Croissant and a Book: A Moveable Feast

Maybe it was watching Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby a few months ago, but I think I have caught the jazz-era fever that seems to be so fashionable these days. I first read "The Great American Novel" in twelfth grade english class and I remember how it captured my imagination at that time, and also coincided with the last movie release of the book staring Paul Rudd and Mira Sorvino. In any case, I've been feeding this fever (after all, my mum always said, "Feed a fever, starve a cold") with more jazz-era inspired work including "Midnight in Paris," and Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

My favourite movie of 2011!

A Moveable Feast was akin to reading Hemingway's diary from his time in 1920's Paris. From my research about the writing of the novel, Hemingway actually wrote it from journals and letters that he had stored away and forgotten about, only to come across them years later. He was inspired to shape the writing into a story, and I really got the sense that it represented his "glory days". The movie Midnight in Paris touches on nostalgia, and I think Hemingway was nostalgic for those days in his later life. Unlike Gill, in Woody Allen's movie, who longs to live in a different decade entirely, Hemingway realized that he was living in a golden era, although there is a clear sentiment that he didn't realize it at that time. This aspect resonated with me, as someone who suffers from what I call "chronic nostalgia." 

One of the other more contentious issues regarding the book is that it was published post-humously, and there will always be unanswered questions about how Hemingway truly wanted to the novel to be published. In particular, the content that explored his feelings for his first wife and the dissolution of their marriage was thought to be altered by his fourth wife, who edited the final manuscript. Despite any possible editorial changes, I think Hemingway wanted it to very clearly express regret and apology to his first wife, and this still comes through to some degree. Hemingway and his first wife separated when it came to light that he was having an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, an editor working for Vanity Fair and Vogue, who does not come across well in the published version that I read. A revised version of A Moveable Feast was published in 2009, which was said to include portions that Mary Hemingway (Wife #4) excluded, but I have also heard that it made fewer references to Pfeiffer. There was a great interview about the new publication on the CBC Radio Program Q several years ago (unfortunately the archives for the podcast only go back to the beginning of this year), but this article summarizes some of the controversy nicely, albeit from one side of the story. 

TIME

This book gets five out of five literary pugs recommending it for a read...