a moveable feast

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, 1950

I was in the mood to read something about writing. The “Feast” is one of those classics that I’ve been meaning to get around to and finally I have. Readable in one afternoon and a great introduction to many other good writers {Fitzgerald, Turgenev, DH Lawrence, Aldous Huxley}. It’s always intriguing for me to know what my favorite writers read – with the hope that it’s a clue about how they conjure up their own literary magic.

6 Things I learned from A Moveable Feast

1. You can write a memoir and not talk about yourself.  Every chapter in this book is about someone that Hemingway knew in Paris. He crosses paths with Sylvia Beach who started the original Shakespeare and Company, an English language bookstore – a rare find in 1920s Paris; F. Scott Fitzgerald who was sieve and fell asleep at the dinner table; Ezra Pound who was talented, generous, but couldn’t box very well.

2. Paris was once cheap! You could eat well, gamble moderately and go on vacation for weeks on a freelancer’s salary!

3. A good café  is one where you can sit without being disturbed or asked to leave until the skies get starry and waiters fill your glasses to the brim.

4. A good drink deserves a good meal. Also, don’t drink and write. Apparently that only works for musicians.

5. Gertrude Stein, who lived at 27 Rue de Fleurus, liked Gertrude Stein and many people agreed.

6. Staring at Cézanne paintings will improve your writing skills. “Write the truest sentence that you know…If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scroll-work or ornament out and throw it away.”