A Moveable Feast

Paris in the 1920s

Hemingway arrived in Paris in December 1921 with his first wife Hadley, letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, and very little money. What the book records—written thirty years later from notes and memory—is the texture of those years: the cold apartment on the rue Cardinal Lemoine where they lived above a bal musette, the Luxembourg Gardens where Hemingway would walk to forget hunger, the Closerie des Lilas where he wrote at a table near the back with a café crème and the newspaper and his own silence around him.

The poverty is real throughout and treated not with self-pity but with a young man’s pride in making it work. When there is no money for lunch there are the chestnuts from the vendor on the corner, or the oysters that are cheap at the Brasserie Lipp, or the walk that costs nothing. Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company on the rue de l’Odéon lends Hemingway books from her circulating library and extends credit she cannot afford. The races at Auteuil and Enghien are a form of excitement and occasionally income. Food and wine are described with the attentive pleasure of someone who knows what it is to go without both.

And then there is Hadley—first wife, the one he left for Pauline Pfeiffer, the one the book circles with a tenderness that is also a form of guilt. The final pages of the original edition make the loss explicit without quite naming its cause: “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

The Lost Generation

The book’s other great subject is the literary world of the Left Bank, and Hemingway’s portraits of its inhabitants are some of the sharpest character sketches in American literature—even when, especially when, they are unfair.

F. Scott Fitzgerald appears in the chapter most readers remember: already famous, anxious about his talent, asking Hemingway embarrassing questions about anatomy while Zelda drinks at the next table. The portrait has been disputed and probably distorted—Fitzgerald’s diary entries from the same period tell a different story—but as a literary performance it is extraordinary: a man caught in the gap between what he is and what he fears, with a wife who fills that gap with contempt. Gertrude Stein appears as a generous patron who then says something unforgivable and makes herself an enemy. Ezra Pound is almost entirely admirable: the one figure who reads other people’s work with real generosity and helps them publish it. Ford Madox Ford is pompous. Wyndham Lewis is mean-looking. Each portrait is efficient and final.

What Hemingway was learning during these years—about sentences, about compression, about the iceberg theory of omission—is present throughout as a kind of running craft seminar. The chapter “A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel,” in which he describes sitting down to write a story and then writing it, is one of the best accounts of the creative process in the literature.

The Last Chapter

The book was published posthumously in 1960, one year before Hemingway’s death, and the version most readers encountered for decades was the edition assembled by his fourth wife Mary and his editors at Scribner—an assemblage from incomplete, partially contradictory manuscript fragments that Hemingway had been working on without finishing. The restored edition of 2009, assembled by his grandson Seán Hemingway, adds material that changes the book’s texture and its treatment of the marriage’s end, and there is genuine disagreement about which version better represents Hemingway’s intentions.

The famous final passage of the original edition—“But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy”—arrives after an account of a winter in Schruns, Austria, where a “third party” appeared and the happiness ended. Hemingway does not name Pauline Pfeiffer. He does not need to. The elegiac weight of the whole book has been building toward this: everything that follows the Paris years is implicitly the cost of leaving them, and leaving Hadley is the price tag most visible on the page.

What remains, whatever edition you read, is one of the most beautiful books about a particular time, a particular city, and a particular phase of a writer’s life. If Paris was, as Hemingway wrote, a moveable feast—a city you carry with you wherever you go—this book is the proof of it.

Rating: 4.3/5 — Hemingway’s most personal and most universally beloved book, A Moveable Feast makes 1920s Paris so vivid and so desirable that every reader who opens it immediately wants to be there, writing at the Closerie des Lilas with a café crème and the morning still ahead.