I’ve reached my 50th year (51st year, for the calendar pedants) without having read Hemingway. I know of Hemingway, I recognised the Hemingway in Woody Allen’s Midnight on Paris, and I know where he fit in the history of English literature. But I’d never read him.
I was wandering through a bookshop recently in need of comfort for my nerves before a virtual blind date. The biography section I find particularly comforting because, as you know, my guilty pleasure in this life is celebrity autobiographies of the Amy Poehler, Rob Lowe, Jennifer Saunders, Diane Keaton ilk.
And then I saw A Moveable Feast. Somehow, I’d had no idea what this was about. I’d thought it was simply another of his novels. Then I saw on the back cover “memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the twenties”. Done deal.
And from the first line I was entranced. Let’s just start with the first line.
“Then there was the bad weather.”
What a way to open. All the writing books and courses repeat, ad nauseum, to start in the middle of the action to really grab the reader’s attention. Well, this starts in the middle of a conversation. Loved it.
Then the descriptions. Leave aside, for the moment, the frisson of recognition I felt. Yes, I’m going to be THAT person and refer to ‘my time in Europe’, but I don’t care if I sound like a wanker. Yes, of course it was an earlier and therefore different Paris to the one I experienced in 2013, but somehow the mythologised ‘Frenchness’ of the city stays the same. It’s essence survives intact, probably helped by the fact that the streetscapes, with the unchanginging Parisian buildings and bridges and rivers and gardens essentially span time.
“It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait.”
And the astonishing thing is that he goes from simple descriptions like these, to something just as simply written but far less easily digestible. A beautiful woman comes into the café, and he watches her while he sharpens his pencil, which is being worn down as he writes.
“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
So often I would have to put the book down after gems like these and think on them for a while.
The simpleness of this paragraph means you don’t see the final line coming. But it’s not gratuitous, it is a perfect end:
“With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smoke-stacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great elms on the stone banks of the river, the plane trees and in some places the poplars. I could never be lonely along the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”
I love also how he gives insights into his writing process.
“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
“… I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything.”
“I had learned … never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
“Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anythign as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.”
Woah, “try to make instead of describe”. Yes.
And this one just because it caught me unawares, like so many other gems swimming in the fragments of polished glass:
“He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dome. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”
And finally:
“… I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.”
Yes. A thousand times yes.
