The newspapers have made us accustomed to confusing him with one of his characters. What is his biography? That of a man of action: journeys, violence, adventures and, at times, between a bout of drunkenness and a safari, literature. He had dedicated himself to literature as he had to boxing or hunting, brilliantly, sporadically: for him the most important thing was to live. Almost as by-products of his eventful life, his short stories and novels owed their realism and authenticity to his life. None of this was true, if anything it was the other way round, and Hemingway himself clears up this confusion and puts things straight in the last book he wrote, A Movable Feast. Who would have believed it? This genial good-natured globetrotter takes stock of his past at the end of his life and among the thousand adventures – wars, women, exploits – that he experienced, he chose, with a certain nostalgic melancholy, the image of a young man fired by an inner passion to write. Everything else, sports, pleasures, even the smallest joys and the daily disappointments and, of course, love and friendship, revolve around this secret fire, stoking it and finding there either condemnation or justification. It is a beautiful book in which he shows simply and casually how a vocation is both privileged and enslaving.
The passion to write is essential, but it is only a starting point. It is useless without that ‘good and severe discipline’ that Hemingway mastered in his youth in Paris, between 1921 and 1926, those years evoked in the book when he ‘was very poor and very happy’. Apparently these were the years of his bohemian existence; he spent the day in the cafés, he went to the races, he drank. In reality, a secret order governed
this ‘movable feast’ and the disorder was really a form of freedom, of being always open. All his actions converged on one point: his work. The bohemian life can, of course, be a useful experience (but no more or less than any other) as long as one is an experienced horseman who will not be thrown by his horse. Through stories, meetings, conversations, Hemingway reveals the rigid laws that he had imposed on himself to avoid shipwreck in the troubled waters through which he was sailing. ‘My training was never to drink after dinner, nor before I wrote nor while I was writing. I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.’ However, at the end of a good day, he treats himself to a glass of kirsch. He cannot always work with the same enthusiasm; at times he feels emptiness, depression, in front of the blank page. Then he would recite in a low voice: ‘Don’t worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is to write a good sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.’ To stimulate himself, he sets out fabulous goals. ‘I will write a story about each thing that I know about.’ And when he finishes a story he always feels empty, sad and happy at the same time, as if he had just made love.
He went to cafés, that’s true, but he used them as his study. On those tables of fake marble on the terraces that overlook the Luxembourg Gardens, he did not go woolgathering or pontificate like the South American bohemians of the rue Cujas: he wrote his first books of stories and corrected the chapters of The Sun Also Rises. And if someone interrupted him, he was thrown out with a volley of insults: the pages where he narrates how he treats an intruder, in La Closerie des Lilas, are a thesaurus of curses. (Years later Lisandro Otero spotted Hemingway one night in a bar in Old Havana. Timidly and respectfully, he went up to greet the author whom he admired and Hemingway, who was writing standing at the counter, despatched him with a punch.) After writing, he says, he needs to read, so as not to stay obsessed by what he is telling. These are difficult times, there is no money to buy books, but Sylvia Beach, the director of Shakespeare and Company, gives him books. As do friends like Gertrude Stein in whose house he also finds beautiful pictures, a friendly atmosphere and delicious cakes.
His desire to learn in order to write is behind all his actions: it determines his tastes, his relationships. And whatever could be seen as an obstacle, like that intruder, is rejected without a second thought.
His vocation is a whirlwind. Let us take the example of horse racing. He befriended jockeys and trainers who give him tips for the races: one lucky day the horses allow him to dine at Chez Michaux, where he spots Joyce talking in Italian to his wife and children. The world of the races, furthermore (and he gives this as his main reason for going racing), provides him with material for his work. But one evening he discovers that this passion is wasting his time, has become almost an end in itself. He immediately suppresses it. The same occurs with journalism from which he earns a living; he gives it up, despite the fact that the North American magazines are still turning down his stories. Although literature is a constant, essential preoccupation of the young Hemingway, it is scarcely mentioned in A Movable Feast. But it is there, all the time, hidden in a thousand forms and the reader can feel it, invisible, sleepless, voracious. When Hemingway goes out to the quays and studies like an entomologist the customs and art of the fishermen of the Seine, during his conversations with Ford Madox Ford, while he is teaching Ezra Pound how to box, when he travels, speaks, eats and even sleeps, there is a spy hidden within him looking at him with cold and practical eyes, selecting and rejecting experiences, storing them. ‘Did you learn something today, Tatie?’, Hemingway’s wife asks him every night when he returns to their apartment in the rue de Cardinal Lemoine.
