Dave's Book Blog: "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway

Tuesday, 24 December 2024

"A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway

The classic manual on how to be a writer living in Paris.

In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and baby son, gave up journalism and tried to eke out a living writing short stories. This memoir, based on notebooks he had stored in the basement of the Ritz hotel in trunks made for him by Louis Vuitton, describes his life surrounded by other writers and how he learned to write.

If, like me, you want to be a writer, this is fascinating stuff. But it's also a roll-call of literary celebrities from James Joyce (author of Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) to F Scott Fitzgerald (author of The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon), Ford Madox Ford (author of The Good Soldier and the Parade's End tetralogy), Ezra Pound (a major influence on The Waste Land by T S Eliot) and Gertrude Stein among others.

It is particularly funny about FMF: not only did Hemingway think him smelly and dishevelled: “I always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room.” (Ford Madox Ford and The Devil's Disciple). FMF also made inaccurate statements, sometimes lying, sometimes contradicting himself, but always insisted that what he was saying was correct. An example is when he misidentifies Aleister Crowley as Hilaire Belloc.

FSF is more tragicomic: he is ridiculous but doomed to die young having failed to fulfil his immense promise: “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he only remembered when it had been effortless.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

Through it all, Hemingway is learning to write:

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
“But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made ... and think, ‘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’.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
“I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
“She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
“You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen your story and make people feel something more than they understood.” (Hunger Was Good Discipline)
He regards Ezra Pound as “the man who believed in the mot juste- the one and only correct word to use - the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives.” (Evan Shipman at the Lilas)
Re Dostoevsky: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?” (Evan Shipman at the Lilas)
“I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all my facility and try to make instead of describe.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

He's obviously serious about his writing. At one stage he talks about terza riruce. I had to look this up. It is a rhyme scheme derived from terza rima, the form Dante used in his Divine Comedy, which uses triplets and rhymes aba bcb cdc ded ... etc. Terza riruce was originally just terza rima used for comedic or scatological purposes but it evolved into a distinct form: aba dab ado, ‘o’; being an anti-rhyme using vowels and consonants unconnected with others in the sequence. Hemingway obviously knows all this but wears his learning so lightly that he merely mentions the word.

The selected quotes show how the Hemingway style excels:

Selected quotes:

“She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin.” (A Good Cafe on the Place St-Michel)
“The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.” (The False Spring)
“All the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” (Hunger Was Good Discipline)
“In those days many people went to the cafes ... to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality.” (Ford Madox Ford and The Devil's Disciple)
“It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.” (With Pascin At The Dome)
“Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.” (Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit.)
“The whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con[sumption].” (The Man Who Was Marked For Death)
“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.” (An Agent of Evil)
“The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.” (Scott Fitzgerald)
“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” (There Is Never Any End To Paris)