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IMMORTAL PAPA—AFTER DEATH—A MOVEABLE FEAST AND OTHER WORKS

After Hemingway shot himself some of his most interesting and valuable books came out under his name. I’m being careful here because he didn’t live to decide if he wanted them published, or edited by other hands.

A Moveable Feast is one of Hemingway’s most approachable books. He wrote a final draft of this memoir while he was sick and dying and reconstructing his youth in Paris. It’s a lovely read full of nostalgic detail about what it’s like to be poor, in love, happy, and learning his trade in the cafes of the artistic capital of the world.

This appeal is summed up by Michael Reynolds in The Paris Years, when he describes the young Hemingway, fresh off the boat in winter 1921, sitting at the Dôme café with his wife Hadley:

Less than two blocks from Hemingway’s table, what was left of Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant lay beneath stone memorials in the Montparnasse cemetery. A five-minute walk down Boulevard Raspail, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were planning their Christmas meal. Close by Ezra Pound was reading through a bit of manuscript … Tom Eliot, on his way to a rest cure in Lausanne … Less than two blocks from the Hemingways’ hotel, James Joyce was dressing to attend a party at Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, where he would celebrate the final revisions to his manuscript Ulysses. None of these literary giants knew that Ernest Hemingway was in town, but before the year was out they would know him well. A conjunction of literary influences was about to take place, which would forever change the topography of American literature. And that was before Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald breezed into town …

From the distance of years, the old Hemingway recalls how blessed he was at this moment:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

The detail is marvelously remembered, slipping magically from his present scribbling in the Paris café to an imagined past in the Michigan woods.

Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. A pencil-lead might break off in the conical nose of the pencil sharpener [in the café] and you would use the small blade of the pen knife to clear it or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade and then slip your arm through the sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again, get the other arm through and feel the weight settle on your back and feel the pine needles [in the woods] under your moccasins as you started down for the lake.

Then he spoils it when a “tall fat young man with spectacles”—a fairy!—interrupts his train of thought. Again the gratuitous jab at a stranger’s sex. Sexually perhaps, the old Hemingway hasn’t strayed far from the young homophobe.

Everyone has a right to reinvent his past to be his own hero. Why let facts intrude? Hemingway emphasizes his and Hadley’s poverty living in a squalid room over the sawmill on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs: a lie because they lived on Hadley’s small trust fund. Still, it’s a lovely picture of a wonderful Paris apprenticeship in the midst of a modernist revolution. What’s not so lovely is the payback.

Hemingway always had a neurotic compulsion to punish those who loved him. Gertrude Stein had given young Hemingway invaluable support, affection, and advice on how to more tightly rework his stories. “Remarks,” she sternly advised him as he was wrestling with The Sun Also Rises, “are not literature,” which was like a lightning bolt of clarity for him, whereupon he immediately proceeded to clean up the manuscript. This Jewish lesbian, his literary mother, openly lived with her lover Alice Toklas. Hemingway digs right into her guts by reporting, or inventing, her as trashing male homosexuals while extolling the beauties of womanly sex. In Gertrude’s rue de Fleurus apartment he overhears, or fabulises, a lesbian quarrel. “… I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever. Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.” Nobody denies there was a sadomasochistic element to the Stein-Toklas relationship with Toklas probably dominant. So what’s the news here?

In A Moveable Feast Hemingway goes out of his way to soul-murder his dead friend F. Scott Fitzgerald who had encouraged him, edited his manuscripts, and got his own publisher at Scribner’s to take on the young unknown writer. Hemingway repays Scott by trashing him as soft, vaguely queer, alcoholic (Ernest should talk!), pussy-whipped by his wife Zelda, and ruined by hanging out with the idle rich. should read Motiveless revenge of this magnitude is positively Shakespearean (think Iago). Hemingway blames Scott for being with Zelda who he blames for Scott’s real or imagined sexual problem. He tells Scott that she is castrating him. “Zelda is crazy … [She] just wants to destroy you.” We have seen parts of Hemingway’s harsh version of Zelda in “The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and will see her again as Catherine in The Garden of Eden.

There’s also curious payback, whether against Hadley or Pauline I’m not sure, in Hemingway’s guilt-stricken reference to the split-up with Hadley.

It is the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman [Pauline] becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman [Hadley] who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both.

A Moveable Feast is a marvelous fable, spiteful and untruthful and a beautiful read. The problem with editing a dead man’s manuscript is that you may have your own and not the author’s agenda. The first edition of A Moveable Feast was edited by fourth wife Mary who must not have been too pleased by Ernest calling Hadley the first and best love of his life. A later edition is edited by Patrick’s son Sean, who may have smoothed out any negative references to his grandmother Pauline, Wife #2.

Islands in the Stream also outlived Hemingway. It started as part of a “The Sea” trilogy when bad reviews of Across the River and Into the Trees knocked him down. He came off the canvas and put aside these three sections when a fourth part intruded and then became a best-seller: The Old Man and the Sea. (Yet another limb from this tree grew The Garden of Eden.) Then he died before wrapping up Islands, which Mary and Scribner published several years after his death. Any Hemingway is better than none, but if he’d lived I hope he or his all-too-forgiving editors would have cut by (at least) half.

If they had chopped away at Islands—got rid of all that waffle about six-toed cats, Havana whores, and daiquiris—what’s left would be a slimmer, intensely readable two-part piece featuring the “Bimini” section, about the painter whose successful work routine is interrupted by a visit from his three young sons, and the exciting “At Sea” action where Hemingway-Hudson goes Nazi submarine hunting.

Hudson’s reasons for disliking his youngest son Andrew remain vague in Islands. But we can guess it has to do with Ernest’s stumbling upon young Gregory liking women’s clothes at exactly the point when the author was struggling with his own androgyny-and-gay issues while drafting the amazing The Garden of Eden. Thus, all out of proportion to a father’s disapproval of a child, Thomas Hudson calls Andrew the “meanest” of the three boys, a “beautiful devil.” Even when Andrew is being “good” Hudson suspects the boy of diabolical trickery to hide his evil nature. And the kid is only eight!

In “Bimini,” the first and best section of Stream, Hudson takes the boys out fishing to test their manliness. David-Patrick, the middle son, is assigned the “fighting chair” to snag a swordfish and hooks one that’s “really huge, bigger than any swordfish Thomas Hudson had ever seen.” The grueling struggle between fish and boy goes on for heart-rending hours, but encouraged by his father not to give up, David bravely fights on, his back aflame with pain and his hands rubbed raw and bloody. David loses the fish through no fault of his own, weeps in exhausted disappointment and is cradled in his father’s loving arms.

P.S. Buried in the Islands in the Stream story is a great recipe for cold potato salad and a paragraph about enjoying one of Hemingway’s favorite foods, the onion sandwich.