Tag Archives: Paris

Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises

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Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. Vintage, 2000; first published as The Sun Also Rises in 1926 (in the US); 1927 in Britain with the title Fiesta

 The central character in Fiesta, Hemingway’s first full novel, is the American expat journalist Jake Barnes. Book 1 shows him hanging around Paris bars and restaurants in the Latin Quarter and elsewhere popular with the other American and British expats and travellers. They drink a lot, flirt and talk in that distinctive Hemingway style: clipped, laconic, smart. I’ve posted before about his famous ‘iceberg’ literary technique: showing just the smallest tip of the substance of what he’s writing about. In Fiesta it becomes tedious.

Jake goes fishing in the Basque country with a friend. They catch fish. They were good fish (forgive the unflattering bad pastiche of Hemingway’s pared-back prose style). Then they go to the San Fermín fiesta in Pamplona (hence the title). This gives Jake the opportunity to brag about being an aficionado of bullfighting. There’s more than one could wish for about the corrida (the running of the bulls), which ones are good bulls, which bullfighters are good.

He’s with a motley collection of friends, several Americans and a seductive socialite English tomboy divorcée, Lady Brett Ashley. She’s a New Woman femme fatale, over whom all the ‘chaps’ (one of her favourite words) fall out, as they all desire her. They drink even more heavily than they did in Paris, fight and vie with each other to show which of the men is the most macho.

There’s some unsavoury antisemitism about one of the group, a Jewish man called Robert Cohn, who’s also obsessively enamoured of Brett.

Brett is the most interesting character. Jake is also in love with her, but their future as a couple is doomed, partly because, although this is never spelt out, he has a wound sustained in World War I that has rendered him impotent.

What’s it all about then? The epigraph cites Gertrude Stein’s depiction of this post-war generation as ‘lost’. These characters are all dissolute, self-indulgent, no doubt as a collective reaction to the horrors of the war years. Same with the women like Brett; now it’s time to cut loose and live life to the full. Hence their preference for ‘fiesta’ rather than mundane life with its responsibilities and wars.

Jake is different in one respect; he’s the only one who seems to have a job and to work for a living. Does he represent the puritanical American work ethic, at odds with the decadence of many young Americans and Europeans at the time? If so, it’s a message J.D. Vance would endorse. That’s not something that endears me to the novel.

I couldn’t muster enough interest to try to fathom it all. I thought these characters were just too unattractive and selfish to care anything about, and the prose style way too macho and mannered. As I said at the end of my previous post about Virginia Woolf, what a contrast with the subtle, layered style and compelling content of her near contemporary novel Jacob’s Room (published just four years before Fiesta).

The Ambassadors, part 3

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In my previous post on Henry James’s late novel The Ambassadors, I highlighted the inadequacy of Strether for the sensitive mission to Paris via London. There are a few plot spoilers in what follows.

I’d like to explore a few more passages to try to show James’s skilful, witty handling of characters interacting in ways that produce drama and comedy.

In Book 2 ch.1 Strether has another conversation with his shrewd, perceptive and generally more worldly confidante Maria Gostrey. She puts it to him that Chad Newsome is a young man he’s been sent out to ‘rescue’, his mission is to separate him from ‘the wicked woman’ he’s assumed to be involved with in Paris.

This blunt assertion has the effect on Strether of ‘pulling him up’ – an idiom that’s used several times about him in such exchanges. She makes it clear he hasn’t any grasp of the ‘facts’ of the matter, and his assumptions once again reveal the narrow-minded prudishness of Woollett people back home in New England.

A little later in this chapter Miss Gostrey asks him what he does in Woollett. He tells her that the town has a ‘Review’, financed by his fiancée Mrs Newsome (Chad’s mother), which he ‘not at all magnificently, edit[s]’. She asks what kind of review it is:

His serenity was now completely restored. “Well, it’s green.”

Mrs Newsome must be quite a ‘swell’, Miss Gostrey teases, and so must he; no, he insists, “that’s not the way it works”. She sees through his show of modesty: “you efface yourself”. He protests; his name is on the cover – this is what he’s ‘reduced to doing’ for himself:

“It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity.”

