‘In those days, there was no money to buy books.’
Hemingway’s Paris memoir, published posthumously in 1964, pieces together fragments of his early years as a struggling writer in the early 1920s when money was hard to come by and reading, writing, wine and young love were enough to sustain even the hungriest of artists. At least for a while.
The frequent references to bars and cafes quickly evoke a strong sense of Parisian culture and serve as a recognizable, if not a little nostalgic, backdrop for the intense yet casual meetings held by the young literary circles and it is in these settings that we meet many of the notable figures of the time – James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, to name a few. Detours around the backstreets of the city offer glimpses of artists’ studios and minimalist writers’ rooms, often found near Montparnasse Cemetery, which leaves the reader with the sense that something important has been lost since those early post-war years; simple living, humble beginnings, youth, and the tension between satisfaction and longing that comes from all three.
A Moveable Feast is often thought of as a book about people, a rare glimpse into the literary greats we have all come to ‘know’. And yet to me the book is more about the enduring nature of simplicity, of Paris itself and a moment in time when a purer sense of bohemia existed and young writers were free to obsess over their art.