In the final chapters of A Movable Feast, Hemingway remembers a colleague of his generation: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Famous and a millionaire thanks to his first book, written when he was a very young man, Fitzgerald in Paris is the writer who cannot control the reins. The bohemian steed drags him and Zelda down to the depths of alcohol, masochism and neurosis. These are pages similar to the last episode in Farewell to Arms, in which an icy current flows beneath the clear surface of the prose. Hemingway seems to hold Zelda responsible for the precocious decadence of Fitzgerald; jealous of literature, it was she who pushed him to excess and to this frenetic lifestyle. But others accuse Fitzgerald himself of the madness which led Zelda to an asylum and to death. Whatever the reason, one thing is evident: the bohemian life can only help literature when it is a pretext for writing: if the reverse occurs (as it does frequently), then the bohemian life can kill a writer.
Because literature is a passion and passion is exclusive. It cannot be shared, it demands every sacrifice and gives in to nothing. Hemingway
is in a café and by his side there is a young woman. He thinks ‘You belong to me and Paris belongs to me, but I belong to this notebook and pencil.’ That is exactly what slavery means. The condition of the writer is strange and paradoxical. His privilege is freedom, the right to see, hear and investigate everything. He is authorized to dive into the depths, to climb the peaks: the whole of reality is his. What is the purpose of this privilege? To feed the beast within which enslaves him, which feeds off all his acts, tortures him mercilessly and is only appeased, momentarily, in the act of creation. When the words flow forth. If one has chosen the beast and carries it in one’s guts, there is no alternative, one has to give it everything. When Hemingway went to the bullfights, visited the Republican trenches in Spain, killed elephants or fell over drunk, he was not indulging in adventure or pleasure, but he was a man satisfying the whims of this insatiable, solitary beast. Because for him, as for any other writer, the most important thing was not to live but to write.
Rereading it today, with all that we now know about the Hemingway who wrote it and about his relationships with the figures explored in its pages, A Movable Feast takes on a somewhat different meaning. In fact, the health and optimism that it displays are literary constructs which do not correspond with the dramatic reality of physical and intellectual decline that its author was suffering. He is right at the end of his literary career and he suspects it. He also knows that he would not now recover from the rapid diminution of his physical faculties that he was suffering at the time. None of this is mentioned in the book. But for today’s reader, informed by the biographies of Hemingway that have appeared in recent years, this knowledge offers one of the keys through which, by reading between the lines of this testimony of the literary origins of a great writer that seems at first sight so clear and direct, he can discover the unhappy trauma that underlies it.
Rather than a nostalgic evocation of youth, the book is a magical spell, an unconscious attempt to return, through memory and the word, to the apogee of his life, the moment of his greatest energy and creative force, so as to recuperate that energy and lucidity which was now rapidly draining away. And the book is also a posthumous
revenge, a settling of accounts with former companions in literature and in the bohemian world. A book of pathos, a swan-song – because it was the last book that he wrote – it conceals beneath the deceptive patina of his youthful memories a confession of defeat. The man who began in this way, in the Paris of the mad 1920s, so talented and so happy, so creative and so vital, who in a few months was capable of writing a masterpiece – The Sun Also Rises – at the same time as he drank in all the succulent juices of life – trout fishing and going to the bullfights in Spain, skiing in Austria, betting on the horses in Saint-Cloud, drinking the wines and spirits of La Closerie – is already dead, he is a ghost who is trying to cling on to life through that age-old conjuring trick invented by men to gain an illusory triumph over death: literature.
We now know that the book is full of pettinesses and spite against old friends and ex-friends and that, for example, some of his stories, perhaps the best – about Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald – are false. But these pettinesses do not cheapen what is admirable in the text: the fact that Hemingway was able to turn defects into virtues, to create a beautiful literary work out of loss and the limitations which, from that time on, prevented him from producing any memorable story or novel.
According to Mary, his widow, Hemingway wrote A Movable Feast between autumn 1957 and autumn 1960, with long interruptions in between. This was a moment of continual crisis for him, of nervous depression, of deep bitterness which rarely showed in his public appearances where he kept up the impression of being the happy and adventurous giant that he had always been, full of appetites and light. (That’s how he seemed to me, in the summer of 1959 in the Plaza de Toros in Madrid, the one time that I saw him, at a distance, on the arm of another living myth of the age: Ava Gardner.)
