Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great American writer, Ernest Hemingway.
BOOK REVIEW
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, Vintage-New Edition, New York, 2000
This book, published after the death by suicide of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, 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". Hemingway notes that these memoirs can be treated as fiction but that one can still gain some insight even through approached 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 structured to sharply give the point he was trying to get across in the story.
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). Gertrude Stein (and Alice B.) get a nod. As does Ford Maddox Ford, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and a smaller group of secondary writers and poets. Hell, I believe after this exposition that you had to have been in Paris at that time if you wanted to fertilize your work.
A special note should be taken of the sections dealing with his relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. From Hemingway's perspective Fitzgerald was a very difficult man but one whom 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 that was not to be. Read here and then go out and read other books on the "lost generation". Some of it will make more sense then.
