A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
(London: Arrow Books, 1994)
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.
Page 2.
Since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story.
Pages 2-3.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping with it.
Page 3.
I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she’s gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.
Page 3.
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.
Page 4.
Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.
Page 4.
I was always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working.
Page 6.
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
Page 7.
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
Page 7.
I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.
Page 8.
Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places.
Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monval illustrations and had a very hooked nose.
Page 8.
We liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening.
Page 9.
Miss Stein thought that I was too uneducated about sex and I must admit that I had certain prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects.
Page 11.
There were almost never any pauses in a conversation with Miss Stein.
Page 13.
Work could cure almost anything, I believed then, and I believe now.
Pages 13-14.
I got home to the rue Cardinal Lemoine and told my newly acquired knowledge to my wife. In the night we were happy with our own knowledge we already had and other new knowledge we had acquired in the mountains.
Page 14.
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was getter than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill from the springs that fed it.
Pages 15-16.
I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career.
Page 17.
It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation.
…
‘That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,’ Miss Stein said. ‘All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.’
Page 18.
In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odeon
Page 20.
Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as a life as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the grown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip.
Page 20.
With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great elms on the stone banks of the river, the plane trees and in some places the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river.
Page 26.
With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning.
Page 26.
When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
Page 26.
When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that cold soil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
Page 27.
The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction form it is not the one the poverty bothers.
Page 28.
We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich. It had never seemed strange to me to wear sweatshirts for underwear to keep warm. It only seemed odd to the rich. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each day.
Pages 28-29.
We should live in this time now and have every minute of it.
Page 32.
We were hungry again from walking and Michaud’s was an exciting and expensive restaurant for us. It was where Joyce ate with his family then, he and his wife against the wall, Joyce peering at the menu through his thick glasses holding the menu up in one hand; Nora by him, a hearty but delicate eater, Giorgio thin, foppish, sleek-headed from the back; Lucia with heavy curly hair, a girl not quite yet grown; all of them talking Italian.
Page 33.
There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.
Page 33.
Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
Page 34.
Everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was good, that emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by fining something better.
Page 36.
You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.
Page 39.
Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it.
Page 44.
In those days many people went to the cafés at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail to be seen publicly.
Page 46.
In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war.
Page 47.
‘That’s Alestair Crowley, the diabolist. He’s supposed to be the wickedest man in the world.’
Page 51.
The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafés, because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together. The big cafés were cheap then too.
Page 58.
Handicapping beasts that are receiving stimulants, and detecting the symptoms in the paddock and acting on your perceptions, which sometimes bordered on the extrasensory, then backing them with money you cannot afford to lose, is not the way for a young man supporting a wife and child to get ahead in the full-time job of learning to write prose.
Page 58.
When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavyweight, missing a meal makes you very hungry. But it also sharpens all your perceptions.
Page 58.
In Paris … you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries.
Page 59.
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that to those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
Page 61.
Ezra Pound was always a good friend and he was always doing things for people. The studio where he lied with his wife Dorothy on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was as poor as Gertrude Stein’s studio was rich.
Page 62.
He liked the works of his friends which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment.
Page 62.
Even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.
Page 63.
Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint. He is also irascible but so perhaps have been many saints.
Page 63.
At that time we believed that any writer or painter could wear any clothes he owned and there was no official uniform for the artist.
Page 63.
Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble.
Page 64.
There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.
Page 67.
Picasso told me that he always promised the rich to come when they asked him because it made them so happy and then something would happen and he would be unable to appear.
Page 68.
Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic and clearly marked for death as a character is marked for death in a motion picture.
Page 70.
Two people … could live comfortably and well in Europe on five dollars a day and could travel.
Page 71.
It made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face.
Page 73.
From the day I had found Sylvia Beach’s library I had read all of Turgenev, what had been published in English of Gogol, the Constance Garnett translations of Tolstoi and the English translations of Chekov. In Toronto, before we had ever come to Paris, I had been told Katherine Mansfield was a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer, but trying to read her after Chekov was like hearing the carefully artificial tales of a young old-maid compared to those of an articulate and knowing physician who was a good and simple writer. Mansfield was like near-beer. It was getter to drink water. But Chekov was not water except for the clarity.
Page 75.
Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house. Until I read the Chartreuse do Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi.
Page 75.
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great reassure given to you.
Pages 75-76.
The Hole in the Wall was a very narrow bar with a red-painted façade, little more than a passageway, on the rue des Italiens. At one time it had a rear exit into the sewers of Paris from which you were supposed to be able to reach the catacombs.
Page 81.
‘The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time.’
Page 83.
Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.
Page 84.
He was lightly built and did not look in awfully good shape, his face being faintly puffy. His Brooks Brothers clothes fitted him well and he wore a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar and a Guard’s tie.
Page 85.
I saw that he had very short legs. With normal legs he would have been perhaps two inches taller.
Page 85.
I did not believe anyone could write anyway except the very best he could write without destroying his talent.
Page 89.
I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.
Page 89.
I was selling stories to the Frankfurter Zeitung and to Der Ouerschmitt in Berlin and to This Quarter and the Transatlantic Review in Pris and we were living with great economy and not spending any money except for necessities in order to save money to go down to the feria at Pamplona in July and to Madrid and to the feria in Valencia afterwards.
Page 90.
Lyon was not a very cheerful town at night. It was a big, heavy, solid-money town, probably fine if you had money and liked that sort of town.
Page 92.
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.
Pages 97-98.
Scott hated the French, and since almost the only French he met with regularly were waiters whom he did not understand, taxi-drivers, garage employees and landlords, he had many opportunities to insult and abuse them.
Page 99.
Scott was very articulate and told a story well. He did not have to spell the words nor attempt to punctuate and you did not have the feeling of reading an illiterate that his letters gave you before they had been corrected. I knew him for two years before he could spell my name.
Page 102.
Zelda had hawk’s eyes and a thin mouth and deep-south manners and accent. Watching her face you could see her mind leave the table and go to the night’s party and return with her eyes blank as a cat’s and then pleased, and the pleasure would show along the thin line of her lips and then be gone
Page 107.
Zelda was jealous of Scott’s work and as we got to know them, this fell into a regular pattern. Scott would resolve not to go on all-night drinking parties and to get some exercise each day and work regularly he would start to work and as soon as he was working well Zelda would begin complaining about how bored she was and get him off on another drunken party. They would quarrel and then make up and he would sweat out the alcohol on long walks with me, and make up his mind that this time he would really work, and would start off well. Then it would start all over again.
Page 107.
Becoming unconscious when they drank was always their great defense. They went to sleep on drinking an amount of liquor or champagne that would have little effect on a person accustomed to drinking, and they would go to sleep like children.
Page 108.
Scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane.
Page 111.
‘One does not forget people because they are dead.’
Page 114.
When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon.
Page 124.
Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced.
Page 124.
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
Page 126.
This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
Page 126.