***From The Pen Of Ernest Hemingway- The Moveable Feast

 

Up Close and Personal with the Lost Generation

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’. 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). Gertrude Stein (and Alice) gets 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 that you had to be 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 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 to 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 here and then go out and read other books on the ‘lost ‘generation. Some of it will make more sense then.