A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway

Me at Shakespeare and Company, Paris

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s memoir of his early days in Paris and his friendships with literary figures such as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It presents a romantic image of a starving artist, unable to afford wood for heating, gambling on horse racing to escape the bread line, but working everyday with great dedication to perfect his craft.

Hemingway’s portrayal of his first wife, Hadley, is full of affection and regret.  “[W]e were very poor and very happy”.  This contrasts with how he depicts his more famous relationships.  His Stein is a semi-tyrannical gossip lacking discipline towards her work.  Scott Fitzegerald was a neurotic alcoholic.  Zelda Fitzgerald was a manipulative and promiscuous harpy.  Only Ezra Pound completely escapes his vitriol.  The book is both a cautionary tale on the trappings of riches and success, and a surprisingly bitchy tell-all.

Indian Camp – Ernest Hemingway

Describe it

The first Nick Adams short story from In Our Time, in which Nick’s father, a doctor, takes him to an Indian camp to see a complicated birth.  Described by one critic as the “master key” to Hemingway’s writing.

What I loved

It all rings true.  One of my favourite Hemingway quotes from The Green Hills of Africa goes:

“First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive.”

Perhaps the most striking word in this quote is “disinterested”, which seems a strange trait to encourage in writers.  By this, I believe that Hemingway meant that a good writer must have the ability to take a step back and observe life, dispassionately, unblinkered by dogma or fear, never turning away from notions that society deems unacceptable.

In Indian Camp, Hemingway’s commitment to truthfulness can be seen in his exploration of masculinity, one of his chief preoccupations. 

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway [Round 2!]

Describe it

In its story of the idle, hedonistic elite, it expresses the anxieties of the modern age – the passing of the old world, the new roles of the sexes, and man’s loss of faith in God, in ideals, in himself. Read it.

What I loved

The spare beauty and vigour of Hemingway’s prose. The strength of an active sentence, the power of that perfect verb.

It made me want to dance and drink whisky in Paris, and fish and drink wine chilled in a mountain stream in the mountains of Spain, and see a bullfight and drink from a wine skin in Pamploma. To say damn this and damn that, and “What a lot of rot” and “To hell with you, Lady Ashley.”

Green Hills of Africa – Ernest Hemingway

Green Hills of Africa has aged as gracefully as its diabetic, alcoholic, suicidal author did.  Firstly, it’s all about big game hunting: Hemingway and his wife and his mates tramp around Africa blowing away lions, rhinos, cheetahs and anything else that moves, presumably so the animal’s dismembered body parts can make a nice conversation piece in their living rooms.

Secondly, it’s all about manly men doing manly men things, with the only significant female character being Hemingway’s wife, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, referred to as P.O.M. (don’t ask me to explain the acronym).  And while she is tenacious – tenacious enough, in fact, to make old Papa liken her to a “terrier”, which she understandably objects to – she is usually relegated to the role of cheer squad in Hemingway’s war against African Bambi’s mother.

And thirdly, Hemingway’s use of native trackers and porters to carry his trophies and eskies of beer has more than a whiff of colonialism and is the kind of unequal economic relationship that makes people very, very uncomfortable nowadays.

But to hell with all of that.  Green Hills of Africa proves that a good author can make any subject interesting, even one that you previously had an aversion to.  It’s also a memoir, meaning that it’s full of insights into man himself that Hemingway tragics like me can slaver over.

Across the River and Into the Trees – Ernest Hemingway

Review by Gabriel

It’s hard to say one of your favourite authors has written an average novel.  After finishing For Whom the Bell Tolls, I thought I’d go on a Hemingway binge, hoping to encounter the same level of genius, and because there is something comforting about his simple, dynamic prose and hard-boiled characters.  Across the River and Into the Trees was disappointing enough to halt my binge just as it was getting started.  Here’s why

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

review by Gabriel

For wanna-be writers, Hemingway is a brutal read.  His writing style is deceptively simple and the compulsion to imitate him is irresistable.  But the depths of his insight into humanity and his skill with characterisation and dialogue set a standard that is impossible to attain.  Then there’s the fact that the man himself had a damn (and I’ve become addicted to that word since reading Hemingway) interesting life.  Served in WWI, covered the Spanish Civil War, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Loved bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing.  If it wasn’t for the alcoholism, mythomania and suicide, it would be an enviable life.  And in For Whom the Bell Tolls, all of his skill and experience converge to make a near perfect novel.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

review by Gabriel

I didn’t grasp a lot of this book.  Of course, I enjoyed it.  Hell, it’s Hemingway – I loved it.  But I missed its significance due to my ignorance of the historical context, and my failure to pick up its subtleties.  As a result, I understood Fiesta only as a story about hedonism and ennui.  Masterfully written with engaging characters, but essentially superficial.  A seductive account of the privileged class having fun in an exotic locale.  I picked up on the theme of masculinity, but couldn’t understand what Hemingway was trying to get at.  I knew I was missing something.  It turns out, there were two key things I was missing.