As we saw last time, when she got him to confess he can’t enjoy life as he should, she serves to expose his rather endearing lack of self-confidence; that wasn’t false modesty – he genuinely thinks he’s a “failure”. This scene, with its witty dialogue and comic tone, shows up the novel’s central theme: that Strether is a sad, Prufrock-like character who senses his inadequacy, which is worse than not knowing it.

This characterisation is reinforced a few sentences later. The Review, he tells Miss Gostrey, goes in for unpopular opinions – ‘”that is so far as we dare.” She presses him again:

”And how far do you dare?”

“Well, she very far. I much less. I don’t begin to have her faith.”

Like Prufrock, Strether longs to feel strong emotion, but doesn’t ‘dare’ disturb the universe. Leavis’s objection, that I wrote about in the first of these posts on The Ambassadors, was that what Paris represented – for Strether and for people in general – wasn’t fully ‘realized’. I disagree. Passages like this reveal, even before he gets to Paris, that his experience of Europe, where Miss Gostrey acts as not just a confidante but also as a catalyst, brings about an epiphany. He comes to see clearly the shortcomings and petty joyless puritanism and vulgarity of Woollett.  He’s forced to confront his timid passivity and submissiveness in his relations with the formidable Mrs Newsome and her set.

This theme is reinforced through the rest of the novel. In Book 4 ch. 1, Strether tells Chad in Paris quite openly about the purpose of his visit: “to make you break with everything”. Chad’s calm and dignified response is ‘disconcerting’ to him (this is another term often used of Strether). He perceives in Chad’s expression a kindness, because Chad can see Strether’s ‘disordered state’ – is even sorry for him. Once again Strether confronts the ludicrousness of his position. When Chad presses him to admit that his people assume he’s being detained in Paris by ‘some woman’: ‘“Is that…what they think at Woollett?”’, Strether ‘changed colour’, feeling he’s stated his case ‘stupidly’. He’s shown blushing on several occasions like this in the novel; his embarrassment is salutary. Chad concludes with a final, fateful thrust: ‘”I must say then you show a low mind!”’

Chad has completely turned the tables on Strether; once again he has been ‘pulled up’ by the young man’s superior worldliness; he’s exposed the ‘smugness’, ‘vulgarity’ and ‘pride’ that inspired Strether’s mission. The comic reversal has a serious side. Chad is later to be seen to be not entirely truthful in his representation of his relationship with Mme de Vionnet, the ‘wicked woman’. But Strether’s bumbling, unquestioning acceptance of Woollett values is being seriously undermined – to the extent that he starts to take Chad’s side. He’s repeatedly forced to acknowledge his own limitations, with reminders of ‘what he didn’t know’ – what was good or bad. He’s lost his way, and this mission is yet another of the many ‘mistakes’ he admits to on several occasions.

These are brought out most clearly in the famous scene in Book 5 ch.2, when Strether urges Chad’s young friend Little Bilham:

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

Bilham mustn’t leave it until too late, he insists, as he has.

“I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before – and now I’m too old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I do see, at least…It’s too late. And as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having the gumption to know it was there…Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t know quite which…at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake…don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”

He might ostensibly fail in his mission to bring Chad back into line with Woollett’s values (and paradoxically Chad reveals himself to be not so far removed from them after all), but in ‘failing better’ he finally starts to ‘see’, to ‘know’ more about himself. Leavis accused James of failing to show clearly what Strether learns – but that’s the whole point: he has to recognise he’s made mistakes, missed the train of life, as he put it, before he can start to be capable of living a fuller, more rewarding life.

His epiphany is brilliantly evoked in the final pages of the novel (Book 12 ch. 5). Having a farewell meal with Miss Gostrey, they discuss Chad’s decision to return willingly to Woollett  – a choice that now Strether perceives as the young man’s fickleness and heartless abandonment of Mme de Vionnet. Once again he’d misread the situation; Chad’s veneer of charm was not, as he’d come to believe, the nobility of a true ‘gentleman’.

