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"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."
Ernest
Hemingway
A
literary brouhaha erupted recently over a new 'Restored Edition'
of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, just released by
Scribner. The literary memoir was first published
posthumously in 1964, but this new edition has been amended by
Hemingway's grandson Seán, who apparently did not like that the
original manuscript (which he says was tampered with by Hemingway's
fourth wife, Mary), portrayed his grandmother (Hemingway's second
wife, Hadley) in an unflattering manner. Hemingway's friend,
A. E. Hotchner, recently weighed in and takes on the grandson in a
New York Times op-ed, and the title of his piece Don't
Touch 'A Moveable Feast' says
it all (he is, of course, talking about the reworked edition!) and
he avers that Ernest Hemingway was completely involved
with the book even though he died before it was actually
published.
We
picked up the 'original' edition, and had a marvelous time rereading
it. A
Moveable Feast records
Hemingway's years in Paris as a young man. La Ville-Lumière
in the 1920's was glittering fertile ground for writers,
home to The Lost Generation, a group of expatriate
Americans who included Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood
Anderson, and Hemingway. Gertrude Stein held court with her
companion Alice B. Toklas in their art-filled home.
Hemingway recounts it all in a series of beautifully-spare
sketches. In A
Moveable Feast, Hemingway is an
industrious and meticulous writer who repairs to a favorite café, the
Closerie
des Lilas, to write. For
English-language books there was Sylvia
Beach's lending library and bookshop, the legendary Shakespeare
& Co.
Beach, part shopkeeper-part Medici, not only
lent the impoverished Hemingway books before he could afford the
deposit, but also money when the young writer needed it. He
praises her saying, "...no one that I ever knew was nicer to
me." The
author is at his literary best here in this memoir, writing it as
he did later in life: the prose is crystalline and constructed,
surer and somehow less hampered by the famous skittishness about
using adjectives, and even the acid portraits of other writers are
classic Hemingway. eCognoscente says stay with the
original….after all Hemingway ended his 1960 preface to the
memoir by saying:
If the reader prefers, this book may be
regarded as fiction. But there is always a chance that such a book
of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact….
Read:
A
Moveable Feast
Tags:
paris
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