Thu 3 Sep 2009
a moveable feast
Posted by alhp under i just read, on writing, words we write
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“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.”
~ Ernest Hemingway to a friend, 1950
I haven’t been able to get through a single book in months; since Factotum actually. I’ve started two Augusten Burroughs books, Life of Pi (a reread), Infinite Jest (for the millionth unsuccessful try), An Imaginary Life, and countless short story collections and journals. On a recent trip my father bestowed upon me several books to breakthrough my reader’s block. Hemingway finally did it.
Outside of school, I had never read Hemingway. I think I was too bedazzled by the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Wallace Stevens, and Kate Chopin in my American Lit class to delve into Hemingway. But the intrigue of a memoir set in 1920’s Paris starring Hemingway with appearances by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was great and the book delivers.
Hemingway’s voice is an easy one to fall into and images of him writing in Parisian cafés and meeting his literary contemporaries are incredibly romantic ones inspiring a great desire in me to quit my job(s) and devote myself to writing entirely. The food, drink, and book recommendations alone are worth the read. Plus you could plan an entire tour of Paris based on his comings and goings. While reading, I did a lot of putting the book down between chapters and staring off into space (one of my favorite pastimes), and part of that was wanting to savor Hemingway’s world. I didn’t want the book to end because I wanted to hang out with Hemingway longer and I knew, as anyone would know, that things would eventually turn dark.
After finishing A Moveable Feast, I Googled and Wikipedia-ed Hemingway and everyone else in the book. I was profoundly saddened, mourning his suicide as if it had just happened, and completely fascinated by the rampant alcoholism and mental illness that plagued him and his circle of friends. The power and limitlessness of self-destruction never ceases to amaze me. I wonder if Hemingway thought of his father’s suicide as he pulled the trigger. I wonder if it made it easier or more difficult.
On that note, here are some not so dark parts (sometimes a little dark, I suppose) I liked:
On page 45, a bit about a false spring:
“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.”
Closely following that at the beginning of the chapter titled “False Spring” on page 49:
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. 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.”
On page 62 about giving up betting at the races:
“When I stopped working on the races I was glad but it left an emptiness. 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.”
On writing, page 156:
“Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.”
So, find out where A Moveable Feast takes you, or maybe where you take it.
