Lost and Found : A Moveable Feast

Jen Giarusso

My favorite part of A Moveable Feast is still the first line. "Then the bad weather came." Hemingway goes on to describe the rain and cold of Paris in the late fall, the trees abandoning their leaves and the walks he took to procure firewood for the apartment he shared with his young wife and child. It isn't the paragraphs of stripped-down description that is most haunting -- it's the first line. The first word. Then.
 
When I first read A Moveable Feast, I was living in Prague. Though Prague in the oughts lacked some of the romance of Paris the 1920s, I still felt like I could relate. Living as an expatriate, making just enough money to get by. Spending cold evenings tucked in cozy cafes and bars. Navigating the nooks of labyrinthine European streets. Fumbling through a foreign language. (Okay, I think Hem may have spoken French pretty well, but in my defense, Czech is way harder.)
 
I read A Moveable Feast and I wanted to write the same way about Prague. I thought, at the time, that Prague must be MY moveable feast and I wanted to immortalize every conversation, every street, every drink, every person, every detail. If Hemingway could write this book that seemed so simple -- like rambling journal entries stuck together -- then I could, too. But that would have been impossible.
 
Hem wrote this book between the years of 1957 and 1960 and it was edited and published posthumously by his wife, Mary. He pieced it together from notes made during "the first part of Paris" -- reflections on the time before he was successful, when he scrimped on clothes and food to buy pictures and travel, when he palled around with other emerging writers, when he truly began to learn how to write. It has very little in the way of plot -- it describes his friendships, the cafes, the trips out of the city in a roughly chronological order, but in general there is no overarching story.

A Moveable Feast can be read many ways -- as travel literature, a love letter to Paris, as a memoir of a canonical writer, as an instruction manual on how to write. But this time when I read it, I felt it was less about reflecting on experiences as they happen but how the mind reflects on them as memories.  It is an ode to memory. How the mind can put more importance on the remembering of events than the living of them.
 
Hemingway found his Paris notebooks in a forgotten trunk in 1956. In the ensuing years, his health began to deteriorate. My re-reading of A Moveable Feast makes me wonder if, in light of what he may have considered the waning years of his life, he looked at these notebooks anew. Now he could look back and make meaning out of his hunger, his memories.
 
Walking around Paris, Hemingway would carefully avoid the streets where he knew there to be good bakeries and tables outside filled with customers. He would spend afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens and museum, looking at paintings. Hunger consumed his thoughts, but sharpened his senses. "I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted," he writes. "Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way."
 
Hemingway appeared to thrive on the hunger and thought a lot about its source. He and Hadley splurge on a "truly grand" dinner at Michaud's, and Hem writes that "when we had finished and there was no question of hunger anymore the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home."
 
"There are so many sorts of hunger," Hadley says. "Memory is hunger."
 
In many of the vignettes, there are memories within memories. In the chapter "The False Spring," Hem and his wife Hadley spend a day at the racetrack and he recounts an entire conversation where he and his wife talk about a trip to Italy they had taken with a friend years before. "I remember everything we ever did and everything we ever said on the whole trip. I do, really. About everything," Hadley says. They find a kind of happiness in reminiscing about a seemingly random trip scattered among many that they took in their youth.
 
This is a book not about living in Paris but about remembering living in Paris. About how everything before and everything after seemed bookended only in hindsight. So much had come before and so much would come after, and at the time the seasons bled into each other -- the days at the racetrack, the winters in Austria and the summers in Spain -- before his stories began to get published, before he started associating more and more with the upper crust of artistic Paris, before his marriage with Hadley began to fade. And at a time when he was sick, mentally and physically, he felt that after more than 30 years sitting in a trunk in the Ritz Hotel, the day of Paris should be remembered.
 
I think sometimes about how long it will take me to really understand my time in Prague or, for that matter, the other chapters of my life. To figure out what came before, what came after, and where to put the Then.

 

 
Jen Giarrusso graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2006 with a degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing. She spent two years teaching in Prague but still considers Pittsburgh her moveable feast. She can be reached at jengiarrusso@gmail.com.