If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.I usually regret rereads – so much has changed within myself over the years that I rarely respond well to the books that loom large in my memory; better to leave them affixed to the tastes of the person I was before – but to accompany a recent short trip to Paris – a city I visited once, briefly, over thirty years ago – I couldn't resist bringing along my old copy of A Moveable Feast. And, ah, this book, this city, it has all stayed with me over the years; rereading the pages, retreading the cobblestoned streets, is truly a feast. A feast.
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, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.Yes, okay, the weather in December was cold and wintery, but Hemingway anticipated that; gave me the words; promised spring. The parks, the cafes, the food; it's all here. Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald; they're all here, too. To have been a part of the Lost Generation, to have struggled to invent a new way of writing, while poor and hungry and being financially responsible for a wife and child, Hemingway captures it all from his perspective decades later (even if he doesn't quite promise that this is all the true gen. Who knows if Fitzgerald actually asked Hemingway to evaluate the size of his penis, but the anecdote certainly illustrates what we've come to accept about Scott and Zelda's toxic relationship.)
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.A Moveable Feast is a love story: an elegy to a city, to a confident young artist, and to the woman who believed in him. While many of the stories in this book are funny or snarky, everything about Hadley, the first Mrs. Hemingway, is tinged with melancholy and remorse for what's to come.
When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.No, I don't often do rereads, but I don't regret this one – I had remembered so much of it, and I think I grew into it over the years. I have a shelf full of the Hemingway I read twenty-some years ago, and I just may be ready to re-experience his world once again; to rejoin the feast.
And this is me with my copy of A Moveable Feast outside Shakespeare and Company: sadly, not the same location where Hemingway borrowed books from Sylvia Beach, but the spirit of the Lost Generation lives on.
