Cereal Monogamist

A Moveable Text

I first read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in high school, where it held inexhaustible charm for me. It’s got everything I was into back then—writers in Paris in the twenties. Man, how I loved the twenties.

The book is made up of sketches Hemingway wrote about what he was doing back then, in Paris. He wanders around museums and cafes and converses with some of the biggest literary names of the era: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. He details the disillusionment that his youthful generation felt in the wake of World War I, and quotes Gertrude Stein coining the expression “lost generation.” (“That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” Miss Stein said. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”) The book is heartbreaking in its simplicity—it’s like the blueprint for an art film, just Hemingway walking around and having conversations with people—and it’s written in some of his best terse, powerful prose.

But what’s really most wonderful about the book, for me, is the glimpses it gives the reader of a writer’s mind and process, and the advice that can be gleaned from Hemingway’s account of his work. At the time, he had yet to publish any of the literary works he’s known for today; he made some money as a journalist, but in many ways, he was literally living the life of a starving artist. In fact, he titles one chapter, “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” and describes trying to focus his mind on his words while his stomach growls over its skipped lunch. Much more practical advice abounds, too: write a story, and then put it in a drawer and return to it in six months. That I learned from Hemingway. Also, when it’s time to finish writing for the day, cut yourself off before the action ends, so that you’ll be able to pick it up immediately when you begin the next day.

What you will also find in A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s unvarnished opinions of the people he consorted with at the time. F. Scott Fitzgerald has an entire chapter devoted to his antics, in which he is portrayed as a paranoid, hypochondriac, henpecked, unmasculine alcoholic who sells out his work for the money. (“He had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books.”)

Also getting the warts-and-all treatment: Hemingway’s first two wives, who both make appearances in the book. Scarcely any words are wasted on the second wife, who appears in the last chapter, but in true Hemingway fashion what words are there are bracingly effective: “We had already been infiltrated…using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. …”

Well, the son of that woman’s child, one of Hemingway’s grandchildren, apparently has been seething about this portrait of his grandmother for awhile. Sean Hemingway, working from the original manuscripts (archived in the JFK Presidential Library in Boston) has created a “restored” edition of the book, making changes that include adding bits and pieces of Hemingway’s material which is more complimentary of second wife Pauline.

This blog post by young Hemingway at Powells mostly steps back from the “be nicer to Grandma” angle in favor of the “it was butchered the first time; this is what he wanted,” angle. This is possibly true; Hemingway died at the tail end of the book’s publication process, and his fourth wife worked together with the publisher to get it finalized. However, a competing theory ran in the New York Times; the opinion of A.E. Hotchner, longtime friend and biographer of Papa Hemingway remembers the publication of A Moveable Feast quite differently. “I recount this history of A Moveable Feast to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it,” he writes, “and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication.”

Will I read the new edition? I don’t know. I was pretty happy with the old one. Also, I think there’s something a bit ridiculous about trying to make notoriously mean-streaked Hemingway seem a bit more cuddly—like when Lisa Simpson dated Nelson Muntz and made him wear a tie. (“I feel like punching myself.”) Kind of a sticky mess, but scholars are used to this kind of thing. The regrettable truth is that nobody writes a text from beginning to end; they’re all movable texts. And the archiving frenzy of the last fifty years or so means that writers’ notes, first drafts, and galley proofs are all floating around, accessible to scholars and just waiting to contradict each other as to what the writer actually meant to say. So that we could all spend the next fifty years making a living arguing about it.