Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is a collection of vignettes of his time in Paris between 1921 and 1926. It tells the story of a young man of the “lost generation” of modernist writers and artists living and working in the interwar period. It brings us face to face with the literary giants like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as famous places like bookstore Shakespeare and Company and its proprietor Sylvia Beach, all of whom influenced Hemingway’s development as a writer.
Paris seemed bleak when the winter rains came, and the small shops selling newspapers or herbs closed their doors. Hemingway lived in the hotel where French poet Paul Verlaine died, and it got cold in his apartment, which was somewhere between six and eight stories up, when the rains began. Hemingway often walked around the city, down the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain, past the Cluny Museum, and found a café on the Place St.-Michel where he would write. When the rains dissipated and the weather turned cold and clear, Paris became a different, more energized city. The bare trees in the Luxembourg Garden looked like sculptures. Even the stairs up to his apartment in the hotel didn’t feel so bothersome.
Hemingway usually wrote in his apartment, and he didn’t stop until he knew where his story was going, so he had something to write about the next day. However, occasionally he’d have writer’s block in trying to start something new, so he’d sit at the fire and just try to write one “true sentence.” Often, this took the form of a simple declarative statement that could begin a story. After writing a “true sentence,” he didn’t have any trouble continuing a story from there.
He also learned to stop thinking about writing after he’d quit for the day. This way, he could really listen to people and things around him for material he could use in his stories the next day. He felt good walking around Paris after a successful writing session.
Hemingway walked around the Luxembourg Gardens and viewed Impressionist works at the Musée du Luxembourg. Afterward, he sometimes visited novelist and poet Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus, where she lived with a female companion. Stein was large but not particularly tall and had nice eyes as well as a German/Jewish face. Hemingway and his wife Hadley, whom he married in 1921, often visited the two women together, and they visited Hemingway’s place in turn.
Stein told Hemingway that she liked his stories, but while his writing was new and unique, he wasn’t good enough yet to be published in any big newspapers or magazines. Also, their sexual content made his stories unpublishable. Hemingway responded that he was trying to authentically reflect the way people talked, which Stein said was pointless if he couldn’t sell his work. Stein also contended Hemingway was part of a “lost generation”—those who had fought in the war and were now drinking themselves to death. This made Hemingway think about Stein’s own shortcomings on his walk home, and he wondered whether he was part of a lost generation or whether she was lost herself. He realized that all generations were lost in their own way—each affected by different things while growing up.
Hemingway was too poor to buy books, so he rented them from Sylvia Beach at the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Even though Hemingway didn't have much money when he first visited Shakespeare and Company, Beach said he could rent books and pay when he was able. She also invited him and Hadley to dinner.
Hemingway went home with many books and told Hadley about his agreement with Beach. She said he was lucky to have found Shakespeare and Company and asked whether he could rent some Henry James books for her. Happy with the arrangement, they began to dream about a better, more stable life in Paris.
On clear winter days, many people walked along the banks of the Seine, which cuts through the middle of Paris. Hemingway walked to the Ile St.-Louis in the middle of the Seine, and then to the Ile de la Cité next to the Ile St.-Louis. At the bookstores in this neighborhood, he sometimes found just-published American books that were inexpensive. A proprietor explained that books in English were often bound cheaply, while French books were better made. Since the proprietors often didn’t speak English, they assumed all of the English books were cheap, and they often just threw them away.
Hemingway often walked to the edge of the Ile de la Cité and watched fishermen use long poles to catch fish. Open-air restaurants fried the fish whole, and they were delicious. When they had money, Hemingway and Hadley ate fish at La Pêche Miraculeuse (the miraculous peach).
With spring’s arrival, all problems evaporated. Hemingway wrote in the early morning before the shops opened. A goatherd came down the street and a woman walked outside and purchased goat’s milk. Hemingway never had much money, but he and Hadley didn’t think of themselves as poor—rather, they considered themselves intellectually superior and didn’t trust the rich. They were still able to eat and drink well, but cheaply, in Paris. Often, Hemingway and Hadley went to the races. They had some successes betting on horses, but they were still poor, and Hemingway was often hungry. However, he believed this cleared his mind and allowed him to focus on his writing.
Sometimes, Hemingway wrote so intently that he’d feel himself inside the scene he was creating. Then, someone would find him at whatever café he was writing in and interrupt the trance. Hemingway often got angry, cursing at whoever happened to recognize him and say hello.
Hemingway honed his craft amid an ex-pat community that included many modernist writers with whom he was friends, including Ezra Pound. Pound and his wife Dorothy had a studio on Notre-Dame-des-Champs where they displayed art from Pound’s friends. While Hemingway didn’t like the art, he admired Pound for supporting his friends’ work. One day, Pound asked Hemingway to teach him to box, and Hemingway tried his best, as English writer Wyndham Lewis looked on. Afterward, they had a drink; to Hemingway, Lewis looked like a nasty man with eyes of an “unsuccessful rapist.”
Pound, though, was extremely kind and helpful. He had friends in all kinds of art-related fields, whom he tried to help along. He was particularly concerned that since the poet T.S. Eliot was working at a bank, he didn’t have enough time to write.
Pound had a charitable initiative, which he called Bel Esprit, that aimed to raise enough money for Eliot to become a full-time writer. Natalie Barney, a rich American, became the patron. Hemingway was also enthusiastic about the plan and helped to find money. After Eliot published The Waste Land, he became better known and was able to give up his bank job, thanks to the Bel Esprit campaign and to the fact that he found his own patrons.
