A Moveable Feast

For the holy day whose date is not fixed, or the mobile repast, see Moveable feast

"A Moveable Feast" is also the title of a live album by Fairport Convention

A Moveable Feast
First American edition
Author(s)	Ernest Hemingway
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Autobiography
Publisher	Scribners (USA) & Jonathan Cape (UK)
Publication date	December 1964

A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s. The book describes Hemingway's apprenticeship as a young writer in Europe (especially in Paris) during the 1920s with his first wife, Hadley. Some of the later prominent people who are featured in his memoirs include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, Pascin, John Dos Passos, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

The book was not published during Hemingway's life, but edited from his manuscripts and notes by his widow and fourth wife, Mary Hemingway. It was published in 1964, three years after Hemingway's death. An edition revised by his grandson Seán Hemingway was published in 2009.

The memoir consists of Hemingway's personal accounts, observations, and stories of his experience in 1920s Paris. He provides specific addresses of cafes, bars, hotels, and apartments, some of which can be found in modern-day Paris. The title was suggested by Hemingway's friend A.E. Hotchner, author of the biography, Papa Hemingway. He remembered they had a conversation about the city during Hotchner's first visits there: "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."

Background

In 1956 Hemingway found a trunk he had left years before in the basement of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The trunk contained notebooks he had filled during the years he lived in Paris. He had the notebooks transcribed. During the period when he worked on the book, The Dangerous Summer, he also brought the Paris memoir to a final draft stage. Scribner's published A Moveable Feast in 1964 after Hemingway's death, when it had been edited by his fourth wife and widow, Mary Hemingway.

Commentary on editing

Ernest Hemingway worked on the manuscript of A Moveable Feast during his later years, rewriting several key passages. He had prepared a final draft before he died. After his death, his fourth wife Mary, in her capacity as Hemingway's literary executor, edited the manuscript.

Literary scholar Gerry Brenner from the University of Montana documented her edits and questioned their validity in his 1982 paper, "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?". He concluded that some edits were misguided, and others derived from questionable motives. He suggested the changes appeared to contradict Mary's stated policy for her role as executor, which had been a hands-off approach. Brenner and other researchers have examined the collection of Ernest Hemingway's personal papers, which were opened to the public in 1979 with the completion of the John F. Kennedy Library, where they are held in Boston. Included are Hemingway's notes and initial drafts of A Moveable Feast. Brenner indicates that Mary changed the order of the chapters in Hemingway's final draft, apparently to "preserve chronology". Brenner notes the change interrupted the series of juxtaposed character sketches of such individuals as Sylvia Beach (owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company) and Gertrude Stein. Additionally, Brenner points out that one chapter, titled "Birth of a New School", which Hemingway had dropped in his draft, was re-inserted by Mary. Brenner alleges the most serious edit was deleting Hemingway's lengthy apology to Hadley, his first wife. This apology appeared in various forms in every draft of the book. Brenner suggests that Mary deleted it because it impugned her own role as wife.

In contrast, A.E. Hotchner has said that he received a near final draft of A Moveable Feast and the version that Mary Hemingway published is essentially the draft which he had read in 1957. Therefore, the original publication is the version Hemingway intended and Mary Hemingway did not revise or add chapters. He believed it represented Ernest's intentions.

Criticism

A.E. Hotchner, a friend and biographer of Hemingway, alleged that Seán Hemingway had edited the new edition, in part, to exclude references to his grandmother, Hemingway's second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, which he had found less than flattering. Other critics also have found fault with some of the editorial changes. Irene Gammel writes about the new edition: "Ethically and pragmatically, restoring an author's original intent is a slippery slope when the published text has stood the test of time and when edits have been approved by authors or their legal representatives." Pointing to the complexity of the author-function, she concludes: “Mary's version should be considered the definitive one, while the ‘restored’ version provides access to important unpublished contextual sources that illuminate the evolution of the 1964 edition.”

Implications of sexual identity and androgyny

In discussion of other issues related to the memoir, the literary critic J. Gerald Kennedy of Louisiana State University pointed out the artificially heroic nature of Hemingway's self-portrait in A Moveable Feast. He contrasted it with the sexual ambiguity and fascination with androgyny found in Hemingway's unfinished novel, The Garden of Eden. Kennedy examines how textual evidence from both published material and unpublished papers from the collection at the JFK Library seem to project a contrasting picture of Hemingway's sexuality. Noting that the clumsy "created" nature of the young Hemingway in A Moveable Feast is well-established as fraudulent (e.g., Hemingway had access to large sums of money during the time he was in Paris, yet portrayed himself as "starving"), Kennedy points out that Hemingway writes as if he were the only person in his literary circle in Paris who was sexually stable and healthy, in contrast to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. This self-assured image, however, is in stark contrast with the confused and experimenting protagonist of The Garden of Eden.

Kennedy notes significant textual clues, such as a fascination with androgynous haircuts and the redacted sections of A Moveable Feast, which refer to the period when Hemingway was having an affair with his second wife Pauline while still married to Hadley. Kennedy concluded Hemingway's "obsession" with indistinct gendering was central to his character, a conclusion also alleged by the critic Mark Spilka and biographer Kenneth Lynn.

2009 edition

In 2009 a new edition, titled the "Restored Edition," was published by, Seán Hemingway assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and grandson of Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer. He made numerous changes:

• The previous introductory letter by Hemingway, pieced together from various fragments by Mary Hemingway, was removed.
• The chapter called "Birth of a New School" and large sections of "Ezra Pound and the Measuring Worm," "There is Never Any End to Paris," and "Winter in Schruns" have all been re-added. The unpublished "The Pilot Fish and the Rich" has been added.
• Chapter 7 ("Shakespeare and Company") has been moved to be chapter 3, and chapter 16 ("Nada y Pues Nada") has been moved to the end of the book.
• Hemingway's use of the second person has been restored in many places, a change which Seán asserts "brings the reader into the story."

From the new foreword by Patrick Hemingway:

[H]ere is the last bit of professional writing by my father, the true foreword to A Moveable Feast: "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."

Film and television adaptations

On September 15, 2009, Daily Variety announced that Mariel Hemingway, a granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway and first wife Hadley Richardson, had acquired the film and television rights to the memoir with American film producer John Goldstone.

Cultural references

• The book is featured in the movie, City of Angels (1998), during an exchange between Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan.
• Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011) is partly set in the Paris of the 1920s evoked in Hemingway's book. The movie features the Owen Wilson character interacting with the likes of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and uses the phrase "a moveable feast" on two occasions.

References

• Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01305-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=yP-cgVNr55wC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:0691013055&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4. 
• Mellow, James R. (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37777-3. 
• Oliver, Charles M. (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark. ISBN 0-8160-3467-2. 
• Stoneback, H. R. (2010). Hemingway's Paris: Our Paris?. Wickford, RI: New Street Communications, LLC. ISBN 978-1-4538-7776-0. http://newstreetcommunications.com/hemingways_paris. 

Further reading

• Hotchner, A.E. (July 19, 2009). "Don't Touch 'A Movable Feast'". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20hotchner.html?_r=1. Retrieved November 22, 2011. 

External links

• Ernest Hemingway Website