Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is the sort of book that makes you want to put on clothes that you don’t own and wander the streets of a city you’ll never fully belong to. I read it recently, partly in a café in Brussels, notebook in hand, sketching the world around me, scribbling the sort of nonsense that would have made Papa Hemingway smile, or sigh, depending on how he felt about my posture or penmanship. But, for a few hours, it felt like I was inhabiting the world he was, as the servers spoke French and the other patrons lived their lives with contagious joie de vivre. It felt like being welcomed into the sort of literary salon where the lost generation trudged through poverty, arrogance, and ambition with equal parts stubbornness and charm.
The beauty of this book isn’t simply Hemingway’s prose, though it is precise, and deceptively effortless, but in the way he makes the people come alive. Not just the greats like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach, but also the cafés, the waiters, the janitors, the street vendors. He imbues them all with a vital presence that’s tangible and visceral. You feel the scrape of a chair on worn wooden floors, smell the faintly sour milk in a morning café, and hear the clink of cups as Paris awakens or the clunk of beer glasses as the evening descends. These are the people and places that ground the “legendary” lives of the writers in a gritty, human reality. Hemingway is generous and honest in that way: he doesn’t let the writer live alone in some mythic bubble of genius. He brings everyone into the fold.
Then there’s Fitzgerald. Poor Fitzy, all nervous energy and preening over Zelda’s approval, obsessed with appearance and reputation. Hemingway doesn’t mock him so much as hold a mirror up: this is what obsession with the world outside oneself looks like. And Gertrude Stein, impossibly wise, almost prophetic, a kind of matriarch in a world of chaos. Encouraging Hem to buy pictures and paintings instead of new clothes. It’s about having priorities. Reading these personal portraits reminded me of meeting people in my own travels recently. Those wonderful humans who seem to take delight in your company not because you’re brilliant, but because you simply exist in a way they find interesting enough to share a drink and their time, talking and listening. Engaging in earnest. Hemingway captures that delight, that subtle magnetism of human connection brilliantly. His story reflected steps I had taken and experiences I had experienced.
The book held up a mirror to me. There in a Brussels café, people murmuring around me in a language I partly understood, writing in a notebook meant for my job but now repurposed for my own work, my life as a kind of parallel Paris. The insecurities, the anxieties, the judgments of these literary titans mirrored thoughts I’ve had recently: am I doing enough? Is my work valuable? Hemingway, without ever being pedantic, dispels some of the bullshit. His words remind you that quiet confidence doesn’t come from wealth or fame, but from simply doing the work and living the life you’ve claimed.
And yes, there’s humour. Hemingway’s irreverent observations, the absurdities of human ambition, the fussiness of writers, the peculiarities of cafés, creep into the prose, giving it a lightness that offsets the melancholy of poverty and artistic struggle. Even in his reflections on hunger, poverty, and failure, there’s a sly smile lurking in the margins, an acknowledgment that humans are absurd, but that absurdity is also beautiful.
A Moveable Feast is a book about people and the spaces they inhabit, about literary camaraderie and rivalry, about love and envy and work and the quiet glory of existing fully in one’s own life. Hemingway’s Paris is alive not because of grand historical events but because of small, vivid human moments: the worry over a sentence, the closeness of a café, the laughter shared with a friend who sees you as you are. Those moments are worth everything.
One of the highlights for me was Hemingway’s writing about the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. I had the chance to visit the modern incarnation myself when I was in Paris. The bookstore felt alive, a repository not just of words but of possibility, the same sense of wonder Hemingway must have felt for himself stepping among the shelves and fellow literary pilgrims of his own earlier version brought to reality by Sylvia Beach. It was one of those vivid experiences where the past and present fold into each other, and you can almost sense the ghosts of ambition, inspiration, and quiet rebellion lingering between the stacks.
Reading this book, you’re reminded that the life of the writer (starving, ambitious, full of ego, full of hope) is not so different from the lives we all lead. The cafés may have changed, and perhaps the languages too. But the heart remains the same. And while reading this book, you can feel like you are a part of it all. As you are and always will be.
