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Hemingway's Paris: A Moveable Feast Revisited
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17071 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
8,810 Words |
| Author
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Philip Gerard
Philip Gerard is the author of eight books, most recently
Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II's Heroic Army of
Deception (Dutton, 2002). He holds a Distinguished Teaching
Professorship in the creative writing department of the
University of North Carolina at Wilmington. |
"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."
- Ernest Hemingway
I came to Paris to find Ernest Hemingway.
The occasion was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Scribners' publications of A Moveable Feast, the remarkable memoir of his formative years in Paris between the wars, published posthumously. 1990, of course, is the semicentennial of the fall of Paris to the Nazis, when German tanks rolled down the Champs Elysees and the world Hemingway had known in the City of Lights was eclipsed by a new barbarism.
John Cheever once remarked that he was among the last generation of American men to wear hats. I claim to be among the last generation of American writers who, mistakenly or not, found in Hemingway a model, not just of great writing, but of a great life.
Even now, twenty eight years after his shotgun suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, biographical gossip of him is news: His private letters have been published against his own explicit wishes; friends, wives, and family members have crowded the bookshelves with their respective inside account; now the "lost" diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, including love letters to young Hemingway, has found its way between covers, confirming she was indeed the real-life counterpart of Catherine Barkley, heroine of A Farewell to Arms. Even the X-rays of Hemingway's war wounds are now available to the public.
Hemingway may be the last American writer whose life still inspires a scrutiny equal to that of his work. He has been called, variously, a man's man, an incorrigible bully, a natural genius, a hack with a great editor, a shameless adventurer, a repressed homosexual, a homophobic womanizer, a great liar, a real-life hero, and the father of the modern American novel.
My own connection with Hemingway is tenuous and a bit haunting: My former editor at Scribners, Tom Jenks, who brought out my first novel, had just finished editing Hemingway's last posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden, before taking me on.
So Papa and I shared at last the same
...
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