I am now reading “A Moveable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway. It is about his years in Paris in the 1920s as a young writer. He meets other American writers who also became famous: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald and others of the Lost Generation.
He did not – could not – write it in the 1920s. He wrote it more than thirty years later towards the end of his life.
I am reading it for four reasons:
- I have never read Hemingway before. Can you believe that? Me neither.
- I found a piece of his writing on the Internet and found out that he writes in Common English! This turns out to be no accident: Hemingway preferred old words to new and tried to keep his language simple and as close to ordinary speech as possible. And he did this successfully.
- I want to know what Hemingway went through to become a writer. This is not necessarily his best book, but I got it because it tells this story.
- It is short. Never having read Hemingway before, I did not want to sink my time or money into a longer book in case I did not like him. This fear has proved to be unfounded.
Never having read a single book or story of his, I had somehow got this idea that Hemingway was like a Hollywood star – full of himself, not serious about his art and not particularly deep.
Like Jamaica Kincaid, although his prose seems simple because it has short, simple words, writing it was hard work.
Like Kincaid, writing seems to be something that he has to do, something that comes up from inside him.
Like Stephen King, Hemingway writes every day in the morning and, when he is done, he enjoys the rest of the day. He also has a particular place to write, a place where no one will pull him away from his work: for Hemingway it was a particular cafe in Paris where none of his friends went.
And like King, Hemingway stuck to his writing even when he had trouble supporting his family. Both must have had very understanding wives!
I compare Hemingway to King and Kincaid not because they are as great as he was, but because I know their habits as writers.
Hemingway wanted to make his writing simple and clean like a well-designed machine. He wanted to make it true, true to how people speak. These are his strengths.
Part of what makes Hemingway’s writing work is his power of observation. He notices the little things and it makes it seem like you are there. You feel like you are walking down the streets of Paris with him.
What sold me on Hemingway was this line near the beginning of the book. It is about a woman who walked into his cafe:
her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
See also:
Hemingway invented the modern American novel. Almost all American novelists who cam after him owe something of their style to him. He separated America from the flowery superfluous European writing style and helped create our own unique voice. He is yours and mine, black or white, the same as Jazz. Of course, he was probably a bit racist, but he was white and that’s how we roll.
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Never read Hemingway either, bit it’s strange that I found this quote on the spine of this month’s “Real Simple magazine. “Never confuse movement with action” Earnest Hemingway.
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*but*^^^^^^^
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