"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)

Other Perspectives:

I recently read Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood which chronicles each of Ernest's four wives. The first, Hadley, is the one to whom he was married at the time of AMF. He left her following an adulterous affair with, and subsequent marriage to, Hadley's best friend Fife; Ernest regrets this betrayal towards the end of AMF, saying: “All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” (There Is Never Any End To Paris). There is no doubt that he was a selfish husband and probably an unpleasant man. There are a lot of writers in this blog who were seriously flawed human beings; I am of the opinion that their works should be judged in isolation from their lives. 

Hemingway won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature

December 2024; 182 pages

First published (posthumously) in 1964

My paperback edition published by Vintage in 2000

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Goodbye to Berlin" by Christopher Isherwood

This isn't a novel, nor is it a series of short stories; it isn't a diary and it is clearly fiction so it isn't a memoir. It is a somewhat ramshackle portmanteau of vignettes designed to show Berlin between 1930 and 1933. 

In the second paragraph, the author states his ostensible purpose: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930) As this conceit suggests, this book contains a lot of quite wonderful descriptions:

• "Yesterday morning I saw a roe being chased by a Borzoi dog, right across the fields ... the roe went bucketing over the earth with wild rigid jerks, like a grand piano bewitched." (On Reugen Island)
• "The cheap jewellery of the Kurhaus lights reflected in the black water." (On Reugen Island)
• "They all thronged around us for a moment in the little circle of light from the panting bus, their lit faces ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines." (The Nowaks)

But 'the camera' isn't as passive as the author pretends. It's not just that it records conversations (and Isherwood has a delightful ear for dialogue, many of the characters are defined largely by the way they talk). Isherwood is author, and narrator, and the lead character, making this an early example of autofiction. I wonder whether this conflating of author and protagonist might have been suggested by the interaction of subject and object in quantum physics, which was being discussed in the mid to late 1920s.

Nevertheless, the 'camera' conceit enables the narrator to be non-judgemental. He is remarkably tolerant of the wide variety of people he encounters, and he stays scrupulously neutral for most of the book (not perhaps in the final section) despite the period covered by the book being a time of tremendous social and political upheaval which culminated in the rise of the Nazi party. Some of my fellow book club readers felt that such neutrality meant that Isherwood was condoning Nazism but it seemed to me that this was not the case. He frequently makes observations, almost in passing, which record Nazi thuggery. He describes a Nazi parade and the impression it makes on him thus: “In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine per cent of the population of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives, who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared. Yes, I said to myself, I’ve done it, now. I am lost.” (Sally Bowles) Forfeiting kinship, selling souls to the devil, and being lost seem to me to be condemning the Nazis. The final section of the book is hard-hitting. But most importantly, he was writing at a time when many of the characters he describes, such as the promiscuous Sally and Otto the rent boy, would have been vilified by the English society in which his readers lived and his profession of neutrality was perhaps the only way, or so he might have believed at the time, for these characters to be accorded respect.

The Guardian said: "Reading this novel is much like overhearing anecdotes in a crowded bar while history knocks impatiently on the window." George Orwell called it "brilliant sketches of a society in decay."

Much of the book explores the difference between what appears to be and the reality beneath (not something that a camera can do). The first paragraph describes Berlin: "From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops, where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930) This is a town of faded grandeur. It is a city that had become a byword for decadent night-life, both straight and gay (the author is homosexual) and all the possibilities of the rainbow. But this was a background of serious economic weakness following Germany's defeat in the First World War and the subsequent political turmoil. This first paragraph seems to encapsulate the idea of faded grandeur, and the idea that the city was rotten behind its impressive frontage.