Miss Godfrey asks if Strether might now be able to patch things up with his fiancée Mrs Newsome, given that he could make a case for not having failed in his mission to send the son home. No, he insists, all is over between them. She presses him: is he sure?

“Oh yes – sure now. Too much has happened. I’m different for her.”

…”I see. So that as she’s different for you-“

“Ah but,” he interrupted, “she’s not. And as Miss Gostrey wondered again: “She’s the same. She’s more than ever the same. But do what I didn’t before – I see her.”

The brilliance of the novel, to sum up, then, is that James presents in what’s outwardly a comedy of manners a sad, moving story of a disappointed man being changed utterly by his contact with European culture. He may not be truly enlightened as a consequence, but he is at least rendered capable of perceiving his shortcomings. In a novel in which ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ are constantly referenced, Strether is shown, with the subtlety and poise of a master of the genre, to learn something crucial about the change he’s undergone; to paraphrase Dylan in ‘Love Minus Zero’, he learns some truths about failure and success.

Henry James, The Ambassadors: initial thoughts

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Henry James, The Ambassadors. Penguin Classics, 2003. First published in 1903 in 12 instalments in The North American Review, then in book form the same year.

 This is not going to be a review of Henry James’s The Ambassadors – one of his notoriously ‘difficult’ late novels. It’s more an account of my experience of it. On reading it for the first time I found it such heavy going; I would read a page or two and find I’d taken in almost nothing of what was written. The style was so convoluted, there was so little happening – most of the text consists of highly civilised people having long conversations in which the characters’ meaning was almost never clearly or overtly stated.

When I’d finished the novel I reread (for the first time in many years) FR Leavis’s essay, ‘The Late James’, in The Great Tradition (1948) – a crucial influence on post-war English literary criticism that was being superseded by the ‘new criticism’ when I started my undergraduate studies in literature in the early seventies. Here’s a sample of his response to this novel.

The energy demanded for its reading, he begins, is ‘disproportionate to the issues…presented.’ As in the other late James novels, his technique had come ‘to exhibit an unhealthy vitality of undernourishment and etiolation…a tendency towards “overtreatment”…with its complexities and exhausting delicacies and its incapacity for directness’.  He suggests that the ‘trouble with the late style is that it exacts so intensely and inveterately analytic an attention that no sufficient bodied response builds up’. The reader doesn’t feel in this late style ‘a rich and lively sensibility freely functioning.’

Yes, I thought, that echoes and vindicates my own difficulties (and what I presumed to be deficiencies) in reading The Ambassadors.

In Leavis’s The Common Pursuit (1952) he’s even harsher. ‘The Ambassadors still seems to me so feeble a piece of word-spinning that I should have been inclined to dismiss it as merely senile if James hadn’t himself provided an explanation in telling us that it had been conceived as a short story [which James was then led mistakenly into] fluffing out…to the bulk and pretensions of a major work…[it remains] wholly boring.’ [Those ellipses are all mine.]

Yet James, in his Preface to the New York edition of the collected fiction, reproduced in this Penguin Classics edition, proclaimed it his personal favourite, ‘frankly, quite the best, “all round”, of all my productions.’ What was I missing? And as I read Leavis again I thought, no, that’s too harsh; this novel needs further scrutiny.

I started dipping into the text again to gather some thoughts and remind myself of the novel’s elements. As I did so my response to what I was rereading was very different from the negativity first time round, an initial reaction that chimed very much with Leavis’s. Returning to it was like reading a different novel – and confirmed, perhaps, the spirit of a statement I recall from my student days along the lines of ‘literary criticism is a reasoned discussion of one’s response to a second reading of a text’ (not an exact quotation, and I can’t remember who came up with the original, but I think that’s a reasonable approximation to the essence of the thing.)

So I shall now attempt to explain what I learned from this very different second reading.

