Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

As I read this text I thought, it’s reflection, memoir, it’ll gloss the rough edges of life. I could not have been more wrong. If anything Hemingway magnifies human imperfections (all but his own of course). In my mind I attributed the odd homosexuality conversation with Gertrude Stein as Hemingway putting his words in her mouth—it didn’t strike me as sincere (I am openly a lesbian, but will slam homosexuals; it just doesn’t ring true). It struck me as more Hemingway than Stein—and it was recalling a conversation years and years after the fact. Memory is so selective, so I brushed it off and moved on to Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Walsh.

The more I read the more uncomfortable I got. Ok, he paints a wonderful portrait of Paris, but at what cost? He annihilates each person in turn. Each chapter more painful than the last—I struggled with how I would—could—write about this text. I arrived at the Scott Fitzgerald section tense and anxious. I finished it wondering if Ernest Hemingway ever liked anyone in his life—did he even like himself? I have my doubts. So he was not unkind in his writing about Beach or Pound, but he didn’t exactly paint them as wonderful human beings either. I read them as marginalia to his reality.

I have tried to balance his profound negativity with his sensory—sensuous portrait of Paris. I tried to find a point to it all. And I cannot do it. Did he harbor deep resentments towards all of these people? How then did he enjoy his time in Paris? And if he didn’t have resentment towards these people—he becomes unreliable as a narrator (which, of course, he is; people with trust funds and cooks can hardly call themselves poor). How valid is his description of Paris? For someone who has not been there, I think the city’s allure might be lost in Hemingway’s castigating, condescending attitude towards the people he encountered there. For people who have been to Paris he reawakens our own memories more than he creates the atmosphere of the city.

I considered, most especially in the Fitzgerald section that he had deliberately waited for Fitzgerald to be dead to write such a tract. I was so dismayed by the passage about Zelda being Scott’s only lover that the final pages of the book are a blur. I read that section more than once thinking—he can’t be saying what I think he is—but he was. I was left desperately wanting a shower.