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A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
Larissa's review
bookshelves: short-stories, vicarious-travel, 2008, usa
Jan 03, 08
bookshelves: short-stories, vicarious-travel, 2008, usa
Read in January, 2008
Reading A Moveable Feast was a strange combination of pure pleasure and pure torture for me. On one hand, what could be better than reading a pseudo-memoir written by the unabashedly self-absorbed, and yet enduringly charming, Hemingway--all white wine, manliness, and burgeoning craft, with an excess of anecdotes and remembrances (often unflattering and unfair, god bless him) of his eccentric and luminous contemporaries? Not much. Especially with such memories: of Gertrude "Aldous Huxley writes like a dead man" Stein, of Wyndham "Eyes of an Unsuccessful Rapist" Lewis, of confirming for Scott Fitzgerald that his endowment was of a sufficient dimension to please any decent woman (compared, when it was, with statues at the Louve).
Everything is romantic: unheated Parisian cafes, living on money borrowed from the woman who owns the bookstore/library, having dinner with fire eaters, skiing up into the tip-top of the Alps to learn about avalanches in the winter, losing 6 months' savings on the ponies, boxing with Ezra Pound, donating money to fund T.S. Elliot's departure from his humdrum bank job. Eating and drinking. Not eating and drinking.
But especially, 'Working.' That up-with-the-sun-to-work-on-my-craft self-imposed grindstone that one sweats over as one might laying bricks and mortar all day. For from the way Hemingway describes it, writing--working--is hard, physical (manly) labor. It taxes you and it costs you and it takes a whole morning to get a paragraph written, but all the better! Like a good climb up a tall mountain, your exhaustion only proves that you've done something real and worthwhile. Which is a sentiment that can make any writer-in-training feel grand and important. This isn't art or creativity or any pansy self-expression. This. Is. Work.
And yet...
Hemingway tells us of a time when one could travel through Europe on a seasonal basis, drink bottles of wine by the liter, eat out in cafes all the time, and still be considered poor. When you could make a living selling magazine stories and the odd piece of journalism. When these combined payments were not only enough to fund an apartment for you and your wife and son, but also for a nursemaid, and for a separate hotel room in which you could work (naked, if need be).
It's a particularly classy brand of poverty that doesn't sound impoverished at all.
Alas and alack. But it's still fun to read about.
Everything is romantic: unheated Parisian cafes, living on money borrowed from the woman who owns the bookstore/library, having dinner with fire eaters, skiing up into the tip-top of the Alps to learn about avalanches in the winter, losing 6 months' savings on the ponies, boxing with Ezra Pound, donating money to fund T.S. Elliot's departure from his humdrum bank job. Eating and drinking. Not eating and drinking.
But especially, 'Working.' That up-with-the-sun-to-work-on-my-craft self-imposed grindstone that one sweats over as one might laying bricks and mortar all day. For from the way Hemingway describes it, writing--working--is hard, physical (manly) labor. It taxes you and it costs you and it takes a whole morning to get a paragraph written, but all the better! Like a good climb up a tall mountain, your exhaustion only proves that you've done something real and worthwhile. Which is a sentiment that can make any writer-in-training feel grand and important. This isn't art or creativity or any pansy self-expression. This. Is. Work.
And yet...
Hemingway tells us of a time when one could travel through Europe on a seasonal basis, drink bottles of wine by the liter, eat out in cafes all the time, and still be considered poor. When you could make a living selling magazine stories and the odd piece of journalism. When these combined payments were not only enough to fund an apartment for you and your wife and son, but also for a nursemaid, and for a separate hotel room in which you could work (naked, if need be).
It's a particularly classy brand of poverty that doesn't sound impoverished at all.
Alas and alack. But it's still fun to read about.
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I'm by no means well-traveled so I might be leaving something obvious out, but I'm having a hard time thinking of super-cheap European cities. Second-hand information has told me that Berlin is very affordable (and perhaps a new mecca for artists of a kind), and that certain Canadian cities are pretty amazing and affordable, too. For American cities, nowhere springs to mind with the right combination of romantic mystique and affordability...there should be some sort of database dedicated to such information.
Detroit? Romantic mystique and affordability? Well, I've never been, so I shouldn't judge. Still, I think of Detroit and I think of a big Gary, Indiana. Still, so many cities are reinventing themselves (e.g. areas of Baltimore, the Old Port section of Portland, ME, etc.) that my Detroit bias may be dated. As for Portland, Maine, it is romantic and has real personality, but cheap it is not. Buying food alone would put you in the poor house.Larissa, I agree about that database. Only I'm not so well-traveled myself. In fact, I gave up flying over a decade ago. I travel to Europe by ocean liner (like Hemingway) and around the States by train (like... um... help me here). I will say this -- if you go to the Left Bank of Paris, Hemingway's book STILL works as a great Fodor's. You can see his old apartment over what was a lumberyard, Gertrude Stein's place, the Jardin Luxembourg, the Closerie de Lilas, and on and on.
Only thing is, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. has moved. Bookstore can be found, but not where Hemingway would have found it (just FYI)...
Keep in mind that this was during and after WWI, when Europe's economy wasn't doing so well. Compared to cities in the US at the time, Paris was quite cheap to live in. Hemingway most likely considered himself impoverished at the time by American standards. Had he been making the same money while living in NYC at the time, he would most likely have been living in a slum. And I'm quite sure that eating your meals at a cafe on a daily basis would have been out of the question.
Well, but Hemingway had Hadley's (his first wife's - she inherited from the deaths of her mother and uncle) money - he wasn't at the level of, say, Jean Rhys who coasted along from one day to another. He still did work for newspapers when he was in Europe, and they were being very careful with money (not flinging it around like, say, Fitzgerald) but I think his lack of money there has been exaggerated. He ditched Hadley for a wealthier woman, Pauline Pfeiffer, and I think Mary Hemingway (his mother) actually helped him out as well, altho he hated her and would never admit it. So to me it's more like Thoreau eating dinner at home every night and writing Walden - very romanticized.
Very fair points, Moira--and the comparison to Walden is a good one I hadn't thought of. I didn't actually realize that he had so much inherited/spousal money.
Even more disturbing, the writing itself (Hemingway's, I mean) looks easy -- enough to make erstwhile writers say, "I can do that!" Right. How endearingly annoying, right?
Anyway, I think your review captures the "hunger is good discipline" part of Hemingway's craft. Probably he was at his peak as a writer in these "starving artist" days in the 20s.
Let's see -- in what metropolitan European city could one afford to be a starving artist THESE days? Prague? No more. Lisbon maybe...? Given the value of the dollar (quickly sinking under the Bush), maybe an American city would be more apt...