The plot of The Ambassadors isn’t in the least complicated, and it’s not a spoiler I hope to summarise it here. Lambert Strether is a refined, buttoned-up New Englander dispatched by his formidable fiancée Mrs Newsome (she’s a widow) as her ‘ambassador’ to Paris to bring home her son Chad (who’s in his late twenties); she fears he’s been lured into a seedy relationship with a bad woman, and needs to be taken back to his rightful place at the head of the family manufacturing business. What could be simpler?

But once in Paris, Strether falls under its spell, and begins to have doubts about his mission – and the narrow-minded attitudes that sent him on it. He finds Chad to be more distinguished, sympathetic and kind than he remembered him as a younger man in New England – he’s become a true gentleman. And the woman with whom Chad is indeed involved, Comtesse Marie de Vionnet, he thinks is ‘wonderful’; he’s charmed by the two of them, and by the city (and woman) that he believes have brought about this transformation and improvement in the young man. He believes what he’s told: that theirs is a ‘virtuous’ relationship. Only when he chances upon the ocular evidence that they are, in fact, in a sexual liaison – sees them as they really are – is he forced to acknowledge the reality.

But that’s when the shape of the novel further develops what EM Forster called, in Aspects of the Novel (first published in 1927), the symmetrical shape or ‘pattern’ of an ‘hour-glass’ – a process that had already started to take shape when Strether began to have misgivings about his mission. He decides not to follow Mrs Newsome’s instructions, and urges Chad to stay in Paris, and not to abandon Mme de Vionnet – with whom he seems at times almost in love himself. To his dismay, Chad announces that’s precisely what he intends to do; he’s going willingly back to New England and will happily throw himself into his mother’s staid world of commerce and polite society. Strether realises that his hopes of marriage to Chad’s mother are now neither feasible nor desirable.

As I said at the start, I hope that summary doesn’t spoil any potential new reader’s enjoyment of the novel. I’d contend that its plot is its least interesting feature. What is of importance, it seems to me, is the way, to use one of Leavis’s favourite critical terms, it’s ‘realised’: the way Strether’s capacity for discrimination undergoes a radical shift. Although he never truly ‘sees’ other people and situations with full understanding, he does undergo a kind of epiphany. His famous advice to Chad’s young friend Little Bilham to ‘live’, enjoy his youth and life to the full, not to make the mistakes he himself had made in letting life pass him by, joyless, takes on a new significance. Although it may be too late for Strether to find the ‘reparation’ he hoped for, he can at least now acknowledge where (and how, perhaps why) he went wrong, and starts to see the likes of Chad, Marie, and, more especially Mrs Newsome, for who they really are.

Now I find I’ve gone on so long I haven’t adduced any evidence from the text to illustrate how I came to my own reading epiphany in responding to this novel, and came to appreciate its subtlety and intelligence. Second time round I also found it remarkably witty, at times very humorous and funny. Yes, the style will always seem over-elaborate and requiring hard work from the reader, but I’d urge you to persevere, if you struggle with its often baffling, meandering syntax, to find the rewards of the ‘genius’, as even Leavis acknowledged, in James’s fiction. Not for nothing did he place Henry James prominently among his top three novelists in the great tradition of literature written in English. So I’m going to need at least a second post to try to show what it is in the text, the language and technique of James that caused the scales finally to fall from my eyes – in a way rather like they did for Strether.

Sebastian Faulks, Paris Echo

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Sebastian Faulks, Paris Echo. Vintage paperback,2019. First published in hardback by Hutchinson, 2018

A central theme in this novel is the way the past seeps, as through a ‘semi-permeable membrane’, into the present. The Paris of 2006, where the main action is set, is haunted by the past: in the canonised historical figures and places whose names are commemorated in the names of Métro stations, squares, streets and so on; and more poignantly in the ordinary people who walk those modern streets and squares in the footsteps, as it were, of their antecedents.

