Country: USA
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 211
To me, the lost generation is where American literature started to get really interesting. The exiled writers started looking back on their homeland and their way of life from a distance and great literature was written because of that. Novels like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, started questioning the American dream and the lives of those pursuing it. Great books have been written before, but the unyielding self-consciousness of American writers really started with the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound and the other members of the lost generation. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's chronicle of this simple time where creativity was the rule that everybody lived by.
Hemingway draws a series of short portraits of his friends, through his everyday life. That makes A Moveable Feast a long, yet involuntary portrait of Hemingway himself as the dynamic leader of this small community. He has conversations with Gertrude Stein (who is impossible), teaches Ezra Pound boxing, drinks with Ford Maddox Ford and James Joyce and has this superb, passionate friendship with Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway was clearly not the best talent of them all, but somehow they are all gravitating around him. They are looking for his approval and his friendship. That puts any writing experience in perspective. Hemingway himself had a pool of such talented writers around himself that even a pure talent like him struggled to get his career off the rails.
And struggle he did. The book opens with Hemingway showing a short story to Gertrude Stein, who calls it "inaccrochable". It's a french term. A little hard to translate, but basically she tells him that his story is very good but if it was a painting, she would be ashamed to hang it on the wall. The conversations with Stein are one of the most interesting part of A Moveable Feast. They are a clash in between tradition and change. Stein is that established writer who thinks there are rules and a definite structure to storytelling and Hemingway is that young, dynamic guy who arrives in the portrait with his drunken friends and his crazy ideas of how simple words might just carry emotion better than long and complex sentence structure. If you like Hemingway just a little bit, your esteem of Gertrude Stein will plummet while reading this. Hemingway says it himself that according to Mrs. Stein his main problem is that he's young and he loves his wife.
The Fitzgeralds chapters are the second showstopper of this small, yet dense portrait of artistic life in Paris. Scott and Zelda were terribly in love and yet they poisoned each other's life. Zelda was visibly unwell and kept dragging her sensible husband into her depression. She gave him a hard time about her work and yet I'm sure that helped him write some of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. The man was a walking wreck with the purest writing talent. At least, through the eyes of Hemingway, who was fascinated and sometimes shocked by Fitzgerald's behavior.
A Moveable Feast is a lot about Paris and a lot about what it is, to be a struggling writer. Hemingway's descriptions are often long and detailed about the life in street cafés. If you're not INTO Paris and french culture, you might get rebutted by all the french-o-philia going on. French expressions, lengthy descriptions, it breaks the pace if you're not into it. It broke the pace for me. But it's still a valuable read for anybody who likes the lost generation or is a struggling writer. You can gain amazing perspective on your situation and on your productions, reading about how so many great writers came to know and appreciate each other and to go on to know immense success. But that's just Hemingway. His work is ultimately a monument to the place he occupied among his friend and yet, he gives you such a close and generous look on his inner circle of friends. The best things often come from somewhere inside. A Moveable Feast is fascinating despite being in love with french culture (yeah, I'm not), and I don't think it could have been better without Hemingway's very own point of view.