the intervals between writing, he stops thinking about what he is creating, so that his subconscious can be working on it: "If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day." Instead, he focuses on reading, or noticing, or listening to other people.

If he struggles to write, he thinks: "'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."

There's also this lovely thing about reading: "To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you travelled too, ... so that you lived in the new world you had found... in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you." I know that double-world feeling very well.

So, it was interesting, if annoying sometimes. And it's given me SO many suggestions for things to read from that period.

Sigh... I now have a to-read list that will last me until I'm at least 220...