Hemingway's Paris

“How different it was when you were there.”—Ernest Hemingway

How do I even begin to describe A Moveable Feast? Being an incorrigible Francophile, I have sunk my teeth into countless memoirs about Paris, but none has ever come close to Ernest Hemingway’s. In 1956, the management of the Ritz Hotel in Paris communicated with Hemingway, who had long returned to the United States to retire, to claim two trunks that he had stored there since 1928. Inside the trunks were remnants from his expatriate life in Paris—pages and pages of fiction, books, old clothes, and his Paris memoirs. These long-forgotten friends from the past inspired him to work on what he called “The Paris Sketches,” and when the memoir was finally published posthumously in 1964, the world was in awe. No one had written more beautifully and truthfully about the fabled city before. Hemingway had claimed the city as his. From then on, all books about France will be judged- and often rejected- according to Hemingway’s Paris.

Hemingway once spoke of the City of Lights as a moveable feast. If one is fortunate enough, he says, to have lived in Paris when he was young, then its stays with him wherever he may go for the rest of his life. The city, in short, is magical. What his memoir does, I think, is allow Paris to go beyond its already transcendental nature—no longer does the reader need to experience living in Paris to carry it with him for the rest of his life; all he has to do is bury his nose in Hemingway’s stories about the hours he spent sipping coffee and carafes at the famed Closerie de Lilas, Sylvia Beach’s massive collection of books at the cozy Shakespeare and Company at the rue de l’Odeon, his incredibly odd museum tour with F.Scott Fitzgerald and intellectually-stimulating afternoon teas at Gertrude Stein’s, or his quaint little apartment which he and his wife had filled with pictures they loved, and he is there. The reader finds himself suddenly transported to halfway around the world. The reader finds, too, that the experience has irrevocably changed him. He finds that, like Hemingway, he will be, from then on, forever in love with Paris.

I have been thinking about what makes A Moveable Feast so special for quite a while now. The fact that it was written by literary genius and Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is, of course, a very cogent reason. Aside from the literariness of its writing, however, what makes the book unparalleled and timelessly beautiful is that, it is not simply a book about Paris—it is a book about a well-lived life. The reader takes a moonlit walk with Hemingway and his son or goes on a modest but happy picnic with his family and realizes that that is exactly the kind of life that he wants for himself. Of course, there is more to life than what Hemingway portrayed it to be. It is not all about carafes and happiness: Hemingway’s family later fell apart and, to the world’s utter dismay, he did go on to kill himself in 1961. But isn’t that the point of Paris? To be a city where simple pleasures like a walk on the Place St. Michel or a cup of cappuccino and not problems are the things that matter and are remembered? To be a city, which, like a dream, is suspended in time? Hemingway’s Paris is a place where one goes to forget and dream. And, true enough, every time I’m feeling a bit down, I sit in a corner, lay out the scrumptious feast that is Paris in front of me, and indulge. Everything just floats away. I am in Closerie de Lilas, and Hemingway is just a table away, oblivious to the world, scribbling away.