A hundred years ago, Ernest Hemingway lived in Paris — a city of beggars, drunks, and the ever-present stench from sewage carts pulled by horses through the narrow streets. And since it is now autumn and the rain is pouring down, it feels like the perfect time to read his incomparable A Moveable Feast once again.
“Then the bad weather set in,” he wrote. “It came suddenly one day when autumn was over. We had to close the windows at night against the rain, and the cold wind stripped the leaves from the trees on Place Contrescarpe.”
Yet Café des Amateurs was packed, the windows fogged by the warmth inside.
“It was a sad, dreary café where the drunkards of the quarter gathered, and I stayed away from it because of the smell of unwashed bodies and the sour stench of drink. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs were drunk all the time, or whenever they had money; mostly on wine bought by the half- or full liter.”
When Hemingway arrived in Paris in December 1921, he was twenty-two, newly married, and broke. He had left Chicago to try his luck as a correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly. Paris at that time was the center of artistic renewal, and Hemingway quickly felt he had come to the right place.
During the five years he lived there, from 1921 to 1926, he transformed from an unknown journalist into one of his generation’s defining literary voices. He wrote about boxing, bullfighting, fishing, and politics, but above all, he learned to write “simply, cleanly, and truly.” This apprenticeship became the foundation for A Moveable Feast — his memoir of Paris, friendship, love, and the struggle to find a language of his own.
Hemingway and his young wife, Hadley Richardson, for a time lived in a cramped apartment near Café des Amateurs, at 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine.
“I could look out over the roofs of Paris and think: ‘Don’t be afraid. You’ve always written before and you’ll write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.’ So finally I wrote one true sentence, and from there I went on. It was easy then, because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or heard someone say.”
After the First World War, Paris became a haven for many young Americans. The dollar was strong, and in the Latin Quarter they could live cheaply. Hemingway and Hadley lived in various places — often cramped, drafty, and with the toilet out on the stairway.
Other artists lived the same way. The cafés became their offices. Hemingway wrote at Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots, and Closerie des Lilas, among many others. He enjoyed his coffee — and other beverages — while he observed and took notes for hours: street vendors, artists, prostitutes, petty bourgeois, and war veterans.
His declared goal was to strip language of everything unnecessary so that only the essential remained. It was in Paris that he developed his signature style — short, rhythmic sentences and a prose that concealed more than it said.
But now and then, as he sat at his café table writing, he could be distracted.
“A girl came into the café and sat at a table near the window. She was very pretty, with a face as clean as a newly minted coin, if they minted coins out of living flesh with rain-fresh skin, and her hair was black as a raven’s wing, cut short and slanted across her cheek. I looked at her, and she disturbed me and excited me. I wanted to put her in the story, or take her anywhere, but she had placed herself where she could watch the street and the door, and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.”
Hemingway ordered another rum, sharpened his pencil, and continued to study the girl in secret.
“I’ve seen you, my beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again. You belong to me and all of Paris belongs to me, and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
He worked his way deeper into the story, until he forgot to order more rum.
“Then the story was finished, and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph, and when I looked up, she was gone. I hope she has gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.”
Through Gertrude Stein — another American writer — Hemingway met many of the era’s leading artists. Her home near the Luxembourg Gardens was a gathering place for the likes of Picasso, Matisse, and Ezra Pound. Hemingway became especially close to Pound, who taught him the importance of economy in language. Pound edited poetry, cut redundant words, and carried this discipline into Hemingway’s prose.
At Sylvia Beach’s English-language bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, he found another home. It was there he borrowed books, met James Joyce, and read the first editions of Ulysses. “In a cold and windswept street, this was a warm and cheerful place, with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous authors, both dead and living.”
A Moveable Feast is also a love letter to Hadley Richardson. They were poor but happy, he wrote — “we had no money, but we had each other and Paris.”
But happiness would not last. As Hemingway’s literary success grew and he moved in wealthier circles, he met the young journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife. His marriage to Hadley ended, a rupture that haunted him for the rest of his life. In A Moveable Feast, he writes of Hadley with warmth and remorse, while Pauline receives a cooler treatment.
The manuscript of the book was rewritten decades after Hemingway had left Paris. In the late 1950s, while living in Cuba, he returned to his beloved European city.
At the Hotel Ritz, he lunched with the hotel’s owner, Charles Ritz. The distinguished hôtelier asked if Hemingway knew he had left a suitcase in the hotel’s basement storage. Hemingway vaguely recalled it, and after lunch, Ritz had it brought up. There, beneath old clothes and photographs, lay the forgotten treasure.
“My Paris notes! Enfin!”
But Hemingway’s great years were behind him. He suffered from high blood pressure and liver disease, and as the 1950s drew to a close, he showed clear signs of depression and paranoia. Early in the morning of July 2, 1961, he shot himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun. His wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, at first claimed it was an accident, but later confirmed it was suicide.
Mary took charge of the notes and saw to it that A Moveable Feast was published three years later. The book was an immediate success. Readers loved it because it reminded them of a Paris that no longer existed.
In the author’s own words:
“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.”
