A Moveable Feast
What is a movable feast? Perhaps a dining creation!
To Hemingway it was Paris, a writer's inspiration!
For us its a marvelous read, beckoning back to French nation!
But for today it is our blog post: Hemingway's Birthday Celebration!
© F.W. Heaton. July 2017
What is a moveable feast? To some, it is a sumptuous dining event enjoyed over multiple locations. To Ernest Hemingway, however, it was Paris! Paris, France, in the early 1920's, was the place to be if you were young, good at your craft, and desiring to be great in your craft, regardless of the nature of your craft—physician, architect, sculptor, philosopher, painter, playwright, musician, writer, et. al. Hemingway was a fledgling writer, earning most of his income as a journalist, yet aspiring to become an accomplished writer. He, thus, put himself in position to learn from the many writers gathering in Paris to both influence and learn from the greats or up-and-comings in their profession. From 1921 to 1926, Hemingway soaked all of this in. But Hemingway was no mere sponge; his inclination was to explore, to face new dangers, to achieve new adventures. And his powers of observation and memory were masterful.
Having filled notebooks with his observations, beginning manuscripts, notations of events, ideas, and people covering those six formative years, Hemingway, on his departure from Paris toward the end of the decade, put the notebooks and personal items in two steamer trunks, asking the management of The Ritz Hotel to hold them for his return. In the succeeding thirty or so years, he apparently forgot about the trunks and contents. Then, in 1956, having been reminded by Charles Ritz, Ritz’ Chairman, of the two trunks stored all these years in their basement storage room, Hemingway gratefully retrieved the trunks, recovered his long-lost notebooks, and set about pulling together the notations, desiring to complete this manuscript as his memoir of those critical years. Although almost completed via multiple attempts from 1957 to 1960, Hemingway was unable to fully complete the work.
Tragically, Hemingway died of suicide in 1961. Over the next three years, Hemingway’s friend and biographer, A. E. Hotchner, and Hemingway’s fourth wife and widow, Mary, completed the organization of the writings, titled it with Hemingway’s own description of Paris, “A Moveable Feast”, and had it published by Scribner’s in 1964. There is some controversy about the subsequent publication of the work; we prefer Hotchner’s evaluation that the 1964 Scribner’s publication is closest to Hemingway’s original intent.
On a trip to Paris Dec13/Jan14 researching Hemingway and this period of his life, Mary & I enjoyed our own version of a moveable feast, dining only in cafés in which Hemingway et. al. dined: Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots, and others, all still going strong in cuisine, ambience and clientele as opposed to trading on their name. When we tried to visit The Ritz to thank the GM (although a subsequent GM) for his/her establishment's astonishing thirty-year safe storage of Hemingway's trunks, we found the hotel closed for four years' renovation, reopening in 2016. We're in hopes we’ll accomplish this delayed desire on our upcoming visit this Dec/Jan. So, there you have it—a moving story about a very moveable feast and an extraordinary story of literary achievement and preservation! Born 118 years ago today, 21 July 1899: Happy Birthday, "Papa" Hemingway!