Hemingway met poet Ernest Walsh at Ezra Pound’s studio. Intense and very Irish, Walsh arrived at the studio with two American women he’d met on a ship returning from the U.S. The women were boasting about how much Walsh was paid for his poetry. Hemingway noticed that Walsh looked visibly ill, or “marked for death” (doomed like a character in a movie).
Walsh took Hemingway out to a very expensive lunch, where they discussed a rumored $1,000 prize to be given by The Dial, a literary magazine that Walsh helped edit. After they had a few drinks, Walsh said Hemingway was going to receive the prize. The more Walsh talked, though, the more convinced Hemingway became that he was being conned. Their conversation drifted from the talents of James Joyce to Hemingway himself. In discussing Joyce’s poor eyesight, Hemingway noted that everyone had some sort of health problem. Walsh responded that Hemingway didn’t seem to have any health issues. Rather than being “marked for death,” Walsh said, Hemingway appeared to be “marked for life.”
Walsh became increasingly sick; eventually, he had hemorrhages and had to leave Paris. Before leaving, he asked Hemingway to take charge of The Dial’s printing in Paris, which Hemingway did happily. He had enjoyed Walsh’s company and respected Walsh’s co-editor despite feeling conned.
Years later, Hemingway was discussing Walsh with James Joyce, who asked if Walsh had promised Hemingway the award. Hemingway said yes, and Joyce said Walsh had promised it to him as well. Hemingway told Joyce about the women in Pound’s studio bragging about Walsh’s money, which Joyce found amusing.
Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald in a cafe. Fitzgerald was accompanied by Dunc Chaplin, who was a pitcher for the Princeton Baseball Team. Fitzgerald had a boyish face with wavy hair and a high forehead. His eyes were friendly and his mouth looked like a woman’s. Fitzgerald praised Hemingway’s work to Chaplin.
As they drank, Fitzgerald began asking Hemingway questions about his personal life, like whether he had sex with his wife before they were married. Hemingway said he didn’t remember, but Fitzgerald continued to press him. Suddenly, Fitzgerald’s face started to tighten, and he looked very ill. Hemingway was alarmed and said they should get him to a doctor, but Chaplin said Fitzgerald always looked this way when he drank. The next time Hemingway saw him, Fitzgerald acted as though everything were normal and alcohol didn’t affect him strangely, although he appeared to be remembering a different night than the one he had spent with Hemingway.
Fitzgerald discussed the faults of his earlier books with Hemingway—his insistence that they were no good led Hemingway to believe that his latest book, The Great Gatsby, was very good. Fitzgerald said the book wasn’t selling, but he had heard that there were good reviews. He was happy with the book but upset that it wasn’t selling well. To make his stories commercially viable, Fitzgerald often revised them. Hemingway was horrified by this and called it whoring. He wanted Fitzgerald to simply focus on writing the best stories that he could.
Soon after, Fitzgerald asked Hemingway to accompany him to Lyon to pick up a car he’d left there. On this trip, Hemingway realized that Fitzgerald couldn’t handle his liquor. When they returned, Hemingway and Hadley went to lunch with Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, and it was clear to Hemingway that their relationship was destructive. Zelda and Scott argued about drinking—Zelda was hungover and was annoyed that Scott was abstaining from alcohol to focus on his writing. She was outwardly pleasant but seemed bothered at the lunch, which was not very tasty. But heir daughter was cute and spoke in a cockney English accent because she had a nanny who did so.
Hemingway realized that Zelda was jealous of Scott’s writing—she tried to get him to drink so he couldn’t write; he tried to abstain so that he could. Scott was also jealous of Zelda, especially her past relationships and the parties that she went to. They both got drunk so often that Scott sometimes barely wrote at all.
Fitzgerald blamed Paris for his struggles to write and wanted Hemingway and Hadley to go out to the Riviera with them in the summer, as he thought this could fix his writing funk. Fitzgerald was still frustrated that Gatsby wasn’t selling well, so he concentrated on writing marketable stories, while Hemingway tried to persuade him to write more novels like Gatsby. Fitzgerald remained mostly cheerful though, and even when he wasn’t, he could poke some fun at himself.
Over the summer, Hemingway traveled to Spain with Hadley, and he started a novel there. (Shortform note: The novel was The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926.)
When he returned to Paris, he found that Fitzgerald had gone with his family to Cap d’Antibes on the Riviera (a peninsula in the South of France near Nice) and had only become more of a drunk. Fitzgerald stopped caring that he wasn’t working and started getting drunk during the day. He occasionally was sober and writing, but when he was drunk, he found Hemingway and tried to get him to stop his own writing. However, Fitzgerald remained an intensely loyal friend when he was sober.
While Hemingway was working in Austria, Fitzgerald invited Hemingway and Hadley to stay with them in the Pyrenees, where Fitzgerald promised there wouldn’t be too much drinking and they could all write. Hemingway agreed and actually found it to be a nice place to write. Fitzgerald and Zelda both looked healthy—he had some money coming in, and they didn’t drink too heavily.
Nonetheless, Fitzgerald didn’t write anything good again until he learned from doctors that Zelda was mentally ill. (Shortform note: Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia in April of 1930 and institutionalized.)
