A movable book

Published in 1964 after Ernest Hemingway's death, A Moveable Feast is itself something of a movable feast. Just as Easter, a movable feast, skips around on the calendar from one year to the next, so this book doesn't stay put. The copy I purchased at Hemingway House in Key West a few years ago is called "the restored edition," supposedly put back the way Hemingway wanted it, except that Hemingway died before deciding what it should contain, or even if it was worth publishing at all.

The title, though a good one, wasn't his idea. Among the titles Hemingway had considered were The Part Nobody Knows, To Hope and Write Well (The Paris Stories), To Love and Write Well, To Write It True, How It Began and How Different It Was When You Were There. The restored edition includes 19 chapters, plus 10 other Paris "sketches," many of which had clearly been omitted previously for good reason.

In this book, even the truth is something of a movable feast. Although generally regarded as a memoir of his experiences in Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway himself called it fiction, and often it reads like his fiction. When he quotes other people, they all talk like characters in his novels.

Various people have had a hand in shaping A Moveable Feast over the years. His last wife, Mary, put the original book together, which may have been a challenge since much of it is about his first wife, Hadley. Later Hemingway's sons had input into its contents. A son (Patrick) writes the foreword for this edition, and a grandson (Sean) writes the introduction.

Hemingway may be at his best in these essays (or stories or sketches or whatever they are) when speaking about writers and writing. Best of all are his pieces on F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially one about the two of them going by train to Lyon to pick up a car and drive it back to Paris. It is a comic tale, fueled by Fitzgerald's hypochondria, his inability to hold his liquor and the fact that the car lacks a top and it rains frequently on the drive home. Elsewhere Fitzgerald is portrayed as a sadder figure because of his drinking, his difficulty in writing and Zelda's (his wife) jealousy whenever he attempts to write rather than spend time drinking with her.

Comments about Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound are also fine, as is his short piece on Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris (not the same one that exists today along the Seine). At one point Hemingway refers to Pound as a saint, interesting because the poet later moved to Italy and supported the fascists.

There is much to like in A Moveable Feast, as well as much that will make one wonder why it was ever included.