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    Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
    Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
    Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
    Ebook290 pages4 hours

    Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

    By Ernest Hemingway

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    About this ebook

    Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.

    Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Seán Hemingway, this new edition also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and his first wife, Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of other luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford, and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft.

    Sure to excite critics and readers alike, the restored edition of A Moveable Feast brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateMay 22, 2014
    ISBN9781476770420
    Author

    Ernest Hemingway

    Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most influential writers and larger-than-life characters of the first half of the 20th Century. A renowned outdoorsman, journalist and, for a time, European expatriate, Hemingway began life as a reporter and his just-the-facts style of writing for newspapers - unadorned and direct - became the signature style he employed in his stories and novels. Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway was rejected by the Army for poor eyesight and soon happened upon a Red Cross notice enticing young men to become ambulance drivers in Europe and immediately signed up.Shipped to the Italian Front in June of 1918, Hemingway would be seriously injured by mortar fire and hospitalized in Milan, where he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse. He would later use his wartime experience as the basis for his book "A Farewell to Arms."Working as a reporter in Paris, Hemingway fell in with a group artists who had taken up residence in the city, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald's publication of "The Great Gatsby" convinced Hemingway that he should move on from writing short stories and embark on a novel. His trip to Pamplona, Spain and subsequent fascination with bullfighting led to his creation of his first full book, "The Sun Also Rises." Hemingway is also known for his novels "To Have and Have Not," "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "The Old Man and the Sea," as well as numerous short stories. In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hemingway's health and mental status began to rapidly deteriorate in the late 1950s and while he continued to write, his mental decline and physical challenges proved to be too much for him to bear. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway took up his favorite shotgun, put it to his head and ended his life.Ernest Hemingway was a dominant figure in American literature during his lifetime and his influence on the writers who followed him - both positive and negative - lasts to this day.

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    Reviews for Moveable Feast

