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A Moveable Feast
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A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s. In addition to painting a picture of Hemingway's time as a struggling young writer, the book also sketches the story of Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley.
A Moveable Feast is considered by many to contain some of his best writing.
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A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s. In addition to painting a picture of Hemingway's time as a struggling young writer, the book also sketches the story of Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley.
A Moveable Feast is considered by many to contain some of his best writing. Some of the prominent people to make an appearance in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, Pascin, John Dos Passos, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. The book was edited by Ernest's fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, and published in 1964, four years after Hemingway's death.
The book contains Hemingway's personal accounts, observations, and stories of his experience in 1920s Paris. He provides the detail of specific addresses of cafes, bars, hotels, and apartments that still can be found in modern day Paris. The title was suggested by Hemingway's friend A.E. Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway, and comes from a conversation the two once had about the city during Hotchner's first visits there.
Editing by Mary Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway worked on the manuscript of A Moveable Feast during his later years, painstakingly rewriting several key passages, and had prepared a final draft before he died. After his death, however, his fourth wife, Mary, in her capacity as Hemingway's literary executor, engaged in extensive editing. Literary scholar Gerry Brenner from the University of Montana documents her edits and questions their validity in many cases in his paper, "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?", concluding that some of them were misguided, and others derived from questionable motives. This would contradict with Mary's stated policy for her role as executor, which had been an avowed hands-off approach.
After examining the vast collection of Ernest Hemingway's personal papers, which were opened to the public in 1979 with the opening of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and included notes and initial drafts of A Moveable Feast, Brenner indicates that Mary changed the order of the chapters in Hemingway's final draft, to "preserve chronology". Brenner notes how this seems to disrupt the intent of the book, interrupting the series of juxtaposed character sketches between such individuals as Sylvia Beach (owner of the bookstore "Shakespeare and Company") and Gertrude Stein. Additionally, Brenner points out that one whole chapter, titled "Birth of a New School", which had been dropped by Hemingway altogether, was inserted back in by Mary without sufficient justification in its contents or execution.
By far the most serious edit, Brenner alleges, is that Mary deleted a lengthy apology to Hadley, Hemingway's first wife and perhaps intended heroine. This apology appeared in various forms in every draft of the book, and Brenner suggests that Mary deleted it because it impugned her own role as wife with its implications that Hadley was the most important spouse.
Implications of sexual identity and androgyny
Other literary critics, such as J. Gerald Kennedy of Louisiana State University, have pointed out the artificially heroic nature of Hemingway's portrait of himself as revealed in A Moveable Feast, and contrasted it with the sexual ambiguity and fascination with androgyny found in another of his unfinished works, The Garden of Eden. In "Hemingway's Gender Trouble", Kennedy examines how textual evidence from both the published versions and papers from the JFK collection seem to project a contrasting picture of Hemingway's sexuality. Noting that the clumsy "created" nature of the young Hemingway in A Moveable Feast is well-established as fraudulent (Hemingway would have had access to large sums of money during the time he was in Paris, yet portrayed himself as "starving"), Kennedy points out that Hemingway writes of himself as seemingly the only person in his literary circle in Paris who was sexually stable and healthy, contrasting himself with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. This self-assured image, however, is in stark contrast with the confused and experimenting protagonist of The Garden of Eden.
Kennedy notes significant textual clues, such as a fascination with androgynous haircuts and the redacted sections of A Moveable Feast that refer to the time during which Hemingway was having an affair with his second wife Pauline while still married to Hadley, and draws the conclusion that this obsession with indistinct gendering was central to Hemingway's character, something previously alleged by critics Mark Spilka and particularly biographer Kenneth Lynn.
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