A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
**A Moveable Feast Overview**
"A Moveable Feast" is a posthumously published collection of essays by Ernest Hemingway, capturing the author's experiences and reflections during his time in Paris between 1921 and 1926, when he lived modestly with his first wife, Hadley, and their son, Bumby. The work offers a vivid portrayal of the city, infused with Hemingway's unique perspective as a struggling writer navigating the challenges of poverty while finding joy in his artistic pursuits. The essays delve into his relationships with prominent figures of the Lost Generation, including Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, revealing both admiration and critique of their personalities and struggles.
Hemingway's narrative blends personal anecdotes with sharp observations, highlighting the complexities of artistic life and the emotional turbulence he experienced. His candidness about other writers' lives, particularly Fitzgerald’s battle with alcoholism, has sparked varied reactions from readers and critics alike, reflecting the tensions inherent in artistic communities. While presented as nonfiction, the essays are shaped by Hemingway's selective memory and romanticized views, offering insights into his psyche more than an objective account of Paris. Through his introspective lens, the work resonates with themes of discontent and the search for meaning amid the bustling life of the city.
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A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
First published: 1964
The Work
“This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy,” writes Ernest Hemingway of the years between 1921 and 1926 when, as a struggling young writer, he lived in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and their son, Bumby. A Moveable Feast, a collection of twenty essays published after Hemingway’s death, captures the moods of a city.
Having quit his job as a journalist, Hemingway lived in an apartment overlooking a sawmill. Selling only a few stories and living on very little money, he skimped on firewood, wore sweatshirts as underwear, and skipped more than a few meals. He borrowed books from Sylvia Beach’s famous bookstore, where his credit was good and Sylvia herself could be counted on for small loans. Occasional windfalls came from lucky bets on the horses, but new clothes and dinners out were rare. The couple did not consider themselves poor. They found poverty ennobling and looked down on the rich.
The book offers without pardon or apology Hemingway’s unvarnished opinions on the legendary writers and artists who worked in Paris at that time. He relished Gertrude Stein’s food, liqueur, and encouragement but resented her treatment of him and his wife as “promising children.” He judged the poet Ford Madox Ford foul-smelling, forgetful, and abusive and the painter Wyndham Lewis arrogant and cruel. Three essays reveal Hemingway’s assessment of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose talent, he writes, “was as natural as the pattern . . . on a butterfly’s wings.” For these accounts, Hemingway has been criticized by some for callously divulging Fitzgerald’s most intimate personal confidences and lauded by others for his frank and affectionate disclosures. Hemingway depicts Fitzgerald as robbed of his art and his friends by alcohol and stripped of his dignity by a faithless and frivolous wife.
While offered as nonfiction, A Moveable Feast is as much a product of Hemingway’s selective, often romanticized perception as it is an objective report. The book reveals more about its author than it does about Paris. Even warm in his bed with his wife sleeping beside him, he found little comfort for a troubled mind, lamenting that nothing is simple, “not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong.” Through all the essays runs this undercurrent of discontent, a gnawing hunger of the soul that plagued the writer and the fictional heroes he created.
Bibliography
Kert, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. Biographical details, including for the years 1920-1926, which focus on Hadley Richardson Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer.
Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. A standard biography of Hemingway, which places the writing of A Moveable Feast in the context of the author’s approaching suicide.
Messent, Peter. “Coda: A Moveable Feast.” In Ernest Hemingway. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Places the work in the context of Hemingway’s larger, utopian project of a pure art that would re-create out of the historical world a linguistic one entered at will, that is equally valid and eternally valuable. Shows how, by merging his voice at the end of his career with his voice as a young writer and the voice of his fictional young writer, Nick Adams, Hemingway achieved some of his best literary effects.
Renza, Louis A. “The Importance of Being Ernest.” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 3 (Summer, 1989): 661-689. Argues that Hemingway felt such a hunger to write true sentences that the very act of writing them created a world as real as the one to which they referred. At the same time, his need to make money threatened his dedication to high artistic standards.
Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast”: The Making of Myth. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Gathering and carefully weighing extensive evidence about the play of imagination and memory in Hemingway’s conceptualization and composition, Tavernier-Courbin provides an objective examination of fact and fiction in this work and a balanced analysis of what the book reveals about its author. Includes chronologies, maps, and manuscript revisions.