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    • 3/5
      Had read this before so listened to it this time. Unfortunately, there's a reason Hemingway is subject so often to parody. His intentional avoidance of all adjectives or variation in sentences makes him difficult to listen to as well as to read. Enjoyed his portraits of his peers, but would not have made it all the way thru had this not been for a book club.
    • 2/5
      Vooral documentair interessant, over zijn verblijf in Parijs in de jaren 20. Duidelijk verfraaid. Soms ontluisterend over collegaschrijvers.
    • 4/5
      I read a lovely high-quality Book-of-the-Month Club edition of this book from 1964 that still had a flyer with discussion by Clifton Fadiman in it. His remarks heightened my appreciation of this interesting book. I hesitate to call it a novel - it is really a memoir of Hemingway's time in Paris in the 1920's - pieces of it told via 20 remembrances of people and places as well as his own struggles with writing and defining himself as a writer. He and his wife Hadley, and son, were quite poor. Hemingway started writing this in Cuba in 1957. Hemingway was writing this thirty years after the events and many of his thoughts do not treat his companions of the times well. Hemingway can flatter and praise some, but he reveals his true thoughts on others quite a lot. Altogether this was a fascinating look at life, love, racing, cafes, just all the places in Hemingway's rather small area of Paris that is just fun to read and drift back into history.There are some lines throughout the book that just zing you when you come across them. Perhaps the most famous is the epigraph: 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" The very last words of the book zinged me: "But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy." I think I got teary-eyed there.
    • 5/5
      I'm an author and I enjoy reading Hemmingway to see how he creates his stories. In [A Moveable Feast], Hemmingway describes life in Paris with his wife Hadley among American expatriates like Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. He gives vivid personality portraits with very few words. His descriptions of weather and food are also terse, yet vivid. Hemmingway also discusses writing and his process at that time, as he was becoming a known author.The book is a series of vignettes that hang together chronologically over a year in Paris. It was written long afterward in the 50s, and there is an aura of nostalgic melancholy about the book.This book is an American classic; one of the few that has been read for 60 years and will continue to be read as long as there is an America.
    • 4/5
      One of the ones you sometimes re-read, partially or entirely.
    • 3/5
      In this collection of short, autobiographical essays, Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley drink, gamble, and hobnob with expatriate writers in post WWI Paris and elsewhere in Europe. Sometimes, in between meals and trips to the racetrack, he settles down and "works" (writes).This book was very different, and not nearly as compelling, as I thought it would be. The essays are too brief and disconnected to allow for indentification with any of the characters, and the narrative (or lack of the same) often failed to hold my interest. It would have helped me if the edition I read had annotations to put the essays into context.
    • 4/5
      A glimpse of Paris in the 20s and the lives of Hemingway and his contemporaries. I love the immediacy of Hemingway and this book transports you to a very specific time in his story. I enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant. Fitzgerald could create a flawless story, Hemingway could create a flawless sentence.
    • 2/5
      Vooral documentair interessant, over zijn verblijf in Parijs in de jaren 20. Duidelijk verfraaid. Soms ontluisterend over collegaschrijvers.
    • 4/5
      I had actually read this last year, but never entered it into my read books. Reading each vignette about Paris (and the mountains Hem skiied in) reminded me of the wonderful time I had there. My favorites were about writing in the cafe, his initial meetings with G. Stein, and the first times they went skiing.
    • 5/5
      I can't help thinking that "A Moveable Feast" is a kind of Facebook into Hemingway's Parisian past. Hemingway writes of himself and in particular, Scott Fitzgerald, as if he were posting on social media private details about a recent event. I don't mean to cheapen the work by comparing prosaic Facebook with Hemingway's genius but the raw public openness is analogous. I felt Hemingway's poor and happy nostalgia marks the end of his innocence and the very ending made me tingle all over - at once identifying with him while hoping it is all in the past. In short, a masterpiece.
    • 3/5
      My first Hemingway. I don't like memoirs, esp vague ramblings like this, but there is such gorgeous writing and hints of the genius in his work, that now I feel like I have to read him.
    • 4/5
      A Moveable Feast is a series of stories about Hemingway's life in Paris in the 20s with his first wife, before the publication of his first novel. Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald all have a chapter. This is a fun Hemingway (perhaps the only one), and everything has a happy nostalgic patina, even when he's digging viciously at Zelda Fitzgerald.
    • 5/5
      Thank You This Is Very Good, Maybe This Can Help You ----- Download Full Ebook Very Detail Here ---- https://amzn.to/3XOf46C ---- - You Can See Full Book/ebook Offline Any Time - You Can Read All Important Knowledge Here - You Can Become A Master In Your Business
    • 4/5
      Is this fiction, or isn't it? Are not all memoirs fiction to some degree, based on fallible individual memory? Hemmingway said this is a work of fiction. Meant to evoke the time, the place and the people of that time. Was this a kindness on his part, to soften some of the stark words within? Perhaps. Whatever it is, he does a masterful job of taking the reader to the Paris of the 1920s. He gives insight into how and why he wrote the way he did. All very interesting and a book to keep on the shelf.
    • 4/5
      This memoir, published posthumously, covers Hemingway's early days in Paris, right after he decided to leave journalism to become a writer of fiction. He was married, a father, constantly writing, friends with some very intelligent and very successful writers (Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald), and - to use his words - "very poor and very happy." In this series of short essays, he sheds his skin to expose his heart.

      I was struck with the sense that Hemingway found every day an adventure. He is constantly stringing together sentences as run-ons with the connectors of "but" and "and." It's like he is spinning some yarn and can't wait to get to the end. So he rushes and avoids the periods and the commas. He is ready to tell his tale no matter what comes. Such was his sense of determination to become a writer while in Paris.

