A Moveable Feast

by Ernest Hemingway

It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris.

and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy

The quote from City of Angels <3

I would give up the room in the hotel where I wrote and there was only the rent of 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine

Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.

Miss Stein sat on the bed that was on the floor and asked to see the stories I had written and she said that she liked them except one called “Up in Michigan.”

She told me that I was not a good enough writer to be published there or in The Saturday Evening Post but that I might be some new sort of writer in my own way but the first thing to remember was not to write stories that were inaccrochable. I did not argue about this nor try to explain again what I was trying to do about conversation. That was my own business and it was much more interesting to listen.

“But even if I never bought any more clothing ever,” I said, “I wouldn’t have enough money to buy the Picassos that I want.” “No. He’s out of your range. You have to buy the people of your own age—of your own military service group. You’ll know them. You’ll meet them around the quarter. There are always good new serious painters.

I had met Miss Stein in the Luxembourg.

She talked, mostly, and she told me about modern pictures and about painters—more about them as people than as painters—and she talked about her work.

Writing every day made her happy, but as I got to know her better I found that for her to keep happy it was necessary that this steady daily output, which varied with her energy, be published and that she receive recognition.

Then all I had to be cured of, I decided Miss Stein felt, was youth and loving my wife.

When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. 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. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything.

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.

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.

She did not want to talk about Anderson’s works any more than she would talk about Joyce. If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back. It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general.

we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

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I will do my best to serve her and see she gets justice for the good work she had done as long as I can, so help me God and Mike Ney. But the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels.

“You know, Gertrude is nice, anyway.” “Of course, Tatie.” “But she does talk a lot of rot sometimes.”

Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon.

she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.

I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished. There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming

“There aren’t any restaurants in your immediate quarter, are there?” “No. How did you know?” “Larbaud lived there,” she said. “He liked it very much except for that.”

When I got there with the books I told my wife about the wonderful place I had found. “But Tatie, you must go by this afternoon and pay,” she said. “Sure I will,” I said. “We’ll both go. And then we’ll walk down by the river and along the quais.” “Let’s walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops.” “Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.” “We can have two drinks.” “Then we can eat somewhere.” “No. Don’t forget we have to pay the library.” “We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.” “And we’ll never love anyone else but each other.” “No. Never.”

Omg <3 <3

“We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

“How do you tell a valuable French book?” “First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.”

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

!!!

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

We walked back through the Tuileries in the dark

<3

When you and Chink talked I was included. It wasn’t like being a wife at Miss Stein’s.”

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 looked and there it all was: our river and our city and the island of our city. “We’re too lucky,” she said.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Racing never came between us, only people could do that;

“Forgive you for what? Always talk about it or about anything. Don’t you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles?

I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air and the fallen leaves blew along the sidewalks from my side of the table past his, so I took a good look at him, repented, and looked across the boulevard.

Lol

“You and your wife plan to come to the Bal Musette Saturday night. It’s quite gay. I’ll draw you a map so you can find it. I stumbled on it quite by chance.” “It’s under 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine,” I said. “I lived on the third floor.” “There’s no number,” Ford said. “But you’ll be able to find it if you can find the Place Contrescarpe.” I took another long drink.

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 really a 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. But I tried.

Then you would hear someone say, “Hi, Hem. What are you trying to do? Write in a café?” Your luck had run out and you shut the notebook. This was the worst thing that could happen.

In Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries.

The studio where he lived with his wife Dorothy on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

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I kept my mouth shut about things I did not like. If a man liked his friends’ painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them.

Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint.

Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known

He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble.

The Fitzgeralds had rented a furnished flat at 14 rue de Tilsitt

In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary,

When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.