2010/6

Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast (192p. in the first British print)

I paid 3 pound sterling for this copy, and when I brought it to the clerk at the cash registry, after having recovered it from a dusty basement shelf, ‘good catch’ he said. Someone clearly screwed up the intake process on this one.

Part biography, part travelogue, an account of Hemingway’s years 1921-1926, living and trying to establish himself as a writer in Paris (with the intermittent trip to the mountains). Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and other luminaries of Paris in the 1920s make their appearance too.

Ernest would have approved of my year 2010 so far.

On skiing:

“Hadley and I loved skiing since we had first tried it together in Switzerland and later at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites and the doctor in Milan had given her permission to continue to ski if I would promise that she would not fall down. This took a very careful selection of terrain and of runs and absolutely controlled running, but she had beautiful, wonderfully strong legs and fine control of her skis, and she did not fall. We all knew the different snow conditions and everyone knew how to run in deep powder snow.”

On bike racing:

“But I will get the Vélodrome d’Hiver with the smoky light of the afternoon and the high-banked wooden track and the whirring sound the tyres made on the wood as the riders passed, the effort and the tactics as the riders climbed and plunged, each one a part of his machine; I will get the magic of the demi-fond, the noise of the motors with their rollers set out behind them that the entraîneurs rode, wearing their heavy crash helmets and leaning backwards in their ponderous leather suits to shelter the riders who followed them from the air resistance, the riders in their lighter crash helmets bent low over their handlebars, their legs turning the huge gear sprockets and the small front wheels touching the roller behind the machine that gave them shelter to ride in, and the duels that were more exciting than anything, the put-put-ing of the motor-cycles and the riders elbow to elbow and wheel to wheel up and down and round at deadly speed until one man could not hold the pace and broke away and the solid wall of air that he had been sheltered against hit him.”

On Dostoevsky:

‘I’ve been wondering about Dostoevsky,’ I said. ‘How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make me feel so deeply?’

‘It can’t be the translation,’ Evan said. ‘She makes the Tolstoy come out well written.’

‘I know. I remember how many times I tried to read War and Peace until I got the Constance Garnett translation.’

‘They say it can be improved upon,’ Evan said. ‘I’m sure it can although I don’t know Russian. But we both know translations. But it comes out as a hell of a novel, the greatest I suppose, and you can read it over and over.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But you can’t read Dostoevsky over and over. I had Crime and Punishment on a trip when we ran out of books down at Schruns, and I couldn’t read it again when we had nothing to read.’

“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.”