Faulks Paris Echo coverThis is most movingly apparent in the audio files accessed from an archive by one of the two central characters (their voices narrate the chapters in a kind of counterpoint). Hannah is an American scholar in her early thirties, researching the part played during the Occupation of WWII by Parisian women. We are given full versions of the transcripts of two of these women, one from the seedier side of the city familiar to the young Édith Piaf, struggling to maintain moral and physical integrity when faced by the sexual importuning of German soldiers with money to burn, and the other from a different world.

The choices they make and shocking, terrible dilemmas they face are sensitively handled by Faulks. One plot twist left me gasping.

I’m less impressed by his choice of the two voices I mentioned. One is of a nineteen-year-old Moroccan lad called Tariq, who’s smuggled himself illegally into the capital of the former colonial ruler of his homeland with the vague aim of finding out something about his half-French mother, who spent her earlier years there. This enables Faulks to indulge in some important, sometimes heavy-handed consideration of France’s often oppressive and brutal colonialist history, and of the plight of immigrants in the 21C city – marginalised and mostly scratching a living, as Tariq ends up doing, in sleazy dead-end jobs like fast-food joints. Two cities, two nations.

At least Tariq’s voice enables Faulks to inject some much needed humour into this dark, disturbing story of historically layered or textured narratives of oppression and hardship, both during the Nazi occupation, and in the modern incarnation of the city. His narcissism, sexual urgency and being constantly hungry are often hilariously apparent; his callow disingenuousness, lack of common sense but basic integrity and decency – with some lapses – also ring true.

Hannah is a less convincing narrator. She’s emotionally scarred and numbed by an ill-advised love affair some years earlier, and Faulks’s providing her with the possibility of romantic redemption is handled, to my mind, rather too conveniently and clunkily.

The author clearly knows Paris intimately, and he brings it sensually to life – especially that dark underbelly noted above that tourists and the fashionable rich rarely see. Tariq serves as a kind of Candide figure, blissfully ignorant of the significance of the names of his beloved metro stations. This causes me to re-examine received notions of such names as Monet or Stalingrad and what they could signify to someone not from a western European culture – and what they say about that culture.

I liked the magical-realist way in which Faulks has figures from the past seem to appear in the flesh in modern Paris. Some embody Tariq’s desperate wish to establish an identity for himself in the living archive of the city, and more pertinently to know and see his late mother in the city, providing him with a personal connection to this alien city which has so far in his young life been only obliquely experienced through its political-historical impact on his homeland.

Others fulfil Hannah’s more academic longing (partly a response also to her emotionally empty life) to animate the past more immediately than historiography allows. The electronic voices she listens to in the archive take on flesh and blood, in a way: this is how history could look, if we had eyes to see, Faulks seems to be saying. Mostly this works.

The puppeteer/beggar on the metro, Victor Hugo, is a more playful example of the ghostly presences that populate this novel as vividly as the supposedly living ones. An epigraph on the first page is a quotation from Hugo’s L’Homme Qui Rit (never heard of it), which gives the book its title. It translates as:

What is history? An echo of the past in the future. A shadow (or reflection) of the future on the past.

There’s a lively interview with Faulks by Sam Leith at the Spectator books podcast from September last year, where I learned that the dedication to ‘Hector’ is to his dog. Why not?!

 

 

Walter Benjamin, flâneurs, the historical shudder, lorettes and Paul Gavarni

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Flânerie again: I turned again today to the opening section of Benjamin’s Convolute M in The Arcades Project, ‘The Flâneur’, a concept which has featured several times here on the blog (dérives in Paris and elsewhere, for example). That’s it in my picture below.

From p. 416 of The Arcades Project

From p. 416 of The Arcades Project

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a helpful introduction to the notion of the flâneur as Benjamin sees it. He’s scornful of that usage which is found too often nowadays, too: the ‘idler’ or ‘tourist’, wandering ‘capriciously’ as Henry James put it, through the urban streets. His is a more charged sense, a key term in his kaleidoscopic presentation of the significance of the city of Paris and its inhabitants in the 19C.

