A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway — The Writer in a Household
Reading Note: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
This reading note discusses the memoir in full.
After the writer Gertrude Stein calls Hemingway’s generation lost, he walks through Paris testing the phrase against what he knows of the war. At home he finds his wife, their son and the boy’s cat beside a fire. He tells Hadley that Stein is kind, though she sometimes talks nonsense. Hadley answers that she does not hear Stein: as a wife, she spends the visits with Stein’s companion. Hemingway ends the chapter on her reply. After his reflections on a whole generation, we discover how differently husband and wife have experienced the same room.
A Moveable Feast offers an absorbing encounter with the young Hemingway through cafés, borrowed books, fellow writers and rules for his work. Hadley, his first wife, and their son, Bumby, draw us into the life around that work. The maxims of the workroom become more interesting beside the arrangements that make the work possible. Keeping a household and making a writer share the same money, hours and attention, though those resources do not feel the same to everyone using them.
The café has a way home
A cold workroom could cost him money before he has written a word. In the first chapter, twigs, split pine and damp hardwood accumulate in his calculation, all liable to be wasted if the chimney will not draw. He walks on to a warm café and begins a story set in Michigan. Now the cold, blowing day is something he can use: it enters the story. A woman at another table attracts him, and he wishes he could put her in it too.
His private declaration assigns both her and Paris to himself, then assigns him to his notebook and pencil. That last turn complicates the pleasure of possession: the man claiming everything has also described what commands him. When the story is finished, he calculates whether he and Hadley can afford a journey. The rain becomes local weather once he can imagine leaving it. The decision still waits on Hadley. At home, she wants to leave at once.
To begin with “one true sentence” is practical advice Hemingway gives himself in the workroom when a story will not begin. The same chapter does not let the advice settle into a complete account of writing. Cézanne’s paintings make simple true sentences seem insufficient for the dimensions he wants; he is learning from them, though he cannot yet explain what he has learned.
In “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” he brings us through Paris along a route that avoids food shops. Hunger, he explains, sharpens perception; at the lending library, Sylvia Beach wants to know what he ate for lunch. He is going home to eat, he says. “At three o’clock?” After money arrives for his work, he rebukes his own martyrdom and heads for Lipp’s. We have followed his route around food; now we linger over potatoes, mustard, bread and cold beer.
Hadley hears a different kind of hunger
When he proposes a day at the races in “A False Spring,” Hadley hesitates over the expense. Her unfinished objection is followed by his admission that satisfaction from work has made poverty easier for him to bear than for her. He remembers her unmet needs before they set out. The correction enters through something she almost says.
At the track, their second horse barely holds its lead. We wait with the couple to learn what the win will pay, but the passing horse interrupts the calculation: wet, breathing hard, with the jockey patting him. Hadley pities him and remarks that they only had to bet. Only then does the price appear. Hemingway has put the animal’s labor between the result and the reward, giving her remark a place his arithmetic must pass through.
We hear more of what Hadley misses on another day later that year, after another successful outing. Walking through Paris, then pausing on a bridge, the couple recall a mountain trip with their friend Chink. Hadley remembers being included in their arguments about writing; her pleasure in having a voice there gives substance to the complaint about being a wife at Stein’s. By the restaurant window, she says, “Memory is hunger.” Hemingway sees food and thinks of the day’s winnings; she has been speaking of other kinds of luck.
After dinner, there is no bodily hunger left to explain away the feeling from the bridge. Yet the prose returns to it on the bus, in their room, after lovemaking, on waking. The repeated “it was there” carries it beyond each possible satisfaction. He lies awake unable to think it out.
Elsewhere, her practical objections give their happiness an equally distinct rhythm. When Sylvia Beach lends him books before he pays the deposit, Hadley insists that they settle it that afternoon.
Their imagined walk expands into drinks and a meal out until she reminds him of the library debt. Dinner moves home; reading, lovemaking and promises of lasting fidelity enter the plan. We hear them building an evening together, with each reply adding a pleasure or correcting an expense. The older narrator’s recollection that he failed to knock on wood allows later knowledge into a conversation whose speakers are still making plans.
Bumby changes the working day
It takes pages for Hemingway to finish with an unwanted café visitor in “Birth of a New School.” To avoid another encounter, he stays home the next morning. A single sentence carries him from boiling the nipples and bottles through making formula and feeding Bumby to writing at the dining table, before the rest of the household is awake. Here the preparation for work includes the child; the visitor had kept preventing work from happening. Bumby and F. Puss are quiet company, and he reports working better than ever.
Bumby is too young to answer his father’s account, and we receive his calmness and the cat’s vigilance through Hemingway’s delight in them. His needs nevertheless change the course of the final chapter. Cafés can shelter the working writer from a Paris winter; Hadley can practice piano in sweaters and return to nurse their son. Once Hemingway considers what the city offers the baby, these arrangements no longer suffice, and the family goes to Schruns in Austria. There Bumby has a nurse, a sleigh and a friendship with Schnautz, the dog who accompanies his outings. Hemingway has just remembered the dog accompanying them when he names Schruns as a good place to work, recalling the difficult revision of The Sun Also Rises.
The cost of a successful trip
The last chapter eventually exchanges this particularity for sweeping claims about the wealthy people drawn to a happy, productive couple. Attractive qualities accumulate until the visitors become a destructive species. A young woman’s involvement with Hadley and Hemingway enters an account of how such arrangements work. He includes his own vanity and susceptibility, but the explanation leaves us little room to encounter the others outside his judgment.
His responsibility becomes more exact when he remembers returning from New York. He should have taken the first train from Paris to Hadley in Austria; he missed the first, the second and the third because the other woman was in Paris. The repeated opportunities make the delay voluntary. We no longer need his general account of the rich to understand the choice.
Hadley’s welcome at the station follows this admission. She praises his successful trip while he notices the sunlight on her face and Bumby’s winter cheeks. We have already been told what delayed him. Her pleasure reaches us through that knowledge, while her words remain the words of someone glad to see him. For a time, he tells us, they are happy together again; the affair resumes after they return to Paris.
My affection for the memoir lies especially in its treatment of Hadley and Bumby, whose needs and pleasures make the writer’s daily arrangements worth following. Overall, the prose strikes me as good rather than extraordinary, and the short stories remain Hemingway’s strongest work for me. His account of omitting the fatal ending of “Out of Season” is illuminating about his practice; the memoir’s report of that decision cannot supply the experience of reading the story.
Green Hills of Africa is good nonfiction too. Its opening kudu pursuit makes an engine’s noise consequential, and the approaching rains give lost hunting time a cost; literary conversation and reflection occupy the book as well.
In A Moveable Feast, the practical life around the work remains more revealing than the broad explanation of how happiness was destroyed. Hadley’s welcome lets a successful publishing trip and a failure toward the family occupy the same moment. We can hear both because the earlier pages have made us familiar with the life to which he is returning.
Sources
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964 Scribner arrangement. Passages discussed: “A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel,” “Miss Stein Instructs,” “Une Génération Perdue,” “Shakespeare and Company,” “A False Spring,” “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” “Birth of a New School,” and “There Is Never Any End to Paris.”
Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, 1936 Jonathan Cape edition; Part I, opening kudu pursuit.
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