A Moveable Feast--Ernest Hemingway
I've posted some excerpts from this volume in previous days. As I finished the book last night I noted several more that I would like to share. A fair portion of the end of the book (two or three labeled sections) are devoted to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife.
A Moveable Feast is an autobiographical reflection on the Paris Years of Ernest and Hadley (his first wife) Hemingway. In the course of it we meet Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Sylvia Beach, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a host of others including either Hilaire Belloc or Alistair Crowley, depending on whether or not you believe Ford. Reading it, I reflected that if Hemingway were your friend, he would be a good friend indeed, and if he were not, well he might still seem so depending upon how dense you are.
Critics fault Hemingway's late prose for becoming a parody of the taut style he developed early in his career; but to my ignorant ears, the prose in this book did not sound that way. There are other interesting oddities, that I suppose, if one were of the mind to one could find cause for exception to: there were moments in which Hemingway deliberately left out some incident or some useful information--for example when he returned home to Paris to search and see if he had lost both the originals and the carbons of stories he had written when Hadley's suitcase was stolen in a Paris train station. (Both originals and carbons were gone and Hemingway does something that he glosses over in the telling.) There are a few other narrative gaps and places where the story trails off after giving enough of an indication--for example when he relates how he finally came to part with Gertrude Stein.
Much of a surface gloss here in review, but I think it is enough to say that the book is worth one's time even if one cannot always discern what Hemingway felt or whether or not the incidents recounted actually took place in just that way. What we can know fairly well is that they are a "novelization," the author having had years and years in which to polish, reflect, and perhaps subtly alter events. What you will get is a strong sense of Hemingway and of Paris in the 1920s, and of the romantic elements of Hemingway's make-up that can often be overlooked.
***** Highly recommended.
A Moveable Feast is an autobiographical reflection on the Paris Years of Ernest and Hadley (his first wife) Hemingway. In the course of it we meet Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Sylvia Beach, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a host of others including either Hilaire Belloc or Alistair Crowley, depending on whether or not you believe Ford. Reading it, I reflected that if Hemingway were your friend, he would be a good friend indeed, and if he were not, well he might still seem so depending upon how dense you are.
Critics fault Hemingway's late prose for becoming a parody of the taut style he developed early in his career; but to my ignorant ears, the prose in this book did not sound that way. There are other interesting oddities, that I suppose, if one were of the mind to one could find cause for exception to: there were moments in which Hemingway deliberately left out some incident or some useful information--for example when he returned home to Paris to search and see if he had lost both the originals and the carbons of stories he had written when Hadley's suitcase was stolen in a Paris train station. (Both originals and carbons were gone and Hemingway does something that he glosses over in the telling.) There are a few other narrative gaps and places where the story trails off after giving enough of an indication--for example when he relates how he finally came to part with Gertrude Stein.
Much of a surface gloss here in review, but I think it is enough to say that the book is worth one's time even if one cannot always discern what Hemingway felt or whether or not the incidents recounted actually took place in just that way. What we can know fairly well is that they are a "novelization," the author having had years and years in which to polish, reflect, and perhaps subtly alter events. What you will get is a strong sense of Hemingway and of Paris in the 1920s, and of the romantic elements of Hemingway's make-up that can often be overlooked.
***** Highly recommended.
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