Ecco, appunto!
A Moveable Feast (1964) was the first of Ernest Hemingway's posthumous publications, edited into final form by his widow, Mary Hemingway, who claimed to have done virtually nothing to the manuscript except correcting the spelling of some Paris street names. That claim, however, has been questioned in the years since the book's publication. A Moveable Feast is a memoir of Hemingway's early days in Paris, introduced by a preface in which the author tells the reader that, if he or she wishes, “the book may be regarded as fiction”. This disclaimer (and several similar statements that exist among the manuscripts) may have been intended to deflect criticism that Hemingway anticipated because of his acidulous portraits of friends and acquaintances from the period.
It was the emphasis on those early friends that caused Mary to recall that she had protested when she first read the book in manuscript that there was too much of other people in the book and too little of Ernest. His reply was that he had employed a technique which he called remate, a term he borrowed from the sport of jai alai, in which it denotes a sophisticated two-wall shot. What Hemingway wrote about his contemporaries was meant to reflect indirectly the portrait of himself as a dedicated young author.
One class of writer, represented by Ernest Walsh, is the sort of minor author Hemingway had first ridiculed in an early feature story, “American Bohemians in Paris”, for the Toronto Star Weekly. Walsh, according to Hemingway, lived off various women who supported him, impressed by the fact that he had published a few poems in Poetry and that he was clearly “marked for death” by his tuberculosis. The portrait is especially unfair because Walsh and Edith Moorhead were among Hemingway's first literary patrons, publishing his early stories in This Quarter and paying handsomely for them. Walsh was not merely posing as a poet doomed to early death: his tuberculosis killed him, but his death evoked no sympathy from Hemingway.
Other patrons to become targets were Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein. Ford had a considerable reputation as a novelist when the two met, having published The Good Soldier (1915), and he was in the process of writing Parade's End (1924-1928), a tetralogy based on his experience on the western front in World War I. Early during his residence in Paris, Hemingway became Ford's assistant editor on the transatlantic review, which soon published several of Hemingway's stories. In spite of his having helped the young author (or perhaps because of his help) Ford had appeared as the rather dense author Braddocks in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway returned to this subject in A Moveable Feast in spite of the fact that Ford had been dead for twenty years when the memoir was begun. Ford appears in the book as a caricature Englishman, a class-obsessed bumbler so full of himself that he has lost touch with the real world. In “Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple” Hemingway relates how Ford instructed him in the ways of British upper-class snobbery, explaining how he defined the term 'gentleman'. He then demonstrated proper gentlemanly behaviour by 'cutting' a man he misidentified as Hilaire Belloc.
Stein, who had played an even greater role in Hemingway's education as a writer, came in for even harsher treatment. Hemingway tells of his first encounters with Stein after he arrived in Paris bearing a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson. “Miss Stein Instructs” features Stein in the role of mentor, in which she appears pompous and opinionated. While Hemingway credits Stein with some valid innovations in the writing of prose, he accuses her of being a lazy writer who disliked revising her work (unlike Hemingway himself). Finally, in “A Strange Enough Ending”, he relates an overheard conversation between Stein and her lover Alice B. Toklas which demeans the writer by depicting her as sexually dominated by Toklas. As with Ford, Hemingway enjoyed the advantage of having outlived his one-time sponsor: Stein had been dead for over ten years when he began to write A Moveable Feast.
Hemingway's greatest foil is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose treatment in the book was the feature that was most hotly discussed at the time of its publication. Fitzgerald was greatly impressed by Hemingway from their first meeting and was responsible for his leaving Boni and Liveright for Scribner's, who would become Hemingway's publishers for the remainder of his life (and well beyond as things turned out). Fitzgerald had also dared to give the younger author advice on his manuscripts, greatly improving The Sun Also Rises when Hemingway followed this advice. But Scott had also given advice on one short story and on A Farewell to Arms with less happy results. He is depicted as an alcoholic who could not hold his liquor, a hypochondriac, and a narcissistic writer who worried altogether too much about his critical reputation.
Hemingway's greatest scorn stems from the fact that Scott allowed his wife Zelda to dominate him. Hemingway and Zelda had a reciprocal hatred for each other almost from their first meeting. In “Hawks Do Not Share” Hemingway accuses Zelda, who had died in 1948, of distracting Scott from his writing by encouraging him to drink and by fostering his sexual jealousy. This latter accusation led to the most infamous chapter in the book, “A Matter of Measurements”, in which Hemingway claimed that Zelda had told Scott that his penis was too small to satisfy her. According to Hemingway's account, he had reassured Scott by taking him to the Louvre to examine the endowments of the statues there.
A Moveable Feast also contains many bright spots as Hemingway relives the first moments of his career. In “A Good Cafe on the Place St.-Michel” he recalls the simple joy of sitting in a warm cafe as he recreated a stormy fall day in northern Michigan, in a story that is almost certainly “The Three-Day Blow”. “Shakepeare and Company” tells of the self-educated writer'sdiscovery of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky and his gratitude to Sylvia Beach, the bookstore's proprietor. In “Hunger was Good Discipline” Hemingway remembers visiting the Luxembourg museum and viewing the paintings of Cezanne, which would influence him in his own description of landscapes. These moments of joy light up what could have been a bitter, negative book.
In spite of the hostile nature of some parts of the book, A Moveable Feast was welcomed by many reviewers when it appeared less than three years after Hemingway's death. Charles Poore, reviewing the book for the New York Times, called A Moveable Feast “Hemingway at his best”. Frank Kermode, writing in the New York Review of Books, called it a moving book that was “in some ways Hemingway's best book since the 1920's.” There was also negative criticism, however. Granville Hicks reviewed the book for Saturday Review, and while he admitted that there was “some first-class Hemingway,” there was “little of the evocative power one finds in The Sun Also Rises.” Several reviewers were disturbed by the attacks on Stein and Fitzgerald, among them pioneer Hemingway expert Philip Young. In Kenyon Review Young complained that “all the jokes in A Moveable Feast are on other people” and suggested that the book was “almost trivial”, mere therapy for an old writer who needed to reassure himself of his own worth.
After the initial reviewers had had their say, however, later critics found that the book rewarded closer study. Two recent critics, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin and Gerry Brenner, have written book-length studies of the memoir, the latter devoting two volumes to the work. Perhaps the most serious questions raised concern the role of Mary Hemingway as literary executor and editor of the late author. The question is just how much editing Mary performed on the text. Examination of the manuscripts suggests that Mary did not follow Hemingway's intentions for ordering the chapters of A Moveable Feast, and the editing involved greater changes than she was willing to acknowledge.
These criticisms aside, A Moveable Feast, the first of a series of posthumous publications, was a welcome addition to the Hemingway canon and was less controversial than later volumes of the author's unfinished works.
Robert E. Fleming, University of New Mexico
First published 20 September 2002
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Chicago Style: Robert E. Fleming, University of New Mexico, "A Moveable Feast" in The Literary Encyclopedia [online database] Profile first published 20/9/2002 [cited 26 Jan. 2006]; available from World Wide Web @ http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7056
MLA Style: Robert E. Fleming, University of New Mexico. "A Moveable Feast." The Literary Encyclopedia. 20 Sep. 2002. The Literary Dictionary Company. 26 January 2006.
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