Book Review: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is a memoir about his time in Paris as a budding writer. It reads as fiction and delves into his writing technique and his relationships with other writers in Paris at the time, including Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitgerald, T. S. Eliot, among others. This is a very quick read, written in approachable language, and is actually quite gossipy. 

I’m not sure if Hemingway’s discussion of writing inspired me to write more or discouraged me from believing I could. Perhaps because he was such a disciplined and regimented writer, and although he shared moments of writer’s block, he also seemed dismissive of those who had a worse time of it than he did. He said to a fellow writer “You shouldn’t write if you can’t write,” though telling him to give up could’ve been a product of a particularly bad mood. But hearing a writer talk about the craft of writing, techniques, and how to be disciplined also romanticized writing a bit and made me want to get back into it on a more regular basis.

The memoir has a signature Hemingway blend of self-awareness and avoidance, where it makes you wonder if the latter is really just Hemingway’s theory of “omission,” whether he needs therapy or if it’s an intentional literary technique. I particularly wondered this during the last two pages of the book, where Hemingway mentions his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer while he was still married to Hadley. He definitely distances himself from the situation, using “you” and referring to the incident in generalized terms, making me wonder if he was avoiding responsibility or if he was using his own life as an opportunity to use his favorite literary technique of omission so that the omitted part “would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

The gossipy parts of the memoir were the controversial depictions of well-known names (especially of Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, and F Scott Fitzgerald) which I half respect, half think is a bit shady to say the least. They weren’t incredibly flattering depictions, though Hemingway at least pretended to try for partiality and fairness. It was interesting nonetheless to read his interpretations of their character and their relationships.There is definitely question of Hemingway’s reliability, which he kind of addresses himself in his preface, saying some readers may wish to regard the memoir as a work of fiction.