Hemingway eventually moved from Paris to Austria in the winters because he and Hadley had a child who couldn’t take the cold. On one of these visits, he met a woman, Pauline Pfeiffer, with whom he began an affair. He went to New York to deal with publishing The Sun Also Rises, then returned to Paris and stayed with her. When he went back to Hadley in Schruns, he thought he still loved only her, but when they returned to Paris, he started the affair again.
For Hemingway, Paris was an important anchor—it changed while he changed, but it was and would always be Paris. He believed it lived in different forms in the memories of people who spent time there. A Moveable Feast reflects Hemingway’s memories of Paris when he was young, poor, and happy.
Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is a collection of vignettes about his time in Paris between 1921 and 1926. During those years, Hemingway took copious notes about his life. He forgot about them until 1956, when he learned he’d left them in a trunk in the basement of the Hôtel Ritz in Paris in 1930. Upon rediscovering the notes on his years in Paris, he set about writing what would become A Moveable Feast.
Hemingway worked on the memoir until 1960. He died in 1961, and it was published posthumously by his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, in 1964.
Born in Illinois in 1899, Hemingway enlisted at age 18 as an ambulance driver in the U.S. Army and served on the Italian front in World War I. After returning, he married his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and they moved to Paris in 1921, where Hemingway served as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.
A Moveable Feast tells the story of a young man of the post-World War I “Lost Generation” and his encounters with literary giants like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as famous places like bookstore Shakespeare and Company and its proprietor Sylvia Beach. Many of these writers served as mentors and friends, and Hemingway used many of their techniques in his work, which is famously sparse, simple, and direct.
Hemingway left Paris after meeting his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, and was a prolific writer for most of the rest of his life, while living in Key West, Florida, Cuba, and Idaho.
This summary follows the structure of the book, which is largely chronological, and combines some of his short vignettes into larger sections.
Hemingway begins his memoir by describing how the rainy late fall and clear winter weather affected the mood and street life of Paris in the 1920s. The end of fall brought rain and cool weather to Paris. Residents shut the windows, wet leaves covered the ground, and the small shops selling newspapers or herbs closed their doors. Paris seemed bleak, and the Café des Amateurs on rue Mouffetard grew crowded. Patrons kept their distance from foul-smelling drunks while conversing with one another.
Hemingway lived in the hotel where French poet Paul Verlaine died, and in the winter, it got cold in his apartment, which was somewhere between six and eight stories up. He would walk around the city, down the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain, past the Cluny Museum, and find a café on the Place St.-Michel where he would write.
One day at the cafe, as Hemingway was writing a story about Michigan and thinking about how the cold and clear weather in Paris was similar to winter in the Midwest, an attractive woman entered. Hemingway knew that he needed to finish his work, so he buried himself in the story and in rum St. James. By the time he finished the story, the woman had left, and Hemingway felt sad for a moment. His mood improved, though, as he began to think about getting away from Paris for a little while and writing in the countryside with his wife Hadley.
When Hemingway got home and suggested a trip, Hadley wanted to leave right away. They set off in the hope that when they came back, it would be clear in the city.
American expat writer Gertrude Stein gave Hemingway advice on his early work. In the next sections, he describes his visits to her apartment and their discussions about writing, the period between the World Wars, and their contemporaries.
When they returned to Paris, it was cold and clear, as Hemingway had hoped. With the rains gone, Paris was a different, more energized city. He found some cheap, good wood that heated the apartment capably. The bare trees in the Luxembourg Garden on winter days looked like sculptures. Even the stairs up to his apartment in the hotel didn’t feel so bothersome.
Hemingway usually wrote in his apartment, and he didn’t stop writing until he knew where his story was going, to make sure he had something to write about the next day. However, occasionally he’d have writer’s block in trying to start something new, so he’d sit at the fire and just try to write one “true sentence.” Often, this took the form of a simple declarative statement that could begin a story. After writing a “true sentence,” he didn’t have any trouble continuing a story from there.
He also learned to stop thinking about writing after he’d quit for the day. This way, he could really listen to people and things around him for material he could use in his stories the next day. He felt good walking around Paris after a successful writing session.
Hemingway walked around the Luxembourg Gardens and viewed Impressionist works at the Musée du Luxembourg. Afterward, he sometimes visited novelist and poet Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus, where she lived with a companion (Alice B. Toklas). Stein was large but not particularly tall and had nice eyes as well as a German/Jewish face. Hemingway and Hadley often visited the two women together, and the women visited Hemingway’s place in turn.
Stein told Hemingway that she liked his stories, but while his writing was new and unique, he wasn’t good enough yet to be published in any big newspapers or magazines. Also, their sexual content made his stories unpublishable. Hemingway responded that he was trying to authentically reflect the way people talked, which Stein said was pointless if he couldn’t sell his work.
She also urged Hemingway and Hadley to spend their money on paintings by their contemporaries instead of on clothing. Stein liked to write every day, but she derived satisfaction only if her work was published and recognized. She didn’t like to revise and didn’t like to make her writing more readable for a larger audience, as publishers sometimes asked her to do.
Stein also discussed her views of sex and homosexuality. Hemingway acknowledged prejudices against gay people from his childhood days in Kansas City and Chicago, where drifters sometimes preyed on boys. Stein responded that the drifters were criminals and perverts.. However, she expressed prejudices as well, contending that gay male sex was ugly, and men felt ashamed afterward and abused drugs or drink to forget. In contrast, she said women weren’t disgusted by their gay sex acts and lived pleasant lives together.
Stein and Hemingway also discussed books as well as the “Lost Generation,” a term she coined for the modernist writers and artists of the interwar period.
