Longing for A Moveable Feast
The first time I read A Moveable Feast was in March of 2016, when we were thinking of a trip to Europe. I stumbled across the book in the Biographies section of my library and brought it home, because I was fresh from Tobias Wolff’s Old School (which features a fictional visit from Ernest Hemingway to a boys’ school) and the stars seemed to be moving into place slowly. It was a cold, rainy spring day and there were doubts around the timely arrival of the cherry blossoms. The trees were still mostly skeletal and my walk to and from the library was rather grey.
I got home, turned on the dim lamp that does long evenings no favours, and sank into the sofa with my book, while G. swotted away for an exam. And as I read, some of the pictures Hemingway drew came to life in our own American winter-spring.
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife — second class — and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.
This was quite close to our Christmas in DC — the time we understood that the city emptied out for vacations and was no vibrant centre of festivities. Everything was closed and a dull rain fell throughout December, as if America had suddenly remembered its British ties from the past. But Hemingway had immediately drawn me in and I plunged into the book wholeheartedly.
That evening and the next day, I was introduced to Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company…
There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were the shelves and shelves of the richness of the library.
…learnt of the Lost Generation…
Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The patron had said to him, “You are all a génération perdue.” “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.” “Really?” I said. “You are,” she insisted. “You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death. . . .”
…and fell achingly in love with a city I hadn’t seen yet.
With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great plain trees on the stone banks of the river, the elms and sometimes the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
A Moveable Feast truly set the stage for our Paris experience later that year. We saw Hemingway’s house, made two pilgrimages to Shakespeare and Company, picnicked by the Seine, saw a sunset that made people drop everything they were doing to flock to the bridges — and we saw all the light of the city and what it meant to be in love and to have friends there. Hemingway also influenced the rest of our stay in DC, making us see more paintings, beguiling us to the George and Ira Gershwin exhibition at the Library of Congress, and sending us to F Scott Fitzgerald’s resting place at Rockville. I wouldn’t have done any of this if not for Tobias Wolff and the stars were now well and truly aligned.
Now, rereading A Moveable Feast, I realise how much the promise of Europe meant to my first read. There was some anticipation, a sense of knowing that such beauty was within reach, that gave it more colour. This reread, on the other hand, is tinged with longing. I also know what happened to Hemingway and Hadley, which makes it slightly sadder. It is not the unabashed love letter to Paris that I remember.
Hadley and I had become too confident in each other and careless in our confidence and pride. In the mechanics of how this was penetrated I have never tried to apportion the blame, except my own part, and that was clearer all my life. The bulldozing of three people’s hearts to destroy one happiness and build another and the love and the good work and all that came out of it is not part of this book. I wrote it and left it out. It is a complicated, valuable and instructive story. How it all ended, finally, has nothing to do with this either. Any blame in that was mine to take and possess and understand.
Hemingway was by no means a role model. He was as deeply flawed as any of us and held outdated notions of masculinity. He had his prejudices and didn’t shy away from airing them. In this, I continue to be intrigued; I don’t read every scrap about the Lost Generation with the fervour that had seized me then, but with a more mellow kind of attraction that has had four years to take root and grow. Their pain is almost personal: what was it like to fight a war, recover and grow giddy in Paris, struggle with relationships, see more economic hardship, then another war? Yet, their friendships seemed strong and their love boundless.
Even as I finish the last of the Paris sketches in the book, there is a void in my heart that will be a massive gaping hole tomorrow. I will nurse it quietly and sink my sorrows in a bottle of green nail polish with absinthe in its name.
PS. I wrote this post to the accompaniment of George Gershwin’s piece An American in Paris, give it a listen if you please.