Notre Dame de Lorette, Paris

Bizet and Monet were baptised in this church: 1840 and 1841 respectively. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons

I was unfamiliar with the church of ND de Lorette, mentioned there. After a bit of digging online, this is what I came up with:

It’s a church (building started in 1823) on the edge of the 9th arrondissement of Paris, near Pigalle and just south of Montmartre. That is, the red light district. Ah ha.

So I looked up ‘lorette‘ in the OED online (that superb free resource, thanks to Cornwall Library Service):

 A courtesan of a class which at one time had its headquarters in the vicinity of the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette in Paris.

Google took me to this website: France in the Age of Les Misérables. Here I found the following quotations:

“The middle ground between street prostitute and grand dame of commercial sex, the courtesan, lorette became an umbrella term for the kept women set up discreetly in a private apartment by a businessman, professional, or wealthy student… Always elegantly dressed, the lorette peeps out coyly from a theatre box, engages in double entendre with male admirers at a masked ball, displays herself while enjoying the view from her apartment window… the lorette slid imperceptibly across the boundaries of acceptability and social stigma.”

The lorette was bound in many ways by the codes of polite society and yet, was not embraced as a part of that same society. “On the boulevards, she was virtually indistinguishable in costume and appearance from the more fashionable among her lover’s female relations. And in a sense, for men she was quintessentially public property – to be discussed, admired, acquired… In other words there was a radical mismatch between the social and moral codes marking out the lorette within ‘respectable’ society and the way she gained public representation in the spectacle of the metropolis.” (The lorette was essentially a decoration for her lovers, something to be admired and used as needed, but not something for everyday inclusion into society.)

(Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and bourgeois culture in 19th century France by Nicholas Green, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1990.

She would be, in Benjamin’s view, a perfect example of the exploitation of the urban poor. Here’s what he says at p. 446:

“We know,” says Marx, “that the value of each commodity is determined by the quantity of labor materialized in its use value, by the working-time socially necessary for its production.”

This would apply as much for the journalist as the courtesan or lorette.

Also mentioned in that opening section in my picture at the start is [Paul] Gavarni. This was the nom de plume of Sulpice Chevalier, a Parisian artist-illustrator (1804-66), noted for his magazine images of characters and scenes of Parisian life. He also illustrated the first collected edition in 1850 of Balzac’s works. So Benjamin’s words resonate at many levels.

Here’s Gavarni’s drawing of a dandy – another central figure in Benjamin, close relation to the flâneur:

[Attribution: By Pline – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

In April last year I wrote more on The Arcades Project

This section of the book begins with a number of epigraphs, including this by Mallarmé:

‘A landscape haunts, intense as opium’

Below is my picture of the title page, which gives bibliographical details.

Arcades Project title page

 

 

 

Tilling and sowing: the Très Riches Heures in October

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It’s the first day of the month, and I intended writing about the last book I read: another Barbara Comyns novel – Sisters by a River. I wrote about Our Spoons Came from Woolworths in a post in January. But I find I don’t have much to say about it right now. Might come back to it shortly, if I feel inspiration.

So as I did for April and May, I’m turning to the beautifully illuminated pages of the calendar in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, painted mostly by the Limbourg brothers in the early 1400s, although this page might be by a later artist who completed the work after the Limbourgs and their patron died (probably of the plague) in 1416.

A book of hours was a book of private prayers and devotions based on the church liturgical pattern. The kalendarium in medieval texts was originally a checklist of saints’ festivals for each month. Over time the tradition evolved so that illustrated versions included, by the 15C, scenes of the occupations associated with each month.

The Limbourgs painted landscapes from different scenes for most months – places owned by their noble patron, or which he’d visited, as here.

October in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

via Wikimedia Commons

In the background of the October sowing and tilling scene is the Louvre Palace, owned at that time by the Duc’s elder brother the king of France. Originally built in the 12C as a fortress, the Louvre was converted into the main royal residence late in the 16C. When Louis XIV made Versailles his main palace in 1782, the Louvre became largely a repository for the royal collection of artworks. This in turn was taken over as a public museum after the Revolution.