Hemingway often visited Stein after returning from assignments for newspapers and wire services, to update her on anything funny that happened to him on these trips. When he wasn’t updating her on his travels, he sometimes dropped in to talk about books—he liked to read so that he wasn’t thinking about his own writing all the time.
Hemingway was reading D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but Stein didn’t care for either of these writers, calling them boring, dead, and preposterous. She suggested he read the work of Marie Belloc Lowndes instead. There were only two writers whom Stein admired, who hadn’t admired her as well: Ronald Firbank and F. Scott Fitzgerald. If you brought up James Joyce with her more than once, you wouldn’t be invited to her flat again.
Stein also contended Hemingway was part of a lost generation—those who had fought in the war and were now drinking themselves to death. This made Hemingway think about Stein’s own shortcomings on his walk home, and he wondered whether he was part of a lost generation or whether she was lost herself. He realized that all generations were lost in their own way—affected by different things while growing up.
For Hemingway, a perk of living in Paris in the 1920s was easy access to books. One bookstore was especially important.
Hemingway was too poor to buy books, so he rented them from Sylvia Beach at the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Even though Hemingway didn't have much money when he first visited Shakespeare and Company, Beach said he could rent books and pay when he was able. Beach also invited him and Hadley to dinner.
Hemingway went home with many books and told Hadley about his agreement with Beach. She said he was lucky to have found Shakespeare and Company and asked whether he could rent some Henry James books for her. Happy with the arrangement, they began to dream about a better, more stable life in Paris.
On clear winter days, many people walked along the banks of the Seine, which cuts through the middle of Paris. Hemingway walked to the Ile St.-Louis, in the middle of the Seine, and then to the Ile de la Cité next to the Ile St.-Louis. At the bookstores in this neighborhood, he sometimes found just-published American books that were inexpensive. A proprietor explained that books in English were often bound cheaply, while the French books were better made. Since the proprietors often didn’t speak English, they assumed all of the English books were cheap and often just threw them away.
Hemingway often walked to the edge of the Ile de la Cité then and watched fishermen use long poles to catch fish. Open air restaurants fried the fish whole, which made them delicious. When they had money, Hemingway and Hadley ate fish at a special place called La Pêche Miraculeuse (the miraculous peach).
Hemingway got to know many of the fishermen, and on nice days he brought wine, sausage, bread, and his book to the river and watched the fishermen fish. Hemingway didn’t fish himself because he couldn’t predict when he would be done writing, and he preferred to save his money to fish in Spain. He always felt at home and was never lonely on the banks of the Seine. The heavy rains in the winter were the only really sad times in Paris. Hemingway knew the spring would come, but it was always a welcome surprise when it did.
In the spring, all problems evaporated. Hemingway wrote in the early mornings before the shops opened. A goatherd often came down the street, and a woman came outside to buy goat’s milk. Hemingway never had much money, but he and Hadley didn’t think of themselves as poor—rather, they considered themselves intellectually superior and didn’t trust the rich. They were still able to eat and drink well, but cheaply, in Paris.
When they had money from Hemingway’s assignments for Toronto newspapers, he decided to go to the horse races after finishing work for the day. He and Hadley took the train out of Gare du Nord to the track, which was old and beautiful.
A friend gave Hemingway the names of two horses to bet on. Both horses won, which put money in their pockets, and it seemed a perfect spring day. Afterward, they went to Michaud’s, an expensive restaurant where James Joyce sometimes ate with his family. They had a wonderful meal, but Hemingway felt sad afterward and couldn’t discern why. He decided it was probably because the simplicity of the morning—deciding to go to the races while the goatherd made his rounds—was gone.
Hemingway and Hadley went to the track many more times, and they both loved it because they could win some money, although the pastime was demanding. If you put in enough time watching the horses, you could understand that some horses were much more likely to win than their odds suggested. Hemingway eventually stopped going to the track because it was taking up too much of his time—without it, he felt a bit empty, but he put his winnings in the bank and felt better.
Hemingway’s friend, Mike Ward, argued that if you have to bet on an activity to enjoy it, it’s not really all that enjoyable. Ward preferred bike racing, which he watched without betting, and Hemingway began to enjoy it as well—there were all kinds of bike races: sprints, longer programs, sprints in a series of heats, duels, one person against a clock, and so on.
Although Hemingway could live cheaply in Paris, there were times when being poor meant going hungry. In this section, he describes how hunger affected his moods and his work.
Not having enough money at times to eat was made more difficult in Paris by all of the bakeries selling delicious-smelling goods that people ate on the sidewalk. On an empty stomach, Hemingway walked to the Luxembourg museum, smelling treats the whole way, and looked at Cézanne’s paintings. He believed that on an empty stomach, his mind was clearer, and he could understand the motivations of the artists better. He felt that Cézanne himself probably had a sort of hunger when he painted, which he channeled into his work, as Hemingway channeled his hunger into writing.
After leaving the museum, Hemingway walked toward the Seine and Shakespeare and Company, taking a route that didn’t pass too many shops that sold food. By the time he reached Shakespeare and Company, all of the books looked different because his perceptions were heightened due to the lack of food. Sylvia Beach commented that he was thin and didn’t eat enough; he didn’t want to acknowledge not having money for food, so he said he was headed home for lunch.
Hemingway also complained to Beach about his trouble finding work since he’d stopped doing journalism. She brushed it off, but after he left the bookstore, he was frustrated with himself for complaining about his money problems. Beach, who was receiving mail at the store for Hemingway, had a letter with some money for him from a publisher in Germany, so he had a big lunch on the way home. At lunch, he thought about his recent publishing successes and failures in America.
