A Moveable Feast

During the college days, reading some extracurricular books for a student is not only a way to broad horizons but also to past time. Therefore the reason why lots of students read one book is becoming evident because of the teachers’ requirement and so forth. Maybe now it is time for them to read a book for writing a book-comment. As to me, the reason I read “A Moveable Feast” is because of the book’s name which I search for the list from the teacher gives one by one for a long time rather than the reasons as above. To begin with, although I have already chosen one book to read, unfortunately, the theme of the book is very complex, what’s more, I have no interest in the book details; as a girl, there exists a common thing among us, called emotion and feeling, which attracts people most, let people think most and understand the substance most, these points will throw curious upon the theme, especially for girls. Eventually, this book is hunted and read by me now.

Title

Abstract：

A Moveable Feast is a serious of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway, which states his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s. The period of Hemingway's apprenticeship is as a young writer in Europe (especially in Paris) during the 1920s with his first wife, Hadley. Besides, there are some of the later prominent people featured in his memoirs, such as Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound and so forth. Although this book was not published during Hemingway's life, it was also one of his masterpieces in his lifetime, which edited from his manuscripts and notes by his widow and fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, one respected journalist. This book was published in 1964, three years after Hemingway's death, which was an edition revised by his grandson Seán Hemingway. Besides, the memoir includes Hemingway’s personal accounts, observations and his experience stories in Paris in 1920s, which he also mentions some specific addresses of cafes, bars, hotels, and apartments, what’s more, some of which can still be found in modern-day Paris. The title was suggested by Hemingway's friend A.E. Hotchner, the author of the biography, Papa Hemingway, who had a conversation with Hemingway about the city during Hotchner's first visits: “If you are lucky enough to live in Paris as a young man, then no matter where you go for the rest of your life, it will be always stay with you, because Paris is a moveable feast.” Therefore this novel is one autobiography, which is based on the facts messy narrative, and blended in unimaginable enhanced hyperbole, blur the boundaries of fact and fiction. It also joined the old nostalgic sweet and pain. He used his familiar habits to rethink their own life to suit their own personal mythology, thus to create his memory of the past, recall the dreams, trained hard and the disaster had happened. And the dream is to his wife Hudson’s pure love and beautiful place friend friendship in Paris and Switzerland. In addition, through this novel, we can further appreciate the charm of Wiener River again.

Key word:

Memory in Paris, culture breath

Title

1. Brief Introduction of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in suburban Oak Park, IL, to Dr. Clarence and Grace Hemingway. Ernest was the second of six children in the family, yet he was raised in the quiet suburban town. His father was a physician, and both parents were loyal to Christians. In this instance, Hemingway's fostered some pursuits and interests in his childhood which would make him have the great achievements in literary.

Each parents hold high hopes for their children, the same as Hemingway’s. His mother hoped that her son would be affected by her musical interests, yet young Hemingway preferred to together with his father on hunting and fishing trips. The hobby of going outdoor adventure had been reflected later in Hemingway's stories, particularly those featuring protagonists, such as Nick Adams.

In addition, Hemingway also had intelligence for physical challenge which made him substantial in his high school, where he also played football and boxed. It’s a pity that Hemingway was repeatedly rejected from service in World War I because of his permanent eye damage contracted from lots boxing matches, and which provided much more material for Hemingway's stories and novels, just like having formed a habit to likening his literary feats in his boxing victories.

Of course, what’s more, Hemingway edited his high school newspapers and reported one program, Kansas City Star, which added one more year to his age after graduating from high school in 1917.

After the short limitation, Hemingway eventually enabled to take part in World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. Unfortunately, he was wounded on July 8, 1918, on the Italian front. During the period of his recovery in Milan, he had another affair as well. As these, Hemingway was given two decorations by the Italian government not only because his bravery but also he was one member of the Italian infantry. Fighting on the Italian front inspired the plot of A Farewell to Arms in 1929. Yet indeed, war itself is a major theme in Hemingway's works. Therefore, the experience he had would become the centre material of his novels. Besides, Hemingway had witnessed firsthand the cruelty and stoicism required of the soldiers he would describe in his writing when covering the Greco-Turkish War in 1920 for the Toronto Star. After that, he was a war correspondent in Spain in 1937, the true situation he saw and the current condition inspired him more thoughts and comment on the society due to the events of the Spanish Civil War. After the First World War, Hemingway returned briefly to the United States and worked for the Toronto Star, meanwhile, he also lived for a short time in Chicago. There, he met Sherwood Anderson and married Hadley Richardson in 1921. On Anderson's advice, they moved to Paris, where he served as a foreign journalist for the Star. As Hemingway gained the events on all of Europe, he obtained much more opportunities to interview the important leaders such as Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Mussolini.

The family of Hemingway lived in Paris from 1921-1926. As the development of stylistic at that time, Hemingway reached its peak in 1923 with the publication of Three Stories and Ten Poems by Robert McAlmon in Paris and the birth of his son John. And the novel “A Moveable Feast” was created and published after 3 years his death in 1964. Here are other details about Hemingway as following: first, Hemingway began to write sketches in January 1923 which had the chance to appear in In Our Time, published in 1924; second, he and Hadley returned to Toronto in August of 1923, where he worked once again for the Star. At this point, his job not only kept him from starting anything new in the coming months, but also made him had no writing which was not committed to publication. Yet this period of time off from writing had given him renewed energy on his return to Paris in January of 1924. And that during his time in Toronto, he read Joyce's Dubliners, which thoroughly changed his writing career. He had the majority of In Our Time written by August of 1924. Though there still existed a period while his publisher Horace Liverwright wanted to change some collections, Hemingway’s attitude was firm and refused to change even one word in the book.

In Paris, Hemingway once used the letter of introduction of Sherwood Anderson's to meet Gertrude Stein and entered the world of foreign authors and artists. Nevertheless, the famous description of the "lost generation