A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. 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. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris 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." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

If I know anything about Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, I know that it contains a scene where Hemingway reassures F. Scott Fitzgerald in the bathroom of a bar that the size of his penis is perfectly ordinary. A Moveable Feast wasn't published until the 1960's, a few years after the death of Hemingway, and perhaps it's best that it much after the death of Fitzgerald, as well, who, as Hemingway depicts him here, was an anxious hypochondriac, tortured by his wife, who probably had enough anxiety to deal with in his life. The penis story is just one of many--there's a long tale about Fitzgerald's hypochondria absolutely derailing a boys' trip to the city of Lyon--and one of the charms of A Moveable Feast is the peek inside the lives of some of the great artists who were trawling around Paris at the time. Fitzgerald gets out better, perhaps, than Gertrude Stein, who's depicted as something of a stubborn battleaxe who hides petty resentments behind a thin veil of principle. That's too harsh: as with Fitzgerald, Hemingway's depiction of Stein is ultimately a loving one, because his depiction of Paris, and those years of his life, is a loving one as well.

But the most interesting depiction of any artist is, I think, the book's depiction of Hemingway himself. Hemingway's writing about a time before he's published any novel at all, and his work is all in short stories, and so the larger-than-life bullfighter and hunter who would be known as "Papa" isn't really present here. The Hemingway of A Moveable Feast is a rather vulnerable creature, battling the uncertainty of writer's block, cultivating a style of simplicity not out of masculine bravado but the need to put down on paper "one true sentence." This Hemingway marvels at his friend Fitzgerald not because his book is so good (when they first meet, he hasn't yet read Gatsby) but because he had the ability to write a novel at all. I thought A Moveable Feast was an interesting counterbalance to the popular image of Hemingway as an icon of machismo. Certainly the vulnerability and the incertitude of Hemingway here involves a lot of self-fashioning, but isn't "self-fashioning" the complaint that people level against Hemingway in the other direction? All of which is to say again that I think those who resent Hemingway for his masculinity haven't read him, or haven't read him closely enough.

It's impossible, I feel, not to respond to what Hemingway can do with a sentence. His sentences seem simple enough, but then, if they're so simple, why are they so moving? I was moved in that way often during A Moveable Feast, though I don't quite agree with those who thinks it's among his greatest works. It has the kind of muddy incoherence of something that feels unfinished, as if it were something he might have knocked into a more recognizable shape, if he'd published it during his own life time. Still, it's remarkable in the way it manages to turn real people--the Steins, the Fitzgeralds, the Pounds, and Papa himself--into Hemingway characters, so vibrant and real even though they are so lightly sketched, touched with a kind of authorial grace.