      It is good for this aspiring writer to read of his struggles. He knew not how to make money. He just worked on his craft. This is good advice for anyone starting off in any profession or station in life. Work on the craft; be dedicated to the work; hone your skills; don't be discouraged by rejection. Such was Hemingway's time in Paris, whose lesson of being "very poor and very happy" is the path to success.
    • 4/5
      The passages about Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald and writing and Paris are fantastic. The stuff about horse racing and skiing vacations, much less so. But then, maybe that says more about my interests than anything else.
    • 1/5
      I have to confess that I have never understood the acclaim afforded to Ernest Hemigway, and this book has done nothing to assuage my doubts. I know that he is revered as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and seen as some sort of embodiment of the writer as a man of action, but his works simply leave me cold.I was looking forward to this account of his life in Paris between the World Wars. After all, with such a setting, and the added frisson afforded by accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of my all-time literary heroes), how could the book fail to enthral? Well, somehow, it managed to overcome the integral advantages, and somehow claw back defeat from the jaws of victory. The foreword and preface to this edition, written by one of Hemingway’s sons, and one of his grandsons, made much play of the considerable efforts to edit the manuscript undertaken by Mary, Hemingway’s final wife, and the rest of the family. I must say that if this manuscript was the consequence of intense and dedicated editing, I dread to think how dreadful the original must have been.Far from an enlightening selection of memoirs recounting scintillating encounters between prominent figures of the world of the arts, it is a series of inconsequential and rambling recollections of tedious meetings, recounted in appalling, inchoate prose. I think we would all have been better served if this book had been edited through the medium of a shredding machine.
    • 1/5
      Boring dribble about Hemingway and people he interacted with. Though the people were famous I really do not care what they had to eat and drink. A total piece of useless information. Sorry I wasted my time with this.
    • 3/5
      My favorite Hemingway book thus far. Moving, funny and interesting - but concise in a mostly non-annoying way. Also, he really hated Zelda Fitzgerald, huh?
    • 4/5
      Absorbing reading. Features a snarky "new introduction" by Jane Kramer that wasn't even bound into the book, and badmouths him pretty much from start to finish. He probably deserved it.
    • 4/5
      A good book and true. Read in conjunction with The Paris Wife, they fit nicely together. Best chapters are about Schuns and several about f Scott.
    • 5/5
      What can I really say about this book? A very personal account of living in Paris in the 1920's. On one hand you have his dealings with and impressions of such characters as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford, T.S. Eliot, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. On the other hand there is a tender and wistful account of a place, a time, and a girl. The elements are blended together in style so unmistakably Hemingway. This small pocket edition worked perfectly as it is a story best read at a cafe or similar establishment.
    • 4/5
      My god, they were so young. I mean, I know this intellectually, but to read this is to really get the full sense of literary boyishness. Your 20s are your 20s no matter what era, no matter which arondissement, and there is something very sweet about this book for just that reason. Boys bragging, boys fronting, boys writing. The whiff of youthful exuberance here is a little intoxicating, feels good; this is well worth reading, or rereading. I'm glad I didn't even think about the updated version.This is a hardcover I bought for $2 or $3 on the street in 2009 or so, but I'd never looked inside until I opened it to read. I noticed that it had the original Book-of-the-Month Club insert inside, so I checked the front matter and hey! -- looks like I've got myself a first American BOMC edition (it came out in London a bit earlier in 1964). Not worth much, and it's in pretty lowly shape, but that still made me happy, and gave it a little extra gravitas.
    • 4/5
      GLBT interest tag is for Sylvia & Adrienne and Gertrude & Alice; for Hem's & Gertrude's homophobia concerning male sexual predators; for confusing predators with non-predator queer people; and for scads of intimate contact with Scott Fitzgerald.

      Is it bad that now I want to read fic where Hem & Scott were together? Where is the AU where Hem took Scott skiing in Austria and they spent weeks skiing, writing, drinking, etc. Someone should write that.

      Interesting: his description of Gertrude's "You're all a lost generation" as her tirade at a WWI veteran motor mechanic refusing to skip her ahead in the line for car repairs. Only later did it become "literary".

      Sexism aside, I'm very fond of Hem. Sure, sometimes I want to throw him off a cliff, but I've always loved adventure stories.
    • 4/5
      Half-ass read in college, but really enjoyed this revisiting. Vintage Hemingway, written by a master at the top of his game. Insightful and poetic and terse.
    • 3/5
      Hemingway is not one of my favorite authors, but in this book his description of Paris in the 20s is wonderful. He plays around with some of the facts, but captures a time and a place in history that fascinates me. Paris was the center of the world then and so much that was groundbreaking was happening there in the way of music (jazz), painting (cubism), and writing. Hemingway shows us his take on this magical time.
    • 3/5
      3.5 really, I couldn't go the whole four. I listened to the audio version of the restored edition, and the narration was out of this world. The type of narration that lifts a story up. There are a number of fragments at the end, from his historical collection, and I have to say that audio is perhaps not the best venue for really soaking this sort of thing up. One of things noted about this restored edition is that it did not flow chronologically, which did in fact end up a little confusing, but that is not a major issue.

