And there, supporting him in that joy, was Hadley, his first wife and mother of his son. He worked harder and harder, and he did it for the joy of it. He tried to write what was important to him. He sat in cafés, day after day, and pared down his paragraphs to nearly nothing at all, trying to make his readers experience what they read, and not just read it. Hemingway writes in one essay after another, no matter what the topic ostensibly is, how hard he was working. There’s a marvelous one about skiing in Switzerland, that reaches right down to the heart of what happens when someone who is in love with his wife falls in love with another woman as well.Īll through these essays run two strains: the visible efforts of a very young man to perfect his writing, and a loving tribute of a man to his beloved wife. There are at least two essays about Gertrude Stein, and a couple of others about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce, T.S. Other essays are about the people he knew in that great city. He and his wife Hadley were grindingly poor, because Hemingway gave up his journalistic career to focus on fiction writing, so quite a few of the essays are about the little tricks of the trade of poverty: how to eat and drink and smoke and buy books and make love in Paris when you’ve got no reassurance that any money is coming in from anywhere. The book is a series of essays about Hemingway’s life as a young expatriate writer in Paris. What was the real risk?Īnd, of course, I surprised myself by enjoying every minute of it, and by revising my opinion of Hemingway as a writer and as a human being. She told me it was the book about Paris, how could I not read the book about expatriate Paris? So when I recently went on a short vacation (with Teresa, I might add!) I picked it up. She told me it was different because it wasn’t a novel.

Somerset Maugham (who does many of the same international settings and love triangles, but in what I think is a far more clever and sophisticated way) and dismissed Papa Hemingway to his legions of fans.īut a friend of mine kept at me and at me to read A Moveable Feast. I found him too macho, too simplistic, and a bit sausage-fingered when it came to what might have been very fine distinctions. Years ago, I read A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, and while I could see the appeal of Hemingway’s terse, stripped-down style and the themes he addresses, I didn’t enjoy his books much. I’ll admit up front that I’ve never been a fan of Ernest Hemingway.

Books like a moveable feast