Hemingway had gotten a short story called “My Old Man” published by Edward O’Brien in a book called Best Short Stories. It was one of only two stories he had left at the time, because all of his manuscripts had been stolen. While Hemingway was in Switzerland, Hadley had packed up his manuscripts to bring to him so that he could show them to an editor there. She briefly left the trunk unattended in the railway station, and when she came back to collect it, it was gone. Hadley had cried a lot when she told Hemingway the manuscripts had been stolen, and he had difficulty writing after that.
When he began to write again, he wrote “Out of Season,” a story that had a suggested, but not explicit, ending in which the main character hanged himself. Hemingway thought this sort of omission strengthened his stories—they became more like paintings, where you have to interpret the meaning and you get better at doing so the more art you see.
Hemingway knew that he eventually had to write a novel, but the idea was daunting when even writing short stories was difficult. He thought of it like running a marathon—he would have to train for it by writing shorter stories and build up eventually to the length of a novel. He had written one novel before, but it was stolen along with the rest of his work—and when he wrote it, he was younger and more carefree about his writing.
As Hemingway finished his lunch and started walking home, he began thinking about what he knew about best that he could write about. He decided to begin work on a story clearly about returning from war. The trick was, the story wouldn’t mention war.
Although he traveled in much the same circles as the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, Hemingway found him unpleasant. In this chapter, he describes an odd encounter with Ford.
Hemingway’s favorite café near his apartment in Paris was the Closerie des Lilas. He liked it because it didn’t attract patrons wishing to be seen—most people kept to themselves and were, Hemingway thought, academics. There weren’t many poets there.
As Hemingway sat in the cafe one day, Ford Madox Ford, the English novelist, joined him. Hemingway didn’t like Ford and tried to avoid him at social events, but Ford had stopped at his table to insist that Hemingway and his wife come to a club with him on the weekend. While they talked, a thin man walked by and Ford gave him a nasty look. He then reported to Hemingway that the man was Hilarie Belloc, a British/French writer. Hemingway didn’t understand why Ford had been rude to Belloc, as Hemingway would have liked to meet him.
Ford described Belloc as a cad and himself as a gentleman. Hemingway asked him if Ezra Pound, a mutual acquaintance, was a gentleman, and Ford said no because Pound was an American. Very few Americans were gentlemen, according to Ford. Henry James was almost a gentleman, and Hemingway was not a gentleman, but not a cad either.
After Ford left, a friend of Hemingway’s sat down, and the thin man passed by again. Hemingway reported to his friend that the man was Hilaire Belloc, to which his friend replied that the man wasn’t Belloc but Aleister Crowley, an English mystic and occultist nicknamed “the wickedest man in the world.”
Hemingway describes getting into a debate at his favorite cafe with a man who interrupts his work. They trade barbs, with Hemingway suggesting the man become a critic (implying he isn’t good enough to be an original writer).
Hemingway sometimes wrote so intently that he’d feel himself inside the scene he was creating. Then, someone would find him at whatever café he was writing in and interrupt the trance. Hemingway often got angry, cursing at whoever happened to recognize him and say hello.
On one occasion at the Closerie des Lilas, he got especially frustrated because he didn’t like having to leave his favorite place. When a man persisted in talking to him, seeking writing advice, Hemingway didn’t answer but simply continued to write. The man rambled on about his writing difficulties. Finally, after finishing his writing for the day, Hemingway began talking with the man, who accused him of being arrogant and cruel by ignoring him. Hemingway told him that since he found original writing so difficult, he should pursue criticism (writing art reviews). The man didn’t get the implied insult and thanked Hemingway, but he remarked as a parting shot that Hemingway’s prose was too spare (thus proving he was already a critic).
Hemingway and Hadley had a son in 1932, and Hemingway had to work hard to support both of them. One evening, he felt especially proud of himself because he’d worked all day even though he’d rather have gone to the track. When he stopped at a bakery after work, the proprietor, Mr. Lavigne commented that he’d seen Hemingway working at the Closerie des Lilas but didn’t interrupt because he seemed so focused.
Hemingway then walked to the Dôme Café, where he joined Jules Pascin, the painter, who was sitting with two women who were models. Pascin was very drunk and asked Hemingway whether he wanted to have sex with one of the models (the two were sisters). The four of them drank and joked together for a while, and the model whom Pascin had offered to Hemingway posed in ways that showed off her figure. She invited Hemingway to have dinner with them, but he extricated himself and went home to his wife.
Although Pascin later hanged himself, Hemingway remembered him as jovial, the way he was that night at the Dôme.
Poet and modernist thinker Ezra Pound was one of Hemingway’s closest friends during his time in Paris. They discussed their work extensively.
Pound and his wife Dorothy had a studio on Notre-Dame-des-Champs where they displayed art from Pound’s friends. While Hemingway didn’t like the art, he admired Pound for supporting his friends’ work. One day, Pound asked Hemingway to teach him to box, and Hemingway tried his best, as English writer Wyndham Lewis looked on. Afterward, they had a drink; to Hemingway, Lewis looked like a nasty man with eyes of an “unsuccessful rapist.”
Pound, though, was extremely kind and helpful. He had friends in the arts who he tried to help. He was particularly concerned that since the poet T.S. Eliot was working at a bank, he didn’t have enough time to write.
