A Moveable Feast.

I've done it. First Zelda, then Hadley, then Scott, and finally Hem. Completing A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway's recollection of his first five years in Paris,  felt like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Z taught me about Zelda Fitzgerald and how she felt about her husband and the Hemingways. The Paris Wife introduced me to the tragically romantic life of Hadley Hemingway, and it showed me how she felt about the Fitzgeralds. Between the Short Autobiography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tender is the Night, I feel like I know F. Scott Fitzgerald and his perception of the people around him.  And A Moveable Feast was the perfect way to wrap it up.

Since people in the book call Ernest "Hem" (except Hadley, who calls him Tatie), that's exactly what I'm going to do. Hem is admirable. His writing oftentimes mirrors his personality - it's simple and straightforward, it's got depth and it can rip your heart out. At least, A Moveable Feast did that to me. By reading The Paris Wife before this memoir, I had excellent background information while I cruised through this novel.  I think I have a secret obsession with the romance between Hadley and Hem, because I found myself rereading the chapters in which she was mentioned.  I have a very strong inkling that he wrote this book as an apology to her.

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Although the author discusses his relationship with several friends (Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Sylvia Beach), I learned the most about Fitzgerald from this book. Hem painted a picture of a man who couldn't hold his alcohol and desperately needed his wife's approval - but, he also seems to enjoy his company. They feed off of each other's strengths. While Fitzgerald can offer the advice of a published author, Hem can offer the social maturity and cool-headedness that Scott and Zelda lack.  Their friendship is both deep and shallow. They might be guilty of using each other to further their own careers,  but they genuinely wanted to see each other succeed.

"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, but then it was a long name to spell and perhaps it became harder to spell all of the time, and I give him great credit for spelling it correctly finally. He learned to spell many more important things and he tried to think straight about many more." - Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

I highly recommend reading the restored version of this memoir. Originally, the book was edited for publication by Mary Hemingway after Ernest's death; however, his sons, Patrick and Sean, poured through the original manuscripts to put together this version of the book, which stays truer to Hem's intentions for his readers. It also includes a very interesting collection of scrapped introductory paragraphs for the memoir, all of which address Hadley directly. Here's what I mean: 

"This book is fiction and should be read as such. It may throw some light on other books that have been written as fact. I apologize to Hadley for any mis-representations or mistakes or for any errors. She is the heroine of the stories and I hope she understands. She deserves everything good in life including accurate reporting."

And there's also:

"This book is fiction. I have left out much and changed and eliminated and I hope Hadley understands. She will see why I hope. She is the heroine and the only person who had a life that turned out well and as it should except certain of the rich."

Are you sensing a theme? Here's one more (remember that last phone call Hadley had with Tatie in The Paris Wife?):

"...Two things are important. Nothing lasted with us no matter how well intended and they ski much better now than they did in our time ... People break their legs and in the world some people still  break their hearts. They come down faster and they drop like birds that know many secrets. They have no time to tell their secrets as they pass. Everyone knows many secrets now and everyone has written everything and will write more. It would be fine if it could all be true but lacking that I have attempted in this fiction only to make it interesting. Nobody was invulnerable but we thought we were then and hearing someone's voice over the telephone you know they still are and that they deserve it."

As you can probably gather from these drafts, the book is full of praise for Hadley. It talks about how much fun they had together, how pleasant she was, and how he broke her heart. And it breaks my heart all over again to read about their romance from Hem's vantage point. It really is a fantastic book, and I hope any lover of this generation's work will take the time to read it. 

PS: If you haven't read any of the books in this blog yet, the order in which I've read them has been amazing - like they were intended to be read in this sequence. If you follow in this order, let me know what you think! Happy reading.

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