Pam's Book 7: A Moveable Feast

I loved The Sun Also Rises. I hated Islands in the Stream. I tend to have strong feelings about Hemingway books. Not, however, with A Moveable Feast. My cousin Scotty recommended it to me, and I tend to trust his recommendations. Overall, I enjoy Hemingway. I love reading anything and everything about Paris. Yet, I feel completely ambivalent about A Moveable Feast. I began reading with enjoyment and anticipation. I was recently told that I need to read more travel blogs; this, I thought, was the ultimate travel blog, far before the internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye.

Hemingway writes of the cafes of the Paris between the wars, of what it's like to be a writer trying to get on his feet. He writes of other writers: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford. He weaves in and out of their lives, in and out of his own life, through short sketches and vignettes, moving in and out of time as if chronology were a liquid thing and not linear. There seems to be no rhyme or reason in the ordering of the book. Usually, he's married to Hadley. Sometimes, however, he's married to Pauline. He writes, in the abstract, of the dissolution of his marriage with Hadley, briefly throughout the book, poignantly and in more detail near the end.

Reading this book, one gets the impression that Paris of the 1920's was solely the haunt of the artistic, whether writers or painters, and each cafe held a resident author who daily staked out a table to write what he could not write at home. All the writers and painters knew one another, moved in the same circles, supported, drank with, conferred with, confessed secret needs and desires with one another. Each artist had a strong personality. Gertrude Stein would not converse with the wives and only enjoyed writing by those who had not criticized her own work. Ezra Pound was everybody's biggest fan and supporter. Scott Fitzgerald was an alcoholic with a crazy wife. Ford Madox Ford smelled funny.

Hem and his wife lived the bohemian lifestyle, sacrificing meals (but never booze) to pay for jaunts to Spain to see the bullfights and Austria to ski, writing, going first to horse races then to bicycle races, never thinking farther ahead than the next journey. I think it's good they were in Paris because they never would have survived Prohibition.

I enjoyed what I learned about Paris in the '20's, and about Hem (as everybody seemed to call him) and Hadley, but I feel the writing only scratched the surface, like trying to write about a trip long after one has already returned home: big on logistical details, lacking any emotional investment. By far the best part of the book was the section of sketches at the end that, I believe, weren't even included in the original edition. They, at least, had some depth of feeling.