      I am keeping this book - I keep only a fraction of the books I read, that is notable. There were a number of parts of this memoir/work of fiction (in his words), that I really enjoyed. I loved hearing about their winters in Schroontz, which I am entirely sure I have misspelled, but hey, I never saw it in writing. And I absolutely adore the dialogue. There is something unique about his dialogue, and between his words and this narration, it was just outstanding. Some of the things that were really small were amazing to ponder, such as leaving their baby son home alone in the crib with the cat as a babysitter

      His writing about Scott Fitzgerald was sadly distressing. I will follow up soon by reading Z, about Zelda, as it also fits in my challenge.

      If you like Hemingway, this is worth your while. If you don't already care for him, this probably won't, change your mind.
    • 4/5
      I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Hemingway's stories of life in Paris as a young man.
    • 5/5
      I recognize that Hemingway's memories of Paris are flawed and romanticized, but I still love this book, one of my go-to comfort reads. I never get tired of it.

    Book preview

    Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

    Introduction

    In November 1956, the management of the Ritz Hotel in Paris convinced Ernest Hemingway to repossess two small steamer trunks that he had stored there in March 1928.¹ The trunks contained forgotten remnants from his first years in Paris: pages of typed fiction, notebooks of material relating to The Sun Also Rises, books, newspaper clippings, and old clothes. To bring this precious cargo home to the Finca in Cuba on their transatlantic voyage aboard the Ile de France, Ernest and his wife Mary purchased a large Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. I recall as a child seeing that trunk in my godmother Mary’s apartment in New York, and I can still remember its smart leather trim with brass fittings, pervasive Louis Vuitton logo, and the gold embossed initials, EH. The trunk itself was easily big enough for me to fit into, and it filled me with wonder at the grand, adventurous life my grandfather led.

    Hemingway may well have had earlier inklings of writing a memoir about his early years in Paris, such as during the long recuperation after his near-death plane crashes in Africa in 1954, but his reacquaintance with this material—a time capsule from that seminal period in his life—stirred him to action.² In the summer of 1957, he began work on The Paris Sketches, as he called the book. He worked on it in Cuba, and in Ketchum, and even brought it with him to Spain in the summer of 1959, and to Paris in the fall that same year. By November 1959, Hemingway had completed and delivered to Scribner’s a draft of a manuscript that lacked only an introduction and the final chapter. A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, concerns the author’s time in Paris from 1921 to 1926. Careful study of the manuscripts for A Moveable Feast reveals that relatively little material was reused from Hemingway’s early papers and manuscripts.³ Of particular note is the chapter on the poet Cheever Dunning, which can be directly linked to a very early draft of the story that Hemingway describes in a letter to Ezra Pound, dated October 15, 1924.⁴ Additionally, parts of the chapter Ford Madox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple were culled from material that Hemingway excised from The Sun Also Rises and had rediscovered in the notebooks he found in the trunks at the Ritz. While A Moveable Feast is the first and most complete posthumously published book by Ernest Hemingway, Mary Hemingway states, in her editor’s note, that the book was finished in the spring of 1960, when he had completed another round of edits to the manuscript at the Finca. In actuality, the book was never finished in Hemingway’s eyes.

    This new special edition of A Moveable Feast celebrates my grandfather’s classic memoir of his early days in Paris fifty years after he completed the first draft of the book. Presented here for the first time is Ernest Hemingway’s original manuscript text as he had it at the time of his death in 1961. Although Hemingway had completed several drafts of the main text in prior years, he had not written an introduction or final chapter to his satisfaction, nor had he decided on a title. In fact, Hemingway continued to work on the book at least into April of 1961.

    During the nearly three years between the author’s death and the first publication of A Moveable Feast in the spring of 1964, significant changes were made to the manuscript by the editors, Mary Hemingway and Harry Brague of Scribner’s. A small amount of material that Hemingway had intended to include was deleted, and other material that he had written for the book but had decided not to include, notably the chapter entitled Birth of A New School, a large section of the chapter on Ezra Pound, now entitled Ezra Pound and the Measuring Worm, and a large section of the final chapter, previously entitled There is Never Any End to Paris and now renamed Winters in Schruns, was added. The introductory letter by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast was actually fabricated by Mary Hemingway from manuscript fragments and, thus, has been left out of this edition. Likewise, the editors changed the order of some of the chapters. Chapter 7 became chapter 3, and chapter 16 on Schruns was made into the last chapter with additional material added from a chapter in which Hemingway wrote about his break up with Hadley and new marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer, a text published in its entirety here for the first time as The Pilot Fish and the Rich. Hemingway had decided against including this material in the book because he thought of his relationship with Pauline as a beginning, not an ending.