Its name perhaps derives from its origins as a wolf-hunting den (Latin ‘lupus’, wolf), according to Wikipedia, but this seems unlikely to me. OED cites a dance named in English from the French palace, but says the origin is obscure, and possibly derived from Latin and Icelandic terms for chimney.

Between the three towers on the palace’s outer wall are two bretèches (anglicised as ‘brattice’). These are small machicolated balconies. Machicolated? This means an opening between the projecting supports or corbels of a fortification’s wall through which missiles, boiling water or cooking oil, etc., could be dropped on to attackers beneath the walls. The word probably derives from OF ‘mâcher’, ‘crush’ + ‘col’, ‘neck’ (OED online).

On the terrace outside the palace walls can be seen people walking and chatting (presumably not peasants, and therefore they don’t have to labour in the fields). Several dogs prance and pose. At the bottom of riparian steps women appear to be doing their laundry in the water of the Seine, which flows in front of the palace. A boatman is embarking or arriving at a mooring.

It’s in the foreground that the main ‘labour of the month’ scene is depicted. A red-clad peasant whips on a horse pulling a harrow, weighted down with a rock to make the prongs dig deeper into the soil and thus bury the sown seeds. Nearer to us another lugubrious looking peasant sows seed by hand from a pouch. Behind him greedy crows and magpies gobble up what he’s sown.

The artist shows a nice eye for detail: we can see the footprints left in the freshly-turned earth by the sower.

The field behind has already been sown. It’s guarded by a scarecrow in the guise of a bowman, and a network of strings threaded with white feathers or rags.

Overhead there’s the usual solar chariot crossing the gorgeous blue of the arch of the starry heavens. There are the usual astrological and lunar cycle symbols around the outer arches.

Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Moveable Feast’ – review part I

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PART ONE (of two)

A Moveable Feast  (Vintage, London, 2000; first published
England and the US by Scribners, 1964) begins with this epigraph:

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.

Hemingway with his second wife Pauline, Paris 1927 (photo: WikiCommons)

Hemingway with his second wife Pauline, Paris 1927 (photo: WikiCommons)

The words were apparently addressed to Hemingway by his friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner.   The title has a Christian liturgical origin (Easter being the most notable example). Having converted to Catholicism shortly before marrying his second wife, Pauline, who came from an Arkansas Catholic family, Hemingway may have chosen this phrase because it resonates with her faith and his relationship with her – she appears only in the final few pages – rather than with his first wife, Hadley, who inhabits the rest of the story.  Given his tendency to abandon his wives before they dumped him (possibly a consequence of his painful experience of being dropped by Agnes von Kurowsky in Italy, 1919 – he based his character Catherine on her in his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms) this seems a little disingenuous.

Hemingway (1899-1961) placed this epigraph at the head of A Moveable Feast, his memoir of life in Paris 1921-26 with Hadley.   In 1928 he had deposited many of his notebooks and papers containing his record of his sojourn in the city in two trunks in the basement of the Paris Ritz, and did not reclaim them until 1956.  According to a note in the text by his fourth wife Mary, who edited the manuscript after his death, he started work on what became A Moveable Feast in Cuba in late 1957, and continued working on it in America and Cuba again for two more years.  He finished it in 1960, but continued making revisions to the text.  It was published three years after his death in 1964 by Scribners of New York.  I have not yet read the revised edition published in 2009 by his grandson Sean.

Hemingway, Hadley and Bumby in Schruns, Austria, 1925 or early 1926 (Wiki)

Hemingway, Hadley and Bumby in Schruns, Austria, 1925 or early 1926 – interesting body language (WikiCommons)

I don’t find Hemingway the most likeable of characters.  He enjoyed big-game hunting and fishing, bullfights, boxing and projected a macho image of himself.  This book is highly engaging, however, mostly for its gossipy anecdotes about the expat writers and artists of ‘the Lost Generation’ in post-war Paris, and his lucid descriptions of living in the poorer quarters with Hadley and baby John (always known as Bumby, who was born in 1923), as a struggling young writer: ‘Home in the rue Cardinal Lemoine was a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic container’.  ‘Hunger was a good discipline’ is the title of one chapter, in which he claims he often skipped meals, taking circuitous rambles along routes that deliberately avoided restaurants or food shops.  He tells how they struggled to afford firewood, which had to be carefully rationed, as their food was.

