Introduction

Years ago, when I read for the first time Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, in my mind’s eye, his story presented itself in lonely vignettes of black and white. Each chapter, or sketch, as he referred to them, represented an older Hemingway trying desperately to write his own truth about his years in Paris with his first wife, Hadley.

I have visited Paris many times over the years to try to discover the city that, more than any other, shaped Hemingway’s writing style. With each trip, I moved closer to seeing Hemingway’s Paris and closer to understanding this complex man and iconic figure.

While walking the avenues, boulevards, gardens and the pathways of Paris, I began to see why this place, above all others, was the perfect setting for Hemingway’s craft to flourish. Being far from family and friends on these personal journeys, I also began to feel a hint of the loneliness and heartbreak Hadley must have felt as her marriage to Hemingway shattered.

Hemingway’s final act in his prolific life was the writing of A Moveable Feast, his memoir. A memoir filled with clarity yet deeply shrouded in despair. This would be the final piece of writing he would work on before taking his life on July 2, 1961. In Feast, Hemingway returned to the city he loved most, Paris. It returned him to the friends and influences who helped form his modernist sensibilities, and it returned him to a time in his life that, more than any other, inspired him to create. It was Paris, too, that returned him to the woman he loved most, Hadley.

Inspiration. Craft. Influence. And love. These were the four aspects, at the end of his life, that Ernest Hemingway felt he had lost for good.

Paris landscape

Jardin du Luxembourg