    The nineteen chapters of A Moveable Feast published here are based on a typed manuscript with original notations in Hemingway’s hand—the last draft of the last book that he ever worked on. The actual manuscript is in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy library in Boston, Massachusetts, the primary repository for all of Hemingway’s manuscripts.⁵ Although this manuscript lacks a final chapter, I believe that it provides a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.

    A number of relatively minor editorial changes were also made to the published edition of A Moveable Feast, changes that I strongly doubt would have been attempted by the editor had she required the author’s approval. These changes have been reinstated. The most significant of them, I think, is the changing in many places of Hemingway’s use of the second person in the narrative, evident from the very first paragraph of chapter one and then throughout the book (see, e.g., Fig. 1). This intentional and carefully conceived narrative device gives the effect of the author speaking to himself and, subconsciously, through the repetition of the word you, brings the reader into the story.

    A particularly egregious edit was made to the foreword to chapter 17 on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway’s final text (see Fig. 7) reads:

    His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think. He was flying again and I was lucky to meet him just after a good time in his writing if not a good one in his life.

    But in the posthumous edition, it reads:

    His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.⁶

    It is clear that the editors culled this text from an earlier draft (see Fig. 6) discarded by Hemingway, but this kind of editorial decision, which casts Fitzgerald in a less sympathetic light than Hemingway’s final version, seems completely unwarranted.

    Hemingway had only provided titles for three chapters of his original manuscript: Ford Madox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple, Birth of a New School, and The Man Who Was Marked for Death (see Fig. 4). The titles from the first publication have been retained, except as noted above, for the clarity of the reader familiar with the book. Likewise, I have provided titles for the additional, previously unpublished sketches.

    There was a great deal of material that Hemingway wrote for A Moveable Feast that he decided to leave out, acting by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates. At least ten additional chapters were composed for the book, each in varying stages of completion, and these have been included in this special edition as a separate section after the main text. None of these chapters were finished to the author’s satisfaction and must be regarded as incomplete. Some of the chapters were written and rewritten in two drafts, and others are preserved in only a single handwritten first draft. As a corpus, I think that most readers will agree they provide a most interesting supplement to the book.

    The chapters of A Moveable Feast do not follow a strict chronological order. Similarly, I have organized the additional chapters with a slightly idiosyncratic logic. Birth of A New School comes first because this chapter was already included in the first publication of the book, where the editors had placed it between Ford Madox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple and With Pascin at the Dôme. Hemingway wrote two different possible endings for this chapter, which were edited and partially conflated by the editors of A Moveable Feast. Both endings are provided here as Hemingway wrote them. Likewise, Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit is material that was published in A Moveable Feast but had been written as a separate chapter, and, in fact, was cut by Hemingway.

    On Writing in the First Person is next because it is quite different from all of the other pieces. It focuses on writing rather than a particular remembrance, and, as a piece about process, seems more appropriate at the beginning than at the end. While incomplete, it offers insight into the process of writing and pokes fun at the so-called detective school of literary criticism. Most young writers write fiction from their own experience but Hemingway, as he intimates in this brief sketch, culled a great deal of material from other firsthand and secondhand sources. For example, he writes about interviewing soldiers from World War I, and his mastery of historical fiction is never more evident than in his novel A Farewell to Arms, where he has recreated the retreat of Caporetto so accurately that one would not believe he had not been at the battle.⁷