Pound had a charitable initiative, which he called Bel Esprit, that aimed to raise enough money for Eliot to become a full-time writer. Natalie Barney, a rich American, became the patron. Hemingway was also enthusiastic about the plan and helped to find money. After Eliot published The Waste Land, he became better known and could give up his bank job, thanks to the Bel Esprit campaign and to the fact that he found his own patrons.
Hemingway and Stein were such close friends for much of his time in Paris that she invited him to drop in anytime without notice and just leave a note with her maid if she wasn’t home. He helped her prepare and proof her manuscripts, although he didn’t believe men could remain close friends with “great women” for long, especially ambitious women writers. He and Stein eventually did have a falling out, although not because of strong personalities. One day, he dropped in and, while waiting to see her, overheard Stein having an intimate argument with her partner, which greatly embarrassed him. He left immediately, telling the maid he had to see a sick friend. Although they continued to communicate, and Hemingway tried to be civil, their relationship was never the same after that. He reflected that everyone had a falling out with Stein at some point because she eventually argued with them.
Hemingway met poet Ernest Walsh at Ezra Pound’s studio. Intense and very Irish, Walsh arrived at the studio with two American women he’d met on a ship returning from the U.S. The women were boasting about how much Walsh was paid for his poetry. Hemingway noticed that Walsh looked visibly ill, or “marked for death” (doomed like a character in a movie).
Walsh took Hemingway out to a very expensive lunch, where they discussed a rumored $1,000 prize to be given by The Dial, a literary magazine that Walsh helped edit. After a few drinks, Walsh announced that Hemingway was going to receive the prize. The more Walsh talked, though, the more convinced Hemingway became that he was being conned.
Their conversation drifted from the talents of James Joyce to Hemingway himself. In discussing Joyce’s poor eyesight, Hemingway noted that everyone had some sort of health problem. Walsh responded that Hemingway didn’t seem to have any health issues. Rather than being “marked for death,” Walsh said, Hemingway appeared to be “marked for life.”
As time went on, Walsh became increasingly ill; eventually, he had hemorrhages and had to leave Paris. Before leaving, he asked Hemingway to take charge of The Dial’s printing in Paris, which Hemingway did happily. He had enjoyed Walsh’s company and respected Walsh’s co-editor despite feeling conned.
Years later, Hemingway discussed Walsh with James Joyce, who asked if he had promised Hemingway the award. Hemingway said yes, and Joyce said Walsh had promised it to him as well. Hemingway told Joyce about the women in Pound’s studio bragging about Walsh’s money, which Joyce found amusing.
Thanks to his access to books at Shakespeare and Company, Hemingway was a voracious reader—enjoying to various extents the work of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Stephen Crane, Stendhal on Waterloo, and many more. Having the time to read in Paris was vital to Hemingway, and no matter how poor he was, he always felt happy to be able to read so much and take books on trips.
Hemingway also appreciated discussing books with other writers—for example, the poet Evan Shipman. One day after playing tennis with Pound, Hemingway checked in at home and learned that Shipman had stopped by and was now waiting for him at a nearby cafe. He had a big whisky with Shipman, and they talked about Dostoevsky—namely, about how he could be a terrible writer but also evoke such intense feelings. Shipman called Dostoevsky a “shit” and said that he wrote best about “shits and saints.” Also, he said reading Dostoevsky made you angry.
At the cafe where they talked, Shipman knew a particular waiter well; the man was concerned about maintaining his job under new ownership. Shipman often visited the waiter’s house outside of Paris, where they worked together in the garden. Shipman was a generous friend.
The poet Ralph Cheever Dunning was a wild character who had a drug problem, but Pound admired his poetry because he wrote without caring whether it was publishable, and Pound enlisted Hemingway to help take care of him.
One day, Pound sent Hemingway a message requesting that he come and see Dunning because he was dying. Dunning had taken opium and stopped eating, but although he looked horrible, Hemingway determined that he wasn’t dying. They eventually took Dunning to a clinic where he could detox, and Pound solicited the help of poetry lovers to pay the bills.
Meanwhile, Pound entrusted Hemingway with a jar of opium in case Dunning needed it in an emergency. At one point Dunning climbed onto the roof of the place he was staying and wouldn’t come down, so Hemingway gave the opium to the concierge, but Dunning came down without it. Hemingway then went to Dunning’s door and handed it to him in person, but Dunning angrily threw it back at him and started throwing milk bottles at him as well. He wasn’t interested in the opium.
Years later, Hemingway wondered what had become of Dunning, but Shipman told him that Dunning’s fate should remain a mystery. Shipman believed that the world needed unambitious writers like Dunning who honed their craft without caring whether they were published or acclaimed.
Hemingway spends much of the book describing his encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist’s problems with alcohol, and his writing—Hemingway considered The Great Gatsby to be great literature.
Hemingway first met Scott Fitzgerald in a cafe. Fitzgerald was accompanied by Dunc Chaplin, who was a pitcher for the Princeton Baseball Team. Fitzgerald had a boyish face with wavy hair and a high forehead. His eyes were friendly and his mouth looked like a woman’s. Fitzgerald praised Hemingway’s work to Chaplin.
As they drank, Fitzgerald began asking Hemingway questions about his personal life, like whether he had sex with his wife before they were married. Hemingway said he didn’t remember, but Fitzgerald continued to press him. At this point, Fitzgerald’s face started to tighten, and he suddenly looked very ill. Hemingway was alarmed and said they should get him to a doctor, but Chaplin said Fitzgerald always looked this way when he drank. The next time Hemingway saw him, Fitzgerald acted as though everything were normal, and alcohol didn’t affect him strangely, although he appeared to be remembering a different night than the one he had spent with Hemingway.
