A Moveable Feast

Since my return from Paris a few weeks ago, I’ve been savoring A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of the city in the 20s.

The book was unfinished upon Hemingway’s death in 1961, and was later assembled from a combination of finished stories, drafts, and bits of notes to his editor and family. I loved Hemingway’s vivid vision of Paris, and loved discovering that the beauty he saw in the city nearly 100 years ago mirrors the affection I have for Paris today. Some of his favorite things (and mine) include:

How walking in Paris unlocks the imagination:

“I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking or doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.”

How the city’s beauty makes poverty bearable:

“In a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, it’s like having a great treasure given to you.”

How it’s a lovely place to be alone in:

“​​​​​​When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people, and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

In addition to being an homage to Paris, A Moveable Feast is an homage to his time with Hadley Richardson, the first of Hemingway’s four wives. The book pays tribute to the heyday of their marriage (and later hints at its demise). When things were going well, their partnership seemed wonderful. They cut their hair the same way, holed up happily in shabby apartments for days on end, and made shared pennilessness seem positively poetic.  Of their relationship and the city, Hemingway wrote:

“I thought we were invulnerable. But we were not invulnerable and that was the end of the first part of Paris, and Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed.”

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

Hemingway’s experience seems to echo that sad adage about love that I hear so often: “It was great, until it wasn’t.”  And when things do fall apart, Hemingway writes of it only obliquely, intimating that his second wife Pauline befriended Hadley before muscling in on him.

Last weekend, I took a class about memoir writing at Catapult, where I argued with the instructor about Ariel Levy’s Thanksgiving in Mongolia essay, specifically on the question of whether Levy, who goes into great detail about some elements of her life experience and barely mentions others, “owes” her reader a more comprehensive reporting of her situation. I don’t think Levy owed her readers any more than she gave them, or that any non-fiction writer does. And I feel even more adamant about this after finishing A Moveable Feast. Much of the beauty of this memoir is in the choices Hemingway has made about what to include and what to leave out – what stories to tell, what people to lionize, and what impression of Paris, marriage, and a writer’s life to deliver. It isn’t a complete account of everything that happened – we don’t know about his son’s birth, don’t learn exactly what happened with Pauline, and don’t get the lowdown on Hemingway’s many vices. When life unravels, it largely occurs off the page. And I think that’s fine. Just as there’s something romantic about Paris, there’s something romantic about filling the gaps in for yourself.

(Or you could just read The Paris Wife for your fill of the dirty details!)