"There is never any end to Paris."

On A Moveable Feast

As I mentioned in another blog, one book I wanted to read while I was here was A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.

Before starting even a page, I thought about the movie Midnight in Paris.  I pictured the writers and painters bouncing all over Europe, writing incessantly, sweating over words, drinking in the bars at night, and enjoying a loud meal with friends.  How could they have known they were part of their own elite club, to be admired years after their deaths, and for many years to come?

The book was published posthumously, which I cannot even imagine for a book of my own.  I wonder if Hemingway would had liked the finished product.  Writers are very particular about their work, and from the descriptions I have read of Hemingway I have the impression of him being even more so.

In actuality, the book was never finished in Hem’s eyes.  I think all writers feel that way.  But you can’t create new things if you don’t finish the old.  It’s like all those sticky notes all over your desk.  If they are always there they are constantly on your mind, occupying precious space that could be used more constructively.

He had debated over the title for the book. He often liked to say that the Bible was the best source for writing titles.  He had a habit of constructing lists of possible titles for his books.  As a kid I would do the same.  Now I wait for them to come to me, and they always do, when the time is right.  One possibility he noted was: “How different it was when you were there.”   My personal favorite: “There is never any end to Paris.”

Writing is like breathing to me.  Hemingway felt the same.  He said that he was born to write “and had done and would do again.”  He didn’t know how not to be a writer.   For Hemingway, Paris was simply the best place to work in the world, and it remained for him the city that he loved most.

Many of the writers and artists of that time, Hemingway not excluded, never had any money, but he never expressed any unhappiness in being poor, and spoke of it like a secret gift that he had been given that the rich would never understand.  To Hemingway, work was more important.  Gertrude Stein would agree, for she told him:  “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures.  It’s that simple.”  She encouraged him to be frugal with the clothes.

Hemingway enjoyed and appreciated art, and didn’t seem to hold back in giving out a complement to an artist or fellow writer.  I too love being surrounded by things that inspire me, whether it is a painting, person, monument, song, or the many finished books in a bookstore.

Fitzgerald is mentioned in the introduction, but there is much more of him throughout the book, of which I was glad because he has interested me since high school and I must admit I didn’t know much about him.

I like the style of Hemingway’s writing.  It is journalesque and simple, but beautiful and elegant at the same time.  The introduction states: “Hemingway’s writing typically reads well when spoken aloud…his words are tight like a musical composition…deathless prose.”

Here are some notes I made as I was reading, and passages and words I particularly liked per chapter.  Anything in italics was written by Hemingway.

Chapter 1             Café des Amateurs in St Michel

As writers, we often take our surroundings into account… since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort in the story.

When I am writing I often create the scene to set the mood, or set the mood I want to be in, or I want the character to be in. 

I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood and in one place you could write about it better than in another.  That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.

The story was writing itself and I had a hard time keeping up with it….I entered far into the story and was lost in it.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy…and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

As I read this passage I felt as if I were reading myself.  Sometimes in writing, during the re-read, you find 5 words or passages out of 200 that are really good and you have to change or discard all the rest.  Writing words is like taking pictures.  Some are unclear, some are sharp, some are forgettable, some have no meaning, and some are extraordinary.

My sister is the first person who reads my work.  I sent her a copy of the first book I finished here, and she finished it quickly and was sorry it was over.  I am so pleased.

I am just as inspired to write on a train as I am in a café.  I guess if I ever get writer’s block, which I seriously doubt, I will just board a train and keep going, stopping where I choose or choosing not to stop at all if the writing is flowing really well and the scenery is pleasing to my eye.

I think next year I must take a train from Paris to Italy or Switzerland or somewhere very far that goes overnight so that I can write, write, write.  And I can take Hem with me and read another of his books when I just can’t write anymore.  Of course, when I read, another part of my mind opens up and spills out all the things that I just must write down on paper.

…where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night.

I grew up in Rhode Island, where it snowed in the winter.  I am not a fan of the snow unless I am skiing on it or on vacation, but there is one thing I miss about those cold winter nights.  When the snow fell through the night you could walk the empty streets just by the light of the streetlamps and the snow creaked beneath your feet and your steps looked like the only marks in the whole world and the remaining silence wrapped you like a warm blanket, the solitude protecting you from the cold.

“I think it would be wonderful, Tatie,” my wife said.  She had a lovely modeled face and her eyes and her smile lighted up at decisions as though they were rich presents.

Chapter 2             Miss Stein Instructs

…the climb to the top floor of the hotel where I worked, in a room that looked across all the roofs and the chimneys of the high hill of the quarter, was a pleasure…I brought mandarins and roasted chestnuts to the room in paper packets…when I was hungry.  I was always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working.

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working.  I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.  That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Myself, I prefer to finish off completely my thoughts for that one day, if time permits, while I have them because thoughts can be fleeting and sneaky and coy.  I then wait for the next day to tell me what to do and what to write, so it is a discovery for me just as it is for the person reading my book for the first time.

Going down the stairs when you had worked well…was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.

I love to walk here before and after and in the middle of writing the day away.

My wife and I had called on Miss Stein…and we loved the big studio with the great paintings.  It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.

I picture a room in my dream house looking like this, a good place to write on a cold night.  As I read this book and the conversations between Hemingway and Stein and I picture them how they were in Midnight in Paris.  I walked to Stein’s house, 27 rue de Fleurus.  The outside was how I pictured it.

Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening…seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good…and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married – time would fix that -…

I had not started the conversation and thought it had become a little dangerous.