Another time, Fitzgerald discussed the faults of his earlier books with Hemingway—his insistence that they were no good led Hemingway to believe that his latest book, The Great Gatsby, was very good. Fitzgerald said the book wasn’t selling, but he had heard that there were good reviews. He was happy with the book, but upset that it wasn’t selling well. When it came to writing stories, Fitzgerald often revised them to make them commercially viable. Hemingway was horrified by this, and he called it whoring. He wanted Fitzgerald to simply focus on writing the best stories that he could.
As their friendship developed, Fitzgerald asked Hemingway to go with him to Lyon to pick up his car, which his wife Zelda had left there during a bad rainstorm. They intended to go down by train, but Fitzgerald missed the train, forcing Hemingway to go alone and wire him from Lyon. Hemingway was frustrated to be spending his money, but at this point, he was in better financial shape than usual, as he was selling a book of short stories and getting paid regularly for his work. Nevertheless, he was saving up to go to Spain with Hadley.
Hemingway learned that Fitzgerald had left for Lyon, but couldn’t find him, even after calling the hotels. So he wandered around Lyon and met a fire-eater with whom he had dinner at a cheap place that served Algerian food. The fire-eater told Hemingway that he could find him wild and debaucherous stories to write, but it was getting late, so Hemingway paid for the meal and left to check on Fitzgerald.
He still couldn’t find him, so he went to bed. In the morning, Fitzgerald managed to track him down, apologizing for missing the train and noting that Zelda wasn't well. They had breakfast together. Fitzgerald looked as though he’d been drinking, but told Hemingway he didn’t drink in the morning. Nonetheless, they both had a drink and felt better.
When they retrieved the car, Hemingway noticed it didn’t have a top. Fitzgerald explained that Zelda hated tops on cars and had it removed. But as they drove back to Paris, they kept getting waylaid by rain. Fitzgerald began worrying about getting “congestion of the lungs,” which he knew people died of. Hemingway told him this was just pneumonia by a different name, but Fitzgerald insisted that it was different and only found in Europe.
When they reached a small town late that evening and booked a hotel room, Fitzgerald told Hemingway he feared getting sick and dying only because he didn’t know who would take care of Zelda and his son if he died. Hemingway was having enough trouble looking after his own wife and son, but he told Fitzgerald he’d try to help out if necessary. Fitzgerald became increasingly paranoid that he had pneumonia, even though Hemingway assured him that he was fine.
Most alcoholics did die of pneumonia at that time, but at this point, Fitzgerald wasn’t so much a drunk as he was strangely affected by alcohol. Hemingway sent out for a thermometer, but the pharmacy was closed, and Fitzgerald grew increasingly incensed, blaming the waiter on duty and complaining about the French, whom he hated.
The waiter managed to find a thermometer that went under the arm, so Hemingway attended to Fitzgerald, taking his pulse, which was normal, and his temperature, which was also normal. While Fitzgerald went downstairs to call Zelda, Hemingway worried about how Fitzgerald would react to an actual illness if he did catch a cold.
They had a few drinks, and Fitzgerald began to talk about how he’d met Zelda and about their long courtship. Hemingway found Zelda’s affairs with other men during the courtship sad because of their effect on Fitzgerald. At their dinner, Fitzgerald passed out at the table—but without making too much of a show of it—and Hemingway and the waiter got Fitzgerald back up to the room.
The day had made it clear to Hemingway that Fitzgerald really shouldn’t be drinking, and that Hemingway wasn’t doing a good job of caring for him.
The next day, though, Fitzgerald was cheerful, and they made their way back to Paris. At meals, Hemingway tried to set an example of moderation by ordering only very light wine, explaining to Fitzgerald that he couldn’t drink anymore because he was getting ready to write.
When Hemingway got back to Paris, he was incredibly happy to see his wife and excited to go to Spain with her—Hemingway decided he didn’t want to go on any more trips with anyone he didn’t love. However, once he read The Great Gatsby, Hemingway was so impressed with Fitzgerald’s talent that he vowed to continue being Fitzgerald’s friend and trying to help him so Fitzgerald could keep writing.
When Hemingway met Zelda back in Paris, he saw how much of a negative influence she was on Fitzgerald, and realized the odds were very long against Fitzgerald continuing to produce great literature.
Fitzgerald invited Hemingway and Hadley to have lunch with him and Zelda at their flat. The place was dark and depressing, and it didn’t look at all personalized, aside from some books and a ledger that Fitzgerald showed them listing all of his published stories and the amounts he’d been paid for them.
Zelda and Fitzgerald argued about drinking—Zelda was hungover, and she was annoyed that Fitzgerald had abstained from alcohol in order to focus on his writing. She was outwardly pleasant, but under the surface didn’t seem altogether happy at the lunch, which was not very tasty. But their daughter was cute and spoke in a cockney English accent because she had a nanny who did so.
Hemingway soon realized that Zelda was jealous of Scott’s writing—she tried to get him to drink so he couldn’t write; he tried to abstain so that he could. Scott was also jealous of Zelda, especially of her past relationships and the parties she went to. They both got drunk so often that Scott sometimes barely wrote at all.
