A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, is a memoir of his years in 1920s Paris as a struggling young writer. The book is set largely on the Left Bank, in rented rooms above a sawmill, in the cafés of Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter, and in the bookstalls along the Seine. Its central figure is Hemingway himself, recalled as a poor but disciplined apprentice who writes in cafés to escape the cold, bets on horse races at the Hippodrome, and learns to distrust literary fashion. The supporting cast is drawn from his actual circle: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, and Sylvia Beach, whose Shakespeare and Company lends him books and publishes James Joyce’s Ulysses. The book’s distinctive framework is a series of vignettes rather than a continuous plot, each named for a person, place, or episode, such as “Shakespeare and Company,” “The Prime Minister of Taste,” and “A Matter of Measurements.” Hemingway contrasts the frugal freedom of his early married life with Zelda Fitzgerald’s disruptive influence on Scott, and he describes the loss of innocence that came with fame and betrayal. The feast of the title is Paris itself, a movable celebration of art, appetite, and memory that he could carry with him after leaving. Though shaped by Hemingway’s later revisions and grievances, the memoir remains a widely read portrait of expatriate modernism and the making of a writer.