MarysLibrary

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.

Recently I've been reading, or trying to read, Gertrude Stein. So when I spotted at the library A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's catty memoir of his time in Paris between 1920 and 1926, I decided it was time to re-read it.

There are two reasons to read this book. One is to find out what Hemingway thought about some of the major literary figures of his day - or at least what he thought about them forty years later. He claims credit for spotting Zelda Fitzgerald's madness early on and he describes her machinations to keep Scott in an alcoholic haze because she was jealous of his work. He is less than flattering about Gertrude Stein. He is absolutely scathing about Ford Maddox Ford, who, by the way, helped him get published when he was an unknown. Gratitude is not Hemingway's strongest character trait.

The other reason for reading A Moveable Feast is to walk the streets of Paris with the author, and he does make the sights, sounds, and smells of Paris graphic. Beer at the Brasserie Lipp, cafe au lait at the Deux Magots, buying a petit pain and some cheap charcuterie and making a rough sandwich with sliced radishes. If you have ever lived in Paris it all comes flooding back as if you had dipped a madeline in your tea.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964) 211 pages. 4 / 5

Cold Cream

Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes by Ferdinand Mount has been published recently in the UK but is not available in the US - at least not at a reasonable price. Here's hoping it makes it across the Atlantic soon, preferably in Kindle format. I want to read it. I need to read it.

I heard about the book in the way I hear about so many books - in a roundabout manner. I was reading a post on the Anthony Powell Yahoo group and it mentioned an article on upper class memoirs by Michael Gove in Times Online called My Naughty Pleasures Between the Covers. That article is in part a review of this new book in which Powell is mentioned.

Powell's four-volume To Keep the Ball Rolling is, of course, an upperclass-memoir. So, in their way, are the collections of letters between, say, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. That sort of thing is so delightful after the flood of "misery memoirs" in which we have been awash for many years now. I agree with Gove:

At a time when the intimate revelations that most grip the nation are those of plastic (in every sense of the word) celebrities, . . . I want a very different sort of life story to curl up with. One in which emotions are carefully hidden, so as not to be too much of a bore, feelings are generally repressed, because it doesn't do to make a fuss, and the delicate re-touching that wins admiring glances is of the wainscoting in the dower house, not of the zeppelins in the Wonderbra.

So very true.

Now to get my hands on the book . . .