Dreaming of Paris & ‘A Moveable Feast’

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 to a friend, 1950

I see Paris only as a dream. I’ve never been there. But all the beautiful memoirs of perennial travelers, and the awe of the individuals who had the chance to pass through the avenues of this dream city with the colors of an impressionist’s brush strokes, cannot provide a more visceral effect than Hemingway’s art of writing simple sentences that can sting the reader’s stagnant senses.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway makes you taste his wine the way the warmth and flavor ran through his taste buds, arousing each of your nerve ending that has forgotten to reckon life’s simplest pleasures.

The book opens as the author finds himself in a café with the usual crowd of drunken men and women, where he gathers as much literary material as he could. This is the job of the writer, exactly what Hemingway does – to present the usual and simple that is often overlooked.

I have discovered the beauty presented in every page of this book prior to reading the whole text, when in the film City of Angels, the following paragraph was quoted:

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold wine washed away leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans."

Hemingway tells us (not only in the fresh idealism he once had in his youth but even when he was reminding us of the legacy of dead poets) that we must always relish the flavor of life in order to live.

This book, which was published posthumously, is the author’s recollections of his life in Paris. In this posh cosmopolitan milieu, Hemingway socialized with several fellow American expatriates who were also into the art of writing, in which they were known in the literary world after Gertrude Stein first termed it, Une Génération Perdue, or The Lost Generation.

The Lost Generation finds itself existing in an age of grand disillusionment. The book contains the perceptions of a writer, who, in his green age, is spurred by views of idealism, which paints a romantic world of innocent love, bravery and beauty, the way this writer had seen a pretty young girl in a café "with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin." He is faced, however, with the lingering immorality and dirt in society, not mainly as a result of the First World War, but because both persistently recurs just like bad weather, and is so much like the grotesque and distorted art of Picasso (a contemporary of the author).

Hemingway consciously tells us that, still, no matter how dirty, corrupt and contemptible the society that we are in is, we must continue to go through life with the passion for it, always seeking for the beauty that there is, the way Dante Alighieri passed through the sordidness of hell. And "you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war."

As a poor literary chap, Hemingway was fired up not by liquor alone, but by his poetic calling. As told in the book, the author and fellow writer Ezra Pound decided to start up a support group, which they called the "Bel Esprit" the primarily aim of which was to raise money and "get TS Eliot out of the bank so that he could write poetry" and become a free man. Though they were quite unsuccessful in rescuing TS Eliot from the bonds of materialistic slavery, they were soon happy to hear that the revered bank employee has successfully published his poem, "The Waste Land." And Hemingway, the jackass that he was, spent the money that he raised to bet on horse racing.

Hemingway proves that pleasures from one’s existence, no matter how meaningless they seem to be, are not only experienced by the exclusive world of the filthy rich particularly in this sophisticated, cosmopolitan place.

As presented in this autobiographical/confessional oeuvre, the author’s grand love for life was meticulously detailed in his every description of every event in the story as he narrates how he has made sacrifices to acquire his passions. Without any sign of regret, only traces of romanticism, the author tells of how he lived through the difficulties of life, with a little family to take care of, by giving up journalism for which he was regularly paid, to pursue a very uncertain literary career.

He vividly recalls his intimacies with his first wife, his memorable walks on the streets of Pairs, the taste of wine and pastry, their travels and simple adventures, the stories he has passionately written and of the time he spent in countless cafés, of the paintings he could not have, and of the books that kept his spirit burning.

Hemingway deliberately makes his readers internalize what he has learned not only about writing, but about life as a whole, that even if one has never been to Paris, the place represents any place or moment in our lives which will always remind us of stardust in the air.