Hemingway in Paris, 1924 (JFK Library, via WikiCommons)

Hemingway in dashing bohemian pose, Paris, 1924 (JFK Library, via WikiCommons)

The picture of 20s Paris is delightful, if romantically fictionalised: goatherds drive their flocks through the city selling milk.   There’s an awful lot of description of meals taken on the rare occasions when they were in funds (often from winning after serious gambling at the horse race track), when they’d happily splurge in expensive restaurants.  But he paints a picture of life with Hadley in near squalor as happy and glowing in the warmth of their idyllic love, as this typically breathless sentence shows, with its characteristic paratactic syntax and patterned repetitions:

Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, not the moonlight, nor right and wrong, nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

All of this is cast away at the end of the book when Hemingway callously embarks on an affair with their mutual friend Pauline.  He and Hadley divorced in 1927.  I’ll return to this rather unedifying finale to the book in Part II of this review: link HERE. For a link to my review of Paula McLain’s fictional treatment of the marriage of Hemingway and Hadley, The Paris Wife, click here

Although the poverty he claims that he and Hadley endured during the period covered by the book has subsequently been questioned by scholars, it does make for a fascinating narrative of bohemian, artistic Latin Quarter life in the 20s, well told by a master craftsman.

Buffalo velodrome 1905
Buffalo velodrome 1905

 

The book is teeming with carefully observed details, like the vivid description of the Belgian cycling ace, Linart,  zooming round the banked track at the Stade Buffalo, the velodrome at Montrouge, ‘dropping his head to drink cherry brandy from a rubber tube that connected with a hot water bottle under his racing shirt when he needed it toward the end as he increased his savage speed.’

Fitzgerald's picture at the Bar Hemingway, Paris Ritz

Fitzgerald’s picture at the Bar Hemingway, Paris Ritz

There are twenty short chapters (the book is only 182 pages long), mostly of only three or four pages; several of the most intriguing feature F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom he is presented as having a curious love-hate relationship.  In the longest chapter in the book we see the moment when they first met, in 1925, shortly after The Great Gatsby had been published – a novel Hemingway admired – in a café, of course (most of the narrative in this book takes place in cafés or restaurants; that’s where the artistic set lived, worked and socialised) – Hemingway reports how Fitzgerald abruptly asked him if he’d slept with his wife before marriage; with Hemingway’s usual tough-guy brevity and sardonic coolness he replies:

‘I don’t remember.’

‘But how can you not remember something of such importance?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.  ‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’…

‘Don’t talk like some limey,’ he said.

Fitzgerald then turned deathly pale, and Hemingway had to help him home.  He’s convinced that Fitzgerald was as heavy a drinker as he was, but is typically scornful that he couldn’t hold his drink as well as Hemingway himself says he does.  He also upbraids Fitzgerald for ‘whoring’ his talent by shaping and revising his stories to suit the lucrative magazine market, and portrays himself in the rather flattering light he favours:

I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way except the very best he could write without destroying his talent…Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

In an earlier chapter he says revealingly (if not exactly modestly) of his vocation: ‘All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence you know.’  When Fitzgerald tells him Gatsby isn’t selling and that he has to write stories that will sell, Hemingway bluntly replies: ‘Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.’

He puts this into practice in nearly all of his best writing, including in A Moveable Feast, saying how he’d throw away anything ‘elaborate’, any ‘scrollwork or ornament’.  He relates his ‘new theory’ for short story writing:

[Y]ou 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.

This book is also written in this trademark style: short, unadorned declarative sentences with few adjectives and largely simple vocabulary.  At their best these sentences are inimitably beautiful.  But what a shame Hem makes it so clear that he thinks so, too…

PART TWO link here: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and others