Up Close and Personal with the 1920s “Lost Generation”- Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” – A Short Book Clip

Short Book Clip

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, 1960

This book, published after the death of Ernest Hemingway, but written in 1960 is a little gold mine of insights about the personalities and places that made Paris in the 1920’s the home of the post- World War I “lost generation” (Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age denizens when they travelled abroad). Hemingway notes that these memoirs can be treated as fiction but that one can still gain some insight even through that lens. Certainly the writing is as sparse and well turned as any of his short stories, including the characteristic last sentence or two of each section built to sharply give the point he was trying to get across.

Of course Hemingway was young , newly married and fairly poor in this Paris but apparently his reputation was such that all the great American and British expatriates crossed his path (or he theirs). Literary arbiter and art patron Gertrude Stein (“a rose is a rose is a rose,” okay, along with a cameo by lover Alice B.) gets plenty of space. As does unjustly neglected Ford Maddox Ford, overblown T. S. Eliot (not overthrown until “beat” mad monk sent him howling in that 1950s good night, made monk wordsmith celtic blasphemer James Joyce, mad monk, mad for real Ezra Pound and a smaller group of secondary writers and poets. All worthy of mention in the modern Western literary canon (of that time, if not now, now in some purified politically correct passé deconstructed corners). Hell, I believe that you had to have been in Paris at that time if you wanted to fertilize your work, those who stayed strictly in America suffer somewhat by comparison.

A special note should be taken of the sections dealing with his relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. From Hemingway’s perspective this was a very difficult man but one who he tried to befriend. And of course there, as always, was the Zelda problem. If you want to understand the inner strain of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night read Hemingway’s tidbits. At some level Hemingway was trying to ‘save’ Fitzgerald as a writer but as we know it was not to be. Read his take here and then go out and read other books on, and by, the literary lights of the “lost ‘generation.” Some of it will make more sense then.