In reality he was a wounded colossus, semi-impotent, incapable of the mental concentration of undertaking an important work, terrified by his loss of memory, a deficiency which for a man who plays at being a deicide – the novelist, who reinvents reality – is quite simply fatal. Yes, how can one invent a coherent fictional world in which the whole and the parts are vigorously linked in order to simulate the real world, the whole of life, if the memory of the creator is fading and the spell of the fiction is broken at every moment by incongruities and
mistakes in the tale? Hemingway’s answer to the question was this book: writing a fiction under the guise of memory, whose disconnected and fragmentary nature is concealed by the unity imposed on it by a narrator who remembers and writes the work.
Memory in A Movable Feast is a literary device to justify the vagaries of a memory which can no longer concentrate on the concrete or undertake the rigorous structure of a fiction, but which jumps, disorganized and free, from image to image, without any harmony or continuity. In a novel, this atomization would have been chaotic; in a book of memories it offers, instead, an impressionistic meandering through certain faces and places afloat in the river of time, unlike the innumerable other people who have been swallowed up by forgetfulness. Each chapter is a short story in disguise, a snapshot organized with the virtues of his best fictions: the terse prose, the taut dialogues which always suggest more than (and sometimes the opposite of) what they are saying and the descriptions whose stubborn objectivity seem to beg us to forgive them their perfection.
But alongside the real history, in each of these elegant snapshots there are more distortions than reliable testimonies. But what does that matter? It does not make them any the less persuasive or exciting for a lover of literature, that is, someone who expects a novelist to write books which are capable of telling him not necessarily the Truth, in capital letters, but rather his own particular truth, and in a way that is so convincing and clever that there is no alternative but to believe him. And in this final autobiographical fiction, Hemingway achieved this magnificently.
Furthermore, although he was not identical to the figure that he sketches in this portrait of his youth, some essential characteristics of his personality do appear in his book. His anti-intellectualism, for example. It is a pose that he always cultivated and which, above all in the final years, he took to extreme lengths. In this book also, authentic – not bookish – literature is presented as a physical skill, something that the consummate sportsman, the writer, perfects and controls through discipline and steadfastness, a healthy life and healthy body. The very idea that art or literature might in some way imply a retreat into the purely mental, a withdrawal from everyday life, a bathing in the wellsprings of the unknown or a challenge to the rational order of existence is energetically rejected and ridiculed. For that reason the sketch that the book offers of Ezra Pound, although lively and generous, does
not even skim the surface of Pound’s contradictory nature. And yet it is clear that Hemingway was not completely incapable of perceiving below or between the interstices of these permissible rituals of life, which sufficed for him, that other life, the life of the depths, of prohibition, of misconduct. It was a world that he feared and that he always refused to explore except in its most superficial manifestations (such as the cruel and fascinating ceremony of the bullfight). But he knew that it existed and could identify those damned souls who inhabited it, like Wyndham Lewis, who is badly treated in these pages. He inspired the best and the most disconcerting sentence in the book. ‘Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.’
Another of his prejudices is also to be found in abundant measure: the machismo which, together with his passion for killing animals and the spell that violent sports held over him, constitute a morality and a code of life which is very different from our own, which is concerned with feminism and its truths, the conservation of nature and the struggle for freedom of sexual minorities. The conversation with Gertrude Stein, in which she tries to gain Hemingway’s sympathy for lesbianism, with arguments that would today make a schoolgirl smile, and his reticence and replies are instructive in this respect. They show how far customs have evolved and how old-fashioned are many of the values that Hemingway extolled in his novels.
But, despite these anachronisms, this short book gives immense pleasure. The magic of his style, its Flaubertian insidious simplicity and precision, the passion for the elements and for physical prowess, the vivid recreation of the Paris of expatriate Americans in the period between the two world wars and an affirmation of the writer that the book symbolizes – a resolute affirmation of a vocation at a time when he could scarcely still write – blend to give a unique status to what would become his literary testimony. Although it contains as many additions and modifications to life as a novel, it remains an important autobiographical document and, with all the liberties that it takes with objective facts, it offers an incomparable picture of the times and the happy insouciance with which France stimulated art and excess, while, inside and outside its frontiers, its subsequent ruin was being brought about. But, above all, its pages, which are as clear and sonorous as a mountain stream, enable us to draw close, with the immediacy of successful fiction, to the secrets
of art which allowed Hemingway to transmute the life he lived and the life that he only dreamed of, into this shared feast that is literature.
London, 23 June 1987