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| Ms. Hen at the Penn Hemingway Awards, April 2019 |
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway
Scribner
1964
Ms. Hen decided to read this book because she wanted to
research on Ernest Hemingway for a speech she is planning. She wanted to read
something by him that she had never read, and figured this was a good choice.
She often attends the Penn Hemingway Awards at the John F. Kennedy Museum in
the spring because it’s an awards show for writers, like the literary Golden
Globes, plus they have free food and drinks (alcohol), which Ms. Hen knows would
please Mr. Hemingway.
A MOVEABLE FEAST is a memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris
when he was young, and when he was working at learning how to write. When Ms. Hen read the
description of the book, she thought he might be trying to prove how cool he
was, talking about all the famous people he knew when he was living in Paris.
But no, Ms. Hen discovered that Hemingway was not a hipster. He talks about how
poor he was, and how some people wandering around Paris were sketchy. They were
living in dangerous times; life was good for some people, but not others.
Hemingway writes about his friends that he would visit:
Gertrude Stein, an older woman he admired who held court with the younger
writers; Ford Maddox Ford and the shadiness that surrounded him; Ezra Pound who
was kind to everyone. He writes about his friendship with Scott Fitzgerald and
his wife, and how they would both drink, and they couldn’t handle it because it
was poisonous to them. They would go to parties and pass out. His wife Zelda
was crazy, who said outlandish things to Hemingway before they knew she was
insane.
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| Shakespeare and Company, Paris |
Hemingway talks about being hungry and walking all around
Paris and looking in the windows of restaurants and bakeries and not having
enough money to pay. He went to a museum to look at a Cezanne still life with
fruit to satisfy his hunger. He borrowed books from the bookstore Shakespeare
and Company, since he didn't have money to buy them. He and his wife would take
what little money they had and go to the racetrack and bet on horses and win
and use the winnings to survive. He figured out a way to bet on the right horse.
Before the time when the horses were tested for steroids, the horses would be
jumpy and jittery before the race, and he knew they were the ones that would
win. Hemingway felt guilty about going to the racetrack because it took time
away from his work. He didn’t like not writing.
Hemingway had an interesting way of writing. He would write
something, and then for the rest of the day, he would not think about his work
until he was actually writing again. That way his mind was clear when he went
to the page. He would spend time reading, and socializing, and doing other
things, but when he was writing, he just wrote. He didn’t like to be interrupted
when he wrote, and he writes about a time when he was working in a café, and
someone interrupted him. Ms. Hen thinks he would have liked laptops and
headphones and music to drown out the noise in the café, like we have now. His
method of having a clear mind when he went to write is a good lesson in being
productive, which Ms. Hen will learn from. She can’t write every day because
she has a job, and it’s difficult, but she tries to write when she can.
Ms. Hen garnered from this book that Hemingway seemed like a
nice person. He might not have been perfect, but nobody is perfect. He was a
man of his time. He writes about the desire to write one true sentence. Ms. Hen
admires this, and tries do the same. Hemingway was a force of nature, whom
nobody can duplicate.
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| Cafe le Flores, Paris, where Hemingway drank |
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