I have never been a fan of Hemingway's fiction, but I was truly fascinated by his memoir, an account of his early life in Paris, when he was married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson. His anecdotes about the various personalities who were key figures in the expatriate community – some of the best-known are Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Beach (who established the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore) – and about the city itself and the general lifestyle of Americans in Paris in 1920s were transporting.
The writing is so different from the spare, blunt delivery of his fiction. It is so lyrical that it can carry you back almost a century, so that you can imagine what it was like to be young, driven and talented, and trying to make one's way as a writer or artist during one of those rare periods of time when the setting stars as much as the people.
The reader accompanies Hemingway to the various cafés, bars and other spots he frequents in Paris, on train trips and jaunts throughout France and elsewhere in Europe, with and without Hadley. Each episode he describes is related overall, but also can stand alone. In any case, it is hard to imagine a life as unrestrained and impulsive today as the one he lives during those years.
Not long after reading A Moveable Feast, I followed it with The Paris Wife, a fictionalized account of the marriage of Hemingway and Richardson, told from her point of view. It is fact that the two had a whirlwind courtship, and that Hemingway had an affair with her best friend that led to an eventual divorce. All this, and the difficulties one might expect in a marriage to a driven creative artist while living in the heady environment of Paris, are well-detailed by McClain, who conveys life among the glitterati of the time, but overlays it with a gifted novelist's emotion and insight.
A tasty combination, well-paired.
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