A Movable Feast

Published by bryan | Filed under journal entries

Feb 9, 2007

Last weekend I bought a copy of “A Moveable Feast” at the airport in Boston, took it with me to New York for a day, and had it completed by the time I got back to Portland. I read near the gate in Boston as my plane loaded, and continued reading as it took off without me.

What I like about Hemingway is, perhaps, what everybody likes about Hemingway. He does not overuse adjectives, and his sentences are short. And yet I am with him as he nurses Scott Fitzgerald back to health, and I am with him while he is warming Bumby’s bottle. I picked up another book at the airport in Chicago (I actually had Feast completed before my layover on the way home) by an author who nearly won the Booker Prize, and while she is a talented writer, I found myself slopping through descriptions rather than silently walking through scenes. I will finish that book, too, but it will take longer.

“A Moveable Feast” is a collection of memoir pieces Hemingway assembled about his stay in Paris in the twenties. He and Scott Fitzgerald were friends, along with Ezra Pound and more, and each of them, in their young twenties (save Pound, who was older) are working with enthusiasm on their craft. Fitzgerald had just released “The Great Gatsby” which is now considered one of the finest novels. Hemingway would soon begin “The Sun Also Rises” but at the time wrote stories for a German magazine and a few others.

The book made me glad to be a writer, and I am delighted I have finally read it. I know that I will read it again. If you write, or create much of anything, or if you like books or Hemingway or are not fond of adjectives, do read “A Moveable Feast.”

Don

P.S. When I set the book on the counter at the Borders in Boston, a delightful woman behind the counter picked it up and held it to her chest. She was older than me and black and her black hair was greying but she did not cut it short. She held the book to her chest and said it was her favorite by the author. Why, I asked. Because he was happy, she said. And as I walked out she called to me and said, “enjoy Paris if that is where you are going. Sit under the trees and drink coffee and the wonderful wine. And think of me.” I thought it was good that she did not ask me if I were going to Paris, but wanted to have that in her mind for me, and wanted to believe I would be in Paris with Hemingway, and would be happy too. I don’t know who that woman is, but thank you for helping me love a book all the more. I have now passed on the favor.