My ‘Moveable Feast’

And then there was that hunger other than the one which at regular intervals bored holes through the linings of our stomachs.

It was the kind that has kept us together from the very first night we literally bumped into each other at a bar in Malate. Two years since, despite meager incomes combined and despite being cramped in a four-by-four square meter of space in one of Manila’s squalid slums, we are still the most florid of knowledge-hungry discussants on almost anything. Friends say we could very well shoot our mouths off until Boy Abunda would relent us with a segment on his show or something, just to showcase our gift of guiltless gab.

We met at a time when MIRC was decidedly a Manila-phenomenon, new age trance music was the favored tune among clubbers, Jocelyn Enriquez was conquering Billboard charts around the world, Nokia 6210 was the apple of the upwardly mobile’s eye, and ranting was just about the tone of choice for most webloggers.

I am your typical easy-going struggling writer by the way. I have been in and out of writing jobs, thankfully most were more creative than technical – been through 14 full-time positions and five per-project bases – in 12 years’ time since graduating from college. My fear of commitment – professional or romantic – brought me to places unexplorable even by the daringest of derringdoes. Whether borne out of a subconscious volition or not, I knew I shunned promotions at the workplace as I prefered to work as a simple bottom-rung rank-and-filer, and worse, parried off financially advantageous relationships in favor of transient dalliances with fellow commitment-phobics.

But the hunger remains. I am always looking for something that would give me both time and space to grow as a writer and as a human being. If it is a job, or a lover, it has to be one that does not impose strictures on my maturing sense of individual freedom. It means allotting leeway for my sprees – collecting previously-owned paperbacks, pirated music and movies, and ukay-ukay muscle shirts, which I carry out with such passion after office hours. They almost always culminate into beer binges at sing-along bars…until we bumped into each other in Malate.

I am writing this because we both have come out of another hunger spell and, before we might be in for another bout yet, I would like to pay tribute to the beautiful memories I have made with the person whom I have for the first time ever dared trust my love to – commitment and all– my phobia has now been eternally cured. And unlike other beautiful memories, these ones can’t help but get livelier each time I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

A Moveable Feast is about the young writer’s life in Paris. It is a novel divided into several parts, or stories, each of which could stand as short fiction. Read individually, the stories come out as charming vignettes of Hemingway’s struggles as an ex-war journalist determined to break into the serious world of literary writing who, in foregoing a well-paying job, sacrificed by at first skipping meals. As a novel, it is a story of a beautiful love affair beset by the common pitfalls of a lofty ambition set against varying backdrops of dainty kiosks, rivers, age-old museums and libraries, horse racing, run-down hotels and cafes, with literary luminaries supporting him here and there – all in postcard-perfect Paris.

Aside from the foreword on the preponderance of poverty along the way, to a reader interested in the craft of serious writing, there are a dozen practical tips. For instance, to avoid the dreaded block, one should not empty one’s mind out in one sitting, meaning one must stop at a point in the writing process when the mind is still in control of the action. The key is to not to push the pen off a "cliff’s edge," simply letting the pen’s ink tank or the creative energy to refract for the next day. Or, if one is grappling for beginners, one only has to start off with a simple declarative statement of truth. By simple, he means a simple sentence stripped of adjectives. And then a lot more.

To the trivia hound, the book offers a shocking truth dished out as straight and cold as only Hemingway can. Handled otherwise by a writer of lesser ilk, the delivery would have sounded malicious because it was about the "size issue" of an equally famous writer, his best and only persistent friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Then, too, there was Zelda’s (Fitzgerald’s wife) descent into insanity and a glimpse of Hemingway’s superstitious nature – why he had kept all those times a rabbit’s paw on one pocket and a horseshoe on the other.

The finds could be endlessly entertaining.

Yes, I have Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast on my lap again and for the nth time, the book does not fail to bring back all the hours, the days, the life I have spent with my one true love.

True, it would take eons before we both could raise the money to live in Paris in gay abandon like Ernest Hemingway and Hadley. True, it might take another deluge before we could both experience snow and rink brandy at kiosques and meet and cogitate with a Getrude Stein, Henry James, Ezra Pound, and yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet the book has reminded me again of stirrings buoyed by this blissful realization that like Hemingway, we, too, can learn to live our lives according to the promptings coming from our own true selves despite the evil shackles of poverty and all. And that we should not live to regret nor regret that we ever lived.