Hemingway\'s a Moveable Feast Provides Remarkable Insight

Hemingway's A Moveable Feast provides remarkable insight into the life and times of one of the world's great modern authors. However, what makes A Moveable Feast timeless is that it captures an era. In the posthumously released memoirs, Hemingway writes about one of the glory days of Parisian life. The bohemian ambiance is palpable, told in Hemingway's characteristically subdued and deceptively simple prose. Paris was a hotbed of creative energy during the 1920s. Readers already know that from terse encounters with film, literature, and art history. Hemingway brings Paris in the 1920s to life. The author recreates scenes, conversations, and situations that deliver the reader right there into the street life, bars, parties, and bedrooms of the people that Hemingway encounters.

The title of the memoirs derives from one line in Hemingway's writing, that Paris is itself a "moveable feast." Hemingway uses this deft metaphor to capture the multisensory experience of living in Paris during its heyday. Paris was a feast for the senses, including the intellect and the heart. Moreover, that sumptuous feast for the soul is "moveable" through both space and time. Hemingway and his fellow expatriates are also living a rather transient, "moveable" existence. Their creative self-expression also becomes a "moveable" form of art that transcends time.

Woven into the memoirs are also tales of tragic romance. Hemingway's writing is usually laden with issues related to gender and sexuality and A Moveable Feast is certainly no exception. With candor, Hemingway explores his feelings toward the women he has loved and resented throughout his life. The author left his first wife for another woman, an act he came to regret. Admitting as much takes a lot of courage, and also reflects the sexual liberation and modern attitudes towards heterosexual intimacy that flourished in Paris during the early 20th century. Hemingway comes across as an ironic misogynist. He lives during a time where women in European cultures broke free of the bonds of patriarchy. Yet Hemingway himself is confined to rigid ways of viewing females and his relationships with them.

In Paris, Hemingway encounters a colorful array of people who may have been just ordinary starving artists at the time. Those people have become, like Hemingway, legendary creative figures such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Aleister Crowley. Seeing these and other notable figures from the eyes of Hemingway adds depth to the narrative and takes Hemingway out of himself, too. Given that the author's life ended tragically and with obvious depression and alcoholism, it is refreshing to glimpse a time in Hemingway's life when he felt strongly connected and engaged with the rest of the world. It seems highly likely that a string of failed marriages sapped Hemingway's emotional strength and eroded his trust in humanity -- not just the opposite sex. Hemingway's own sense of angst and guilt pervade the text, too, and reveal the wellspring from where his fiction sprouts.