A Moveable Feast

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast

Parisians have turned to a book in droves following the terrorist attacks. Hemingway’s Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, has become a best seller, the most popular book in France at this time.

According to the Guardian (11/20/15) the book is No 1 on Amazon’s French site, booksellers are running out of copies and, to meet the demand, the publisher continues to print thousands of new copies.

Hemingway takes you right into the mood of being in Paris, a Paris that Parisians hope to recapture in reading the book. He goes to the cafes--sometimes to write, or to talk, at other times to hide, and then to eat or drink.

Hemingway writes about the craft of writing and how he did it and how to do it better. “Up in that room I decided I would write one story about each thing I knew about.”

Currently there is an exhibition of Hemingway’s letters, photographs, films, and corrected proofs of his books at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York—Ernest Hemingway—Between Two Wars.

In a letter to his father he tries to explain what he was trying to do. “You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do that without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.”

A Moveable Feast was written toward the end of his life and published posthumously in 1964, long after his youthful days in Paris. In it he traces the writers he knew there, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, each of whom took an interest in his work and responded with encouragement and appraisal.

Alison Flood, the author of the Guardian article notes that the book is published in French as Paris est une fete (Paris is a Celebration.)

She says it has struck a “chord with the mood of defiance in the wake of the attacks. This has seen Parisians drinking and eating in restaurants, cafes and bars…and posting about it under the slogan “Je suis en terrasse: on social media.”

"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it."

1954 Nobel Prize in Literature

Ernest Hemingway was born on this day, 115 years ago. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. However, following two plane crashes in Africa, his injuries prevented him from traveling to Stockholm. John C. Cabot, United States Ambassador to Sweden delivered his address. And here is what Hemingway wrote:

“Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.”

Prior to Ambassador Cabot’s reading, H.S. Nyberg, Member of the Swedish Academy, made the following comment:

“Another deep regret is that the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, on account of ill health has to be absent from our celebration.

We wish to express our admiration for the eagle eye with which he has observed, and for the accuracy with which he has interpreted the human existence of our turbulent times; also for the admirable restraint with which he has described their naked struggle.

The human problems which he has treated are relevant to all of us, living as we do in the confused conditions of modern life; and few authors have exercised such a wide influence on contemporary literature in all countries. It is our sincere hope that he will soon recover health and strength in pursuit of his life-work.”

"All the Wondering Things and Times We Had"

Hemingway. The almost forgotten writer. The writer who meant everything to me when I first starting reading fiction. The writer who you either cherish or deplore. The writer whose life almost everyone thinks of first instead of what he wrote. James Salter is an exception

In his essay, “The Finest Life You Ever Saw” in the October 13th New York Review of Books, Salter reviews Paul Hendrickson’s recent book, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. Part of the book is about Hemingway’s cabin cruiser, Pilar, that he used to fish for marlin off the coast of Cuba and, as some have claimed, hunt down German submarines during World War II. It is also a carefully research personal biography of Hemingway’s life and writing in Havana between 1934 and 1961.

Salter also writes with a sense of reverence about Hemingway's style, the writing that made him great, the one that so many have tried but failed to imitate, only to appear as a parody. Hemingway’s spare writing style is easy to mimic and many have tried. There is even an annual International Imitation Hemingway competition that has been held for over thirty years.

Salter describes Hemingway’s distinctive voice by commenting “…he had his poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness.”

Here’s an example from the start of Hemingway’s short story In Another Country.

“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.”

Salter writes about the thousands of letters, estimated between six or seven thousand that Hemingway wrote to his many friends, long letters and quotes from a few. I marvel at this number and think of other writers who wrote just as many letters, if not more, in their lifetime.

Voltaire is said to have written about 15,000 letters in his 83-year life, other writers were dedicated letter writers--Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, etc. I think how few letters are written today, not just by well-known writers but each of us. The loss to historians in the future who want to know about the eminent is incalculable. The loss to those of us who want to review our earlier correspondence is just as great. I speak from personal experience here.

Salter concludes his review with a statement made about Hemingway by the wife of the journalist George Seldes: “Forgive him anything, he writes like an angel.”