A Moveable Feast

A Moveable Feast was written by Ernest Hemingway and published posthumously in 1964, three years after his death. The title, A Moveable Feast, is a play on the term used for holy days that do not consistently fall on the same date every year. The memoir’s structure mirrors this concept, featuring 20 separate yet related stories that make up Hemingway’s own collection of inconsistent holy days. The memoir blends fact with fiction as Hemingway recalls his early time spent in Paris as an up-and-coming writer during the 1920s. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s unique perspective on his experience living in Paris; he includes a multitude of diverse stories depicting the ever-changing nature of Paris itself and well-known canonical authors such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Scott Fitzgerald. The nature of this subjective storytelling makes narrator reliability and issues of memory a central issue throughout the text, along with Hemingway’s own coming-of-age story as a man and as a writer. The book is referenced in numerous contemporary films, such as Midnight in Paris and City of Angels. During the November 13th, 2015 attacks in Paris, the book underwent a resurgence and became a bestseller in France. This study guide references the 1979 edition of A Moveable Feast.

Summary

The story begins on a cold, rainy winter day in Paris, where Ernest Hemingway is writing in a café. He decides to leave Paris for a more picturesque winter destination with snow. Upon returning to Paris, Hemingway consults with his fellow writer and mentor Gertrude Stein on his short story Up In Michigan. Stein proves a tough critic, critiquing not only his work as inaccrochable but declaring that his entire generation is lost. Hemingway rejects her condemning labels as restrictive of happiness. Hemingway then writes of a woman named Sylvia Beach, who runs the rental bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. A good-natured woman, Sylvia allows Hemingway to take as many books as he pleases without having to immediately pay. Hemingway describes the shop and Sylvia as, “delightful and charming and welcoming” with “shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library” (16). The wealth of Sylvia’s library is contrasted with the run-down book stalls along the Seine. He discusses the value of a book and how its worth is determined; a woman running a book stall on the Seine equates value to aesthetics over content.

In the next section, Hemingway longs for spring, leading him and his wife, Hadley, to engage in “A False Spring”—the title of Chapter 6. Hemingway’s addiction to horse racing becomes a symbol for the promise of spring, possibilities, and the desire for change and excitement. In this section, themes of hunger come to the forefront. First, Hemingway is existentially hungry; he feels a lack of meaning despite his decadent lifestyle. The hunger follows him everywhere, and he and his wife mistake it for real, physical hunger. He remarks on the fact that “memory is a hunger,” as he remembers an old friend, Chink (26). The topic of hunger transitions to fasting and discipline; Hemingway believes that when one is hungry, their other senses are heightened, allowing them to better understand art and literature. Hunger is equated to a deliberate lack that a writer imposes on a story by omitting certain details. The omitted part strengthens the story insofar as it makes people “feel something more than they understood” (34). After complaining to Sylvia about finances, Hemingway fears he is becoming a martyr and ultimately decides to eat.

Many of the stories in the memoir recall the various characters and writers in Hemingway’s circle of expats in Paris. There’s Ford Madox Ford, whom Hemingway find unpleasant, and Pascin, a painter who adheres to a very hedonistic lifestyle. After Pascin ultimately takes his own life, Hemingway muses how easily a joyful, hedonistic exterior can mask the true nature of a person.

Ezra Pound is a charitable man and a great writer in the eyes of both Hemingway and the Paris community. He creates the charitable program Bel Esprit to help T.S. Eliot leave his job at a London bank to pursue poetry full time. The program is wildly successful, as Eliot is awarded the Dial award for The Waste Land. Eliot’s success juxtaposes Hemingway’s own literary and moral dilemmas; he bets his earnings from the Bel Esprit program at the horse races.

Hemingway recalls the end of his friendship with Gertrude Stein after overhearing a very private and hostile argument between her and her partner. After that moment, Stein was never the same and Hemingway was unable to restore the friendship, becoming cynical to notions of real friendship in general: “I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends anymore in your head is the worst. But it was more complicated than that” (55).

Another character is introduced who shares the same first name as Hemingway, Ernest Walsh. Walsh rises to fame suddenly and is given the role of co-editor at Dial. Hemingway is suspicious of him, and when Walsh promises him an award, Hemingway makes a play on their names, calling out Ernest for not being “Ernest” at all. Hemingway also mentions characters such as Evan Shipman, a kind man who speaks with Hemingway about Dostoevsky, and Ralph Cheever Dunning, an opium-addicted poet who refuses to eat.

In the last major section of the novel, Hemingway describes his relationship with fellow famous writer and Parisian expat F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. When the two men first meet each other during a night of drinking, Fitzgerald suddenly becomes very pale and sick and leaves the gathering. A few days later, Fitzgerald denies feeling ill and invites Hemingway on a trip to Lyon to retrieve a car that he and he wife had left there. Hemingway agrees, but Fitzgerald proves to be difficult company. He arrives late, forcing Hemingway to pay for his own ticket and food. Fitzgerald finally arrives and the two decide to head for Paris. The car does not have a roof, and their journey is waylaid by rain. Fitzgerald fears that he has congestion of the lungs, and they stop at a hotel for the night. Hemingway attempts to calm Fitzgerald, as his symptoms appear to be psychological in nature.

Eventually, Fitzgerald relaxes and reveals to Hemingway that Zelda once loved another man. Hemingway recalls, “Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any one of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did” (81). Hemingway equates Zelda to a hawk, with sharp eyes an ongoing jealousy of her husband’s work. Their tempestuous relationship and her fondness for alcohol are a constant challenge and distraction for Fitzgerald and his attempts to write. Fitzgerald’s story ends when the owner of a bar he frequented does not remember him, depicting his waning fame and relevance as time has passed. Hemingway comments on the importance of writing freely and not changing stories to fit a more profitable formula.

A Moveable Feast ends with the time Hemingway, his wife, and his son, Bumby, spent in Austria. Finding the winter in Paris unbearable with a child to care for, the three head to Austria. They pick up skiing and become good friends with the locals and tourists in the town. Hemingway eventually leaves Austria for New York to work with publishers for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. The completion of his first novel marks the end of his early days as a writer, and consequently, his early days in Paris. He returns to Paris, but both he and the city have changed.