Paris Through Hemingway's Shot Glass
Review of Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" (1964)
Published posthumously, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (1964), is his recollection of 1920s Paris, when he was a broke but ambitious young writer, hanging around with literary legends, starving just enough to feel artistically pure, and figuring out how to turn experience into prose.
It’s also a book filled with razor-sharp gossip, the kind of literary backstabbing that makes you wince and cackle at the same time.
“In later life the idea of a moveable feast for Hemingway became something very much like what King Harry wanted St. Crispin's Feast Day to be for "we happy few": a memory or even a state of being that had become a part of you, a thing that you could have always with you, no matter where you went or how you lived forever after, that you could never lose. An experience first fixed in time and space or a condition like happiness or love could be afterward moved or carried with you wherever you went in space and time.”
Gossip, Grudges, and Greatness
The book is a loosely connected set of vignettes rather than a structured memoir. Hemingway recalls his time as a struggling writer in the Latin Quarter with his first wife, Hadley, before fame and ego blew everything apart.
“We ate well and cheaply and we drank well and cheaply and we slept well and warm together and loved each other.”
Drawing from notebooks he kept during the 1920s, Hemingway describes the thrill of literary discovery—writing in cafés, perfecting his short, muscular sentences, soaking up wisdom from Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford.
“The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.”
He sketches out the personalities of the 1920s expatriate literary crowd, the so-called "Lost Generation," and his portraits range from admiring...
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.”
...
“But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were the shelves and shelves of the richness of the library.”
...to downright cruel.
“He started to talk about my writing and I stopped listening. I was embarrassed and it made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. I’ve seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust was for all, and you and your marked for death look, you con man, making a living out of your death. Now you will con me. Con not, that thou be not conned. Death was not conning with him. It was coming all right.”
Paris itself is the real star, though. Hemingway captures its streets, cafés, and seasons with a sharp yet affectionate touch:
"There is never any end to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached."
This is a book dripping with nostalgia, but it’s also tinged with regret. Hemingway is writing from the 1950s, decades after the Paris he loved has vanished. He’s older, wounded (literally and emotionally), and bitter about how his life turned out.
“Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.”
There’s a ghostly sadness behind the charming recollections, a sense that he’s trying to write himself back into a world that no longer exists.
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil 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.”
Where Hemingway shines
The prose is exactly what you expect: spare, direct, deceptively simple. It’s Hemingway at his most refined, stripped of the bluster that sometimes plagues his novels.
“The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.”
He captures moments with a clarity that makes them feel immediate, like you’re sitting beside him at a café, watching as he quietly dissects the world.
"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 sidewalks so that you saw and smelled the food. Then you were unhappy with your writing and you were too ambitious and you were conceited and you were self-centered and you quarrelled with people and you were in too much of a hurry and did not drink enough wine and did not listen to good music. And you lied and you were in a bad way."
The book is also a gold mine of writing advice. A particularly popular one is about how to start a day's writing...
But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.
If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. 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.”
... when to stop the day's writing...
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.
...and what to do after stopping and before starting the next day.
“It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when you had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.”
Hemingway also gives his two cents on how to grapple with and learn from the literary giants of the past when you think their writing is frankly bad.
“I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
...
In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev.”
And there's one that probably best reflects on his own style of sparse writing, made alive through its omissions.
“This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
What might disappoint you
Is A Moveable Feast an honest account of Hemingway’s early years? Probably not. Written near the end of his life, when Hemingway was struggling with depression and alcoholism, it often feels like score-settling masked as reminiscence.
“This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”
Hemingway writes as if he were always the cool, competent one while everyone else was floundering. It’s an incredible act of self-mythologizing—polished, selective, and sometimes downright unfair. But it’s also riveting.
His treatment of some figures, particularly his second wife Pauline, borders on character assassination. The real knockout punch, though, is reserved for F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Hemingway recounts a disastrous road trip with Fitzgerald, where the Great Gatsby author comes off as a neurotic mess, obsessed with his health, his talent, and his unstable marriage to Zelda.
At one point, Fitzgerald confesses a deeply personal insecurity, and Hemingway, ever the macho man, reassures him in the most Hemingway way possible—by taking him to a bathroom to prove a point. It’s both hilarious and deeply uncomfortable, a moment that tells you everything about both men.
The Verdict: A Beautiful, Mean, Crafted Memoir
A Moveable Feast is a love letter, a grudge match, and a nostalgia trip all wrapped into one slim volume. Hemingway makes you fall in love with his Paris, even if you suspect that half of it is fiction.
The book is best consumed with a grain of salt and an appreciation for the difference between fact and art.
However, if you’ve ever fantasised about living as a penniless genius in a Parisian café, this book will ruin your life.
It’ll make you want to quit your job, buy a battered notebook, and sit in a corner, nursing an espresso, trying to write your one true sentence.
Read Next:
For more dirt on the Fitzgerald-Hemingway rivalry, read Amanda Vaill's Everybody Was So Young. It tells the story from the perspective of the Murphys, the wealthy patrons who hosted both writers on the Riviera.
For another beautifully written expat memoir, pick up Janet Flanner’s Paris Was Yesterday. Or, for another literary city, try Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, which explores how the city's rich heritage and melancholia seeped into the Nobel laureate's writing.
If you want a novel that captures the energy of artistic life in Paris, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is wilder, cruder, and messier—but just as intoxicating.
But, if you just want more of Hemingway's memoir prose, pick Green Hills of Africa, an account of a safari he and his wife took in 1933.