    Secret Pleasures is a story about Ernest wearing his hair long and deciding with Hadley to grow their hair to the same length. Most likely it is based primarily on the winter of 1922–23, when they were at Chamby sur Montreux, Switzerland, not Schruns, Austria, and is a case where Hemingway has altered the facts to improve the story.⁸ The sketch, only preserved in a single handwritten draft, is audacious for its intimate portrayal of the author and his wife and recalls certain passages in Hemingway’s posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden.⁹ It gives a particularly vivid impression of Ernest Hemingway as a young professional with one good suit and one pair of dress shoes who needed to observe the social conventions and dress code of his job as a journalist. The length that one cuts one’s hair remains a theme that resonates with young people today as they get their start in life. Hemingway conveys the complexity of motivations and assumptions in the simple act of growing his hair out: transitioning to his new bohemian lifestyle as a full-time writer of fiction, saving money both by not cutting his hair and not going out to the fashionable quarter because of his bohemian appearance, how this allowed him to focus on his writing, his journalist colleagues’ disdainful impressions contrasted with the completely different cultural associations of long hair for Japanese men, whom Hemingway met at Ezra Pound’s studio and whose long, straight black hair Hemingway admired. From this practical and anti-establishment act grows the idea that he and Hadley wear their hair at the same length as a kind of secret pleasure shared between them. Hemingway comically contrasts the scene in Paris with that in Schruns, where the local barber assumes that Hemingway is following the new Paris fashion and, consequently, encourages other customers to take up the style.

    A Strange Fight Club is a story about a little-known Canadian boxer named Larry Gains and his irregular training at the Stade Anastasie, a dance hall restaurant in a tough part of Paris where fights were held as dinnertime entertainment and the fighters acted as waiters. It is an unusual portrait of Paris life in the 1920s and reveals the pugilistic side of Ernest Hemingway, who enjoyed boxing himself and often covered important fights as a journalist.¹⁰ Hemingway, as when he spars with Ezra Pound in his studio, casts himself as the authority, which he displays to the reader through his careful assessment of Larry Gains’s inexperienced moves.

    The Acrid Smell of Lies is an unflattering portrait of Ford Madox Ford, whose breath was fouler than the spout of any whale. Hemingway’s intense dislike of Ford has long puzzled biographers, especially given Ford’s often glowing praise in print of Hemingway’s writing and the opportunities that Ford gave Hemingway as an assistant editor of The Transatlantic Review.¹¹ According to one theory, their falling out was the result of a dispute over money.¹² In this sketch, Hemingway ascribes his unreasonable antipathy toward Ford as his own inability to listen to Ford’s constant lying.

    The Education of Mr. Bumby is a sketch preserved in just one handwritten draft, in which Ernest and his son Jack, whose nickname was Bumby, join F. Scott Fitzgerald for a drink at a neutral cafe in Paris. The piece adds another example to Hemingway’s portrayal of Fitzgerald’s problems with drinking and his wife Zelda’s jealousy over his writing. After telling Fitzgerald stories about World War I, Hemingway mentions to Bumby that their friend André Masson was damaged by the war but went on to lead a productive life as a painter. Masson served in the Great War for two and a half years until 1917, when he was wounded in the chest and suffered depression afterward. Masson shared with Joan Miró a Paris studio, which Hemingway visited on a number of occasions. Hemingway acquired three forest landscape paintings by Masson, all of which now hang in the Hemingway room at the John F. Kennedy library, and knowing that Masson was deeply affected by the war may explain something of their haunting effect.¹³

    Scott and His Parisian Chauffeur is more a story about F. Scott Fitzgerald than about Paris—it takes place in America after a Princeton football game that the Fitzgeralds and Hemingways attended together in the fall of 1928. One can see why Hemingway decided to leave it out as it falls outside the general chronological parameters of the book. However, the black humor and automotive theme make the sketch a fine sequel to Ernest’s earlier chapter on the drive with Fitzgerald from Lyon to Paris in his hoodless Renault, amplifying Hemingway’s portrayal of Scott’s complicated tragedies, generosities and devotions.

    To judge from the manuscripts (see, e.g., Fig. 5), the most difficult part of writing A Moveable Feast for Ernest Hemingway was coming to terms with his betrayal of Hadley with Pauline and the end of that first marriage. In a way this would have been a logical ending to the book, and one can see why Mary Hemingway decided on it for the ending. However, Hemingway, after writing a chapter about it, included in this edition as The Pilot Fish and the Rich, decided that it was not the ending he wanted since he considered his marriage to Pauline a beginning, and this ending clearly left the heroine of the book, Hadley, abandoned and alone. What is worse is that only a part of The Pilot Fish and the Rich was incorporated into the last chapter of A Moveable Feast in the 1964 edition. The remorse that Hemingway expresses and the responsibility that he accepts for the breakup, as well as the unbelievable happiness that he had with Pauline, was cut out by the editors. For the first time, readers of this edition have the full text to consider as Hemingway wrote it. The extensive edits Mary Hemingway made to this text seem to have served her own personal relationship with the writer as his fourth and final wife, rather than the interests of the book or of the author, who comes across in the posthumous first edition as something of an unknowing victim, which he clearly was not (see also Fig. 5).

