You may have heard that a restored edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was published this month. Once Hemingway’s papers were released in 1979, scholars have since studied the changes that were made to the original manuscript under the direction of his widow, Mary Hemingway, and Harry Brague of Scribner’s.
Hemingway’s grandson, Sean, describes the restored edition in the introduction: “Presented here for the first time is Ernest Hemingway’s original manuscript as he had left it at the time of his death in 1961. Although Hemingway had completed several drafts of the main text in prior years, he had not written an introduction, nor had he decided on a title. In fact, Hemingway continued to work on the book at least into April of 1961” (2).
Some of the changes in the restored addition include: the addition of ten incomplete chapters; the reordering of chapters in chronological order; and the inclusion of material relating to Hemingway’s love affairs which would have been sensitive to Mary Hemingway.
In March 1928, Hemingway poses with Sylvia Beach and friends in front of her bookstore, Shakespeare & Company. From the time it opened in 1919 until closed its doors in 1941 because of the war, the shop was a popular gathering place for writers and artists on the Left Bank. Books were for sale, but Beach also had a lending library, and Hemingway frequently borrowed books (Plath 65).
The title, A Moveable Feast, is not written anywhere in the original text and was actually suggested to Mary by a friend of Hemingway’s. Many of you may recall the quote:
“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” (XIII).
I never read the 1964 edition of A Moveable Feast. In college, I managed to read only one Hemingway novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, without much effect on my psyche. However, this last week my emotions have been sent into a twirl. A Moveable Feast, to say the least, is a charming book, but for those individuals who have spent any considerable length of time living in a foreign country, it may have a particular effect. I lived in Austria for four years and have since then tried to synthesize this experience with my subsequent professional and personal choices in the United States. Austria is my moveable feast.
Hemingway’s son, Patrick, elaborates eloquently in the Foreword on the idea of a moveable feast: “In later life the idea of a moveable feast for Hemingway became something very much like what King Harry wanted St. Crispin’s Feast Day to be for “we happy few”: a memory or even a state of being that has become a part of you, a thing that you could always have with you, no matter where you went or how you lived forever after, that you could never lose. An experience first fixed in time and space or a condition like happiness or love could be afterward moved or carried with you wherever you went in space and time” (XIV).
My walk from one campus to another along the Dornbirner Ach
Since I came back to the States I have never wanted to romanticize Austria or Europe. From the age of 25 to 29, certainly I was there long enough to have every experience and emotion imaginable even while the landscape was a picture postcard. As I read Moveable Feast, I also try not to romanticize Paris, Hemingway, or that time period.
It snowed relentlessly through February and March of my last year in Dornbirn, Austria.
Patrick Hemingway writes that his father had many moveable feasts, one of them being his D-Day landing on Omaha Beach. So we must all have our own variable moveable feasts. Each one is our own memory of the time and place; and our remembrance reflects our current place in time and space.
Patrick also includes the last of his father’s professional writing, a true introduction for A Moveable Feast: “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist”(XIV).
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The cover of my copy of The Prime of Life which I so fortunately happened upon in a bookshop in Zurich.
My favorite memoir, The Prime of Life, by Simone de Beauvoir is sadly out-of-print in the U.S. Beauvoir was a French writer and philosopher who had a long relationship with Jean-Paul Sarte.
Although I had lived alone for years, living abroad gave me an ever larger sense of freedom and possibility. I thoroughly identified with Beauvoir’s thoughts after getting her first teaching position: “The most intoxicating aspect of my return to Paris . . . was the freedom I now possessed . . . From the moment I opened my eyes every morning I was lost in a transport of delight . . . I too had a room to myself . . . I papered the walls orange . . . I could get home with the milk, read in bed all night, sleep till midday, shut myself up for forty-eight hours at a stretch, or go out on the spur of the moment . . . I felt like I was on vacation forever . . . I remember how tickled I was when I got my first salary cheque. I felt like I had played a practical joke on someone” (11-12).
See? I just fall from one memoir to another . . . maybe it’s okay to get lost in a romanticized past. I guess it is the gift of compensation that comes when we have left a time and place.
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