Fitzgerald blamed Paris for his struggles to write and wanted Hemingway and Hadley to go out to the Riviera with them in the summer, as he thought this could fix his writing funk. Fitzgerald was still frustrated that Gatsby wasn’t selling well, so he concentrated on writing marketable stories, while Hemingway tried to persuade him to write more novels like Gatsby. At this point though, Fitzgerald remained mostly cheerful, and even when he wasn’t, he could poke some fun at himself.
Over the summer, Hemingway followed through on his plan to go to Spain with Hadley, and he started a novel there. (Shortform note: The novel was The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926.)
When he returned to Paris, he found that Fitzgerald had gone with his family to Cap d’Antibes on the Riviera (a peninsula in the South of France near Nice) and had begun drinking heavily again. Fitzgerald stopped caring that he wasn’t working and started getting drunk during the day. He occasionally was sober and writing, but when he was drunk, he found Hemingway and tried to get him to stop his own writing. However, Fitzgerald remained an intensely loyal friend when sober.
While Hemingway was working in Austria, Fitzgerald invited Hemingway and Hadley to stay with them in the Pyrenees, where Fitzgerald promised there wouldn’t be too much drinking and they could all write. Hemingway agreed and found it to be a pleasant place to write. Fitzgerald and Zelda both looked healthy—he had some money coming in, and they didn’t drink too heavily.
Nonetheless, Fitzgerald didn’t write anything good again until he learned from doctors that Zelda was mentally ill. (Shortform note: Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia in April of 1930 and institutionalized.)
This section begins with a conversation between Hemingway and Fitzgerald at a restaurant, and it concludes by jumping ahead in time to Hemingway’s reminiscences about Fitzgerald after his death, when Hemingway had returned to visit Paris after World War II.
One day over lunch at a restaurant, Fitzgerald revealed that something was bothering him—he was worried about his “measurements,” or the size of his penis. Zelda had told him that his “measurements” couldn’t please a woman. Hemingway took a look in the restaurant bathroom and reassured him that he was fine. Further, he saidt they should go to the Louvre and look at the statues so Fitzgerald could see that he was normal in comparison. When Fitzgerald remained doubtful, Hemingway commented that Zelda was trying to destroy him and was insane. Fitzgerald snapped back that Hemingway didn’t know Zelda, and Hemingway dropped the subject.
Many years later, the head chef at the Ritz Bar, Georges, asked Hemingway to tell him about Fitzgerald, who had recently died. Patrons asked Georges about Fitzgerald often, as they knew that Fitzgerald had frequented the bar, but Georges didn’t remember him. While talking to Georges, Hemingway realized that, along with Fitzgerald, most of the people he had known while he was a young man in Paris were dead. They were literary giants, and so Hemingway promised Georges that he would write about his time in Paris and describe Fitzgerald as he remembered him.
In the closing chapters, A Moveable Feast returns to the theme of cold, rainy winters in Paris, from which Hemingway and his family take refuge in Austria. Hemingway alludes to the affair he began there that led to the breakup of his marriage to Hadley. Paris’s cold winters were too hard on the Hemingways’ child Bumby, so for several years, they spent winters in Schruns, Austria, at a hotel called the Taube. The meals were good, the rooms were nice, and there were trails, huts, and mountains nearby. The people were friendly, and Hadley and Hemingway went alpine skiing while Bumby had a sitter. They usually stayed there between Thanksgiving and Easter, and they enjoyed having big meals, drinking, and reading. There, Hemingway revised The Sun Also Rises.
In Schruns, Hemingway began to sport a beard, and the locals took to calling him “the Black Christ” due to his intense facial hair. During one of the later winters they spent in Schruns, avalanches began endangering the skiers. Hemingway learned to heed the avalanche warnings. However, some tourists were not so concerned—a huge avalanche killed a group of German tourists who had insisted on going out to ski in dangerous conditions. Even with the avalanches, though, the place was beautiful, and they loved being outdoors.
The next winter, the rich began to arrive, and things changed. Hemingway was naive about the rich in Schruns at first, and he partied with them, and read aloud parts of his novel, which they praised.
(Shortform note: While in Schruns, Hemingway met and fell in love with American journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, who was among the rich tourists and who would become his second wife in 1927 after he divorced Hadley. Hemingway is vague about this timeline in A Moveable Feast.)
Hemingway returned to New York to arrange a publisher for the novel, and when he came back to Paris, he saw Pfeiffer there. Instead of going straight back to his wife and child in Schruns, he stayed in Paris for a while with Pfeiffer. When Hemingway finally returned to Schruns to see Hadley, he felt ashamed and decided he loved only her and his child. When they returned to Paris, though, he began his affair with Pfeiffer again, which led eventually to his leaving Paris for good with Pfeiffer.
For Hemingway, Paris was always an important anchor—it changed while he changed, but it was and would always be Paris. He found that whatever he put into Paris, it gave back to him. Hemingway had put all of himself into living in Paris, and he had incredible years there, learning to write. He never lived in a large city again. But he believed Paris lived in different forms in the memories of people who spent time there, and it evoked powerful feelings. A Moveable Feast reflects Hemingway’s memories of Paris when he was young, poor, and happy.
Try to think about an important place in your own life in the same way Hemingway thought about Paris.
If you are older than 25, remember where you spent your early 20s. If you are younger than 25, think about your childhood. If you were writing a memoir, what places would you be sure to include? Why?
What events would you need to include to paint a detailed picture of this period of time in your life? Why would you need to include them?