    "Nada y Pues Nada" was written by Ernest Hemingway over three days, from April 1–3, 1961, as a possible final chapter for the book. It is the last demonstrable sustained piece of writing that Hemingway did for the book and is only preserved in a single handwritten manuscript (see Fig. 8). It is as much a reflection of the author’s state of mind at that time, only three weeks before he attempted suicide, as it is a contribution to the book. His commitment to his work despite his failing health is remarkable, especially amid the paranoia and severe state of depression that he was facing. Writing, as he had done before in better times, that he was born to write and had done and would do again must have been difficult knowing that his writing was not going well and had not been for some time. In the final sentence, he writes that his memory has been tampered with, likely a reference to his recent visit to the Mayo clinic for shock therapy treatment, and that his heart no longer exists. As Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War–time friend Antoine de Saint Exupery observed in his book, Le Petit Prince, it is only with the heart that we can see rightly, as the essence of things is not visible to the eye. Hemingway’s expression of despair is a sad portent of the end for him, which came by his own hand less than three months later.

    In a letter written to Charles Scribner, Jr., on April 18, 1961, but never mailed, Hemingway writes that he is unable to finish the book as he had hoped and suggests publishing it without a final chapter.¹⁴ He mentions that he has been trying to write an ending for over a month. The false starts and endings included in the Fragments section of this volume probably belong to this time. He also provides a long list of tentative titles for A Moveable Feast. Hemingway had a habit of writing out lists of possible titles for his books from as early as his 1920s collection, in our time.¹⁵ Some names were frivolous and some were serious, and he often liked to say that the Bible was the best source for finding titles.¹⁶ At first glance, the list of titles Hemingway drew up at this time seems awful and may be an indication of how much his mind was deteriorating. They include: The Part Nobody Knows, To Hope and Write Well (The Paris Stories), To Write It True, Good Nails Are Made of Iron, To Bite On the Nail, Some Things As They Were, Some People and The Places, How It Began, To Love and Write Well, It Is Different In The Ring, and, my personal favorite, How Different It Was When You Were There.

    The title that he tentatively settled on was The Early Eye and The Ear (How Paris was in the early days). This last title sounds a bit like a medical textbook that could have belonged to his father. In seriousness, though, I think that Hemingway was trying to get at what he believed were key facets of his writing technique with this title. The eye, a term usually used in the connoisseurship of fine art, draws an interesting comparison between writing and painting, a subject that Hemingway discusses in A Moveable Feast, especially his learning from the paintings of Cézanne.¹⁷ Hemingway first developed his eye, his ability to discern the gold from the dross and turn his observations into prose, in Paris in the twenties. The ear, which we think of as more pertinent to musical composition, is clearly important to creative writing. Hemingway’s writing typically reads well when spoken aloud. When complete, his writing is so tight that every word is integral, like notes in a musical composition. In his early years in Paris, he learned about the value of rhythm and repetition in writing from Gertrude Stein and, especially, James Joyce, whose masterpiece, Ulysses, published by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, is an extraordinary virtuoso display of English prose that comes alive when read aloud.¹⁸ The Early Eye and The Ear gets at the need to hone your craft, something Hemingway truly believed in and worked at all his life. It implies talent, for you must have a good eye and a good ear to begin with if you are to be successful, but it also suggests that you need experience to develop your abilities as a writer, and Paris at that time was for Ernest Hemingway the perfect place to do this. Indeed, many of the handwritten first-draft manuscripts of A Moveable Feast are extremely clean and serve as remarkable and poignant testimonies to Hemingway’s talent (see Figs. 2–3), even in his final years. The deathless prose appears on the page fully formed like the goddess Athena born from the head of Zeus.

    The final title of the book, A Moveable Feast, was chosen by Mary Hemingway after the author’s death. It does not appear anywhere in the manuscript but was suggested to her by A.E. Hotchner, who recalls Ernest mentioning the phrase to him at the Ritz Bar in Paris in 1950.¹⁹ The choice of spelling follows Hemingway’s idiosyncratic preference to retain the

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