Hem also visited many museums and he knew the painters whose works were hanging in there.  Imagine that.  He wrote: I was learning something from the paintings of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put into them.

I always have my notebook or journal with me when I go to the museums.

Work would cure almost anything…

Chapter 3             Shakespeare & Company            

I learned in this chapter that my favorite bookstore originally had a different address than it does now.  Hemingway would borrow books there since he had no money to buy them, and he stated of owner, Sylvia Beach, “no one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”

Chapter 4             People of the Seine

Sylvia states that reading books is like a form of gambling.

It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

You expected to be sad in the fall.  Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

Chapter 5             A False Spring

But then we did not think ever of ourselves as poor.  We did not accept it.  We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich.

We should live in this time now and have every minute of it.

There are so many sorts of hunger.  In the spring there are more.  Memory is hunger.

Memory.  The hunger of perhaps wanting to relive the wonderful moments of your life.  Those perfect nights or extraordinary circumstances that you may not have realized at the time they were happening that they were that special and you can only revisit them in your mind.

Chapter 6            The End of an Avocation

But I justified it to myself because I wrote it.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped.  But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself.  If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

As I read and commented on this section, I was on the train heading for Belgium.  On the last smaller train I took, we left the station and I observed the area.  All the old houses were touching one another and the yards were very small.  The roofs were weird and everyone had their laundry hanging out.  I wondered if this is what it looked like where Hemingway lived.  I wondered what it smells like down there.  Probably like the bathroom on this train.

Chapter 7             Une Génération Perdue

On his wife: She did not like to hear really bad nor tragic things, but no one does…she wanted to know how the gay part of how the world was going; never the real, never the bad.

It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in my body…

…Miss Stein she did not like to read French although she loved to speak it.

Outside on the rue de l’Odéon I was disgusted with myself for having complained about things.  I was doing what I did of my own free will…You – damn complainer.  You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself.

When I stopped doing newspaper work I was so sure the stories were going to be published.  But every one I sent out came back.

My point for adding this one: even Hemingway had trouble getting published, Van Gogh had struggled getting his paintings hung, and many of those in theater and film had very modest backgrounds.  So what?  Do what you love to do.

Hem looked at the bright side, mentioning that when he was hungry it helped him work better and appreciate the art more, particularly Cézanne.

Chapter 10             With Pascin at the Dôme

It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.

What?  Dilute wine with water?  I can’t imagine!

“Go on, then,” Pascin said.  “And don’t fall in love with typewriting paper.”

Pascin ended up hanging himself.  So many writers and artists have ended their own lives.  Was writing their outlet?  Or had it made them feel frustrated and unfulfilled?

Chapter 13             The Man Who Was Marked for Death

“Everybody has something wrong with them,” I said, trying to cheer up the lunch.

He remarks how he has always hated his first name.

Chapter 14             Evan Shipman at the Lilas

“Keep to the French,” Ezra said.  “You’ve plenty to learn there.”

“I know it,” I said.  I have plenty to learn everywhere.”

He talks about skiing, and in those days there was no chair lift!  You walked up the hills you wanted to ski down: It was better than flying or anything else, and you had built the ability to do it and to have it with the long climbs carrying the heavy rucksacks…It was the end we all worked all winter for, and all the winter built to make it possible.

Later he writes: They come down faster and they drop like birds, strange birds that know many secrets…

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.  I do not know about that now but this is now Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

Chapter 17             Scott Fitzgerald

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dusk on a butterfly’s wings.  At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.  Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think.  He was flying again and I was lucky to meet him just after a good time in his writing if not a good one in his life.

I love when he wrote on Scott Fitzgerald.  This was one of the longer chapters of the book.  Scott felt so real.  In the introduction of this book, they showed a couple of different ways he had written this passage, and it was neat to see the subtle differences.  It is rare to see from any writer since we don’t publish books with all of our drafts!

I could not believe this and I wanted to argue him out of it but I needed a novel to back up my faith and to show him and convince him, and I had not yet written any such novel.

…already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.

Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true.

“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

Scott was nervous and hospitable and he showed us his accounts of his earnings as though they had been the view.  There was no view.

There was going to be everything there that a man needed to write except to be alone.

Extra Chapters and Passages Added to the Book

On Writing in the First Person

When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you.  That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them.  If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too.  If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory.  There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life.  That is not easy to do.

My own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password.

Secret Pleasures

“It will look sort of funny maybe.”

“Not to us. Who are the others anyway?”

“Nobody.”

It had been the style once and so it probably was the style again.

The Pilot Fish and the Rich

They never wasted their time nor their charm on something that was not sure.  Why should they?  Picasso was sure and of course had been before they had ever heard of painting.

If you are sure of your work you will always have satisfaction, no matter what anyone else says.

All things to be truly wicked must start from an innocence.

On Writing…

In writing there are many secrets too.  Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.

His dying friend told him: But you must keep on because you write for all of us…Please do it even when you never want to think about it.

And Hem wrote: But there are remises or storage places where you may leave or store certain things such as a locker truck or duffel bag containing personal effects or the unpublished poems of Evan Shipman or marked maps or even weapons there was no time to turn over to the proper authorities and this book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart.  Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.

Fragments

It is hopeless not to expect to be sued by people all of whose names begin with Miss.

It seemed so easy when it started.  Then you found mistakes and errors.

It is not easy to put in the missing all in fiction and it is all in if you leave it out.

But this is how Paris and other places were in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

That Paris you could never put into a single book and I have tried to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.  We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what east it could be reached.  It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it.