A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

by Ernest Hemingway

In later life the idea of a moveable feast for Hemingway became something very much like what King Harry wanted St. Crispin’s Feast Day to be for “we happy few”: a memory or even a state of being that had become a part of you, a thing that you could have always with you, no matter where you went or how you lived forever after, that you could never lose. An experience first fixed in time and space or a condition like happiness or love could be afterward moved or carried with you wherever you went in space and time.

There was a great deal of material that Hemingway wrote for A Moveable Feast that he decided to leave out, acting “by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.”

Hemingway’s writing typically reads well when spoken aloud. When complete, his writing is so tight that every word is integral, like notes in a musical composition.

The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

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.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.

“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.”

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.”

I, the one who was so righteous about people and their destructiveness, tolerated this one that was the falsest, most beautiful, most exciting, vicious, and demanding because she could be profitable.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

But for a long time it was enough just to be back in our part of Paris and away from the track and to bet on your own life and work, and on the painters that you knew and not try to make your living gambling and call it by some other name.

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.

It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general. You learned not to do it the first time you made the mistake. You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him.

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill.

“Forgive you for what? Always talk about it or about anything. Don’t you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles? But promise me you won’t worry and that you’ll eat enough.”

It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty.

The way it ended with Gertrude Stein was strange enough.

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.

You should know a little about the system of not visiting people. You had to learn it. Much later Picasso told me that he always promised the rich to come when they asked him because it made them so happy and then something would happen and he would be unable to appear.

But I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst.

“I learned one thing.” “What?” “Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

He had begun to be very rude to his inferiors or anyone he considered his inferior.

When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you.

If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory.

People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boreing way there was.

Nothing can be simpler than growing.”

The first year in the Vorarlberg was an innocent year. The second year of the great killing by avalanches was a different kind of year and you began to know people and the places very well. You knew some people too well and you were learning the places for survival as well as for pleasure. The last year was a nightmare and a murder year disguised as the greatest fun of all. It was that year that the rich showed up.

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places. I do not know about that now but this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

People break their legs and in the world some people still break their hearts. They come down faster and they drop like birds that know many secrets. They have no time to tell their secrets as they pass.

This book is fiction but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

They ski much better now and some break their legs and some break their hearts. The latter is important and unfortunate and some good philosophers explain how you can not break them if they were not there and something happened and they did not exist.

We, who had been at the war, admired the war crazies since we knew they had been made so by something that was un-bearable. It was unbearable to them because they were made of a finer or more fragile metal or because they were simple and understood too clearly.

I have tried to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged, by the man who writes it, by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.

maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that, sometimes, many are stronger at the broken places.

If, in your time, you have ever heard four honest people disagree about what happened at a certain place at a certain time, or you have ever torn up and returned orders that you requested when a situation had reached such a point that it seemed necessary to have something in writing, or testified before an inspector general when allegations had been made, presenting new statements by others that replaced your written orders and your verbal orders, you, remembering certain things and how they were to you and who had fought and where, you prefer to write about any time as fiction.