This theme of superficiality versus reality is found throughout the book. For example, in the first section we are introduced to Christopher's landlady Fraulein Schroder, who pretends that her lodgers are guests and that she was, and is, better than she appears. She insists that she has “got the money to be independent” but she spends her days cleaning and gossiping and empties chamber pots. She talks about past lodgers including “a Freiherr [Baron] once, and a Rittmeister [a captain in the cavalry] and a Professor”, and the son of a surgeon. Now she has “Herr Issyvoo”, a barman, a lady who yodels in music-halls, and a prostitute. Her best friend Fraulein Mayr is another such who talks about the days when she was “a slip of a girl”; now “the muscles of Frl Mayer’s nude fleshy arms ripple unappetizingly.” Outside the lodgings, Christopher gives private tuition in the district in which they rich live; this provides another contrast between the dream and the reality: "Most of the richest Berlin families inhabit the Grunewald. It is difficult to understand why. ... Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear: their only view is of their neighbour's backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire's slum." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930)

In the second section we are introduced to the marvellously over-the-top Sally Bowles, and again we see the contrast between hope and truth: her clothes Sally’s clothes “produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in a grand opera”; Sally paints her fingernails bright green which only draws attention to her dirty fingers. Sally is a wannabe actress and sings in night-clubs, she is promiscuous with a succession of boyfriends, all of whom she exploits but she is a hopeless gold-digger, a poor lover abandons her for richer pickings, a rich man promises to take her for a tour of Europe but departs alone, a sixteen-year-old con artist swindles her out of some savings.

The third and fourth sections focus on Otto, a poor young boy who goes 'gay for pay'. We first meet him as the 'companion' of Peter in a seaside resort; he torments Peter by repeatedly going dancing with girls and later dumps him. We rediscover Otto in his poverty-stricken working-class family when Christopher, down on his luck, lodges with them, sharing Otto's room. The family is one of contrasts: the father a communist, the elder son a Nazi who earns a few pennies where he can, Otto, who sleeps in and doesn't work, until he returns home with twenty mark notes, having done something his mother knows is shameful. In some ways Otto is a male version of Sally.

Apparently, Otto was in real life Walter Wolff, a young man with whom Isherwood had a sexual relationship.

In the fifth section we meet the Landauers, a rich Jewish family who own a posh department store. The young girl, Natalia, who, when perplexed, says “Then I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” (whatever that means) is a perfect innocent in contrast with Sally. It’s never quite clear what she means by this (her English is imperfect) but this doesn’t seem to matter. The father of the family wanted to be an academic, Bernhard's ambition was to be a sculptor, but they both spend their lives working for the family firm: it doesn't really matter if you are rich or poor, your dreams are undermined by economic reality.

The final section, set in the winter of 1932 - 1933, is one of bleak despair ... and scarily appropriate to today.

• "Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold ... I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railways, in the iron work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "People like Bobby are their jobs - take the job away and they partially cease to exist." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "Everybody stole. Everybody sold what they had to sell - themselves included." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "Most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "You see those two buildings? One is the engineering-works, the other is the prison. For the boys of this district there used to be two alternatives ... But now the works are bankrupt. Next week they will close down." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)

The characterisations are brilliant. The dialogue, often at cross-purposes, adds tension and complexity and depth to the characters. And the descriptions are stupendous. This is a writer at the top of his form.

But I've said it before in this blog and I will repeat it here: I hate it when author's use untranslated foreign language. Is every reader supposed to know German? Or is the author just showing off? Why doesn't an editor at least add a footnote translating the words? I either have to get out a dictionary or use Google Translate or just skip that bit and wonder whether it was important. All of these actions disrupt the free flow of the reading process and make me dislike the book a little tiny bit; dislikes which can accumulate (as they did, for example, with Trilby by George du Maurier).

Selected quotes:

• "Where, in another ten years, shall I be myself? Certainly not here. How many seas and frontiers shall I have to cross to reach that distant day; how far shall I have to travel, on foot, on horseback, by car, push-bike, aeroplane, steamer, train, life, moving-staircase, and tram? How much money shall I need for that enormous journey? How much food must I gradually, wearily consume on my way? How many pairs of shoes shall I wear out? How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke? How many cups of tea shall I drink and how many glasses of beer? What an awful tasteless prospect! And yet - to have to die ... A sudden pang of apprehension grips my bowels." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930)
• “Most rich people, once they have decided to trust you, can be imposed upon to almost any extent.” (A Berlin Diary)
• "The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. No." (The Nowaks)
• "All day long he made his rounds of the tenements in the district, collecting fifty pfennigs here, a mark there, scratching up his precarious livelihood, like a hen, from this apparently barren soil." (The Nowaks)
• "If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be an omnibus." (A Berlin Diary)

The Sally Bowles section of this book formed the basis for the brilliant must-see musical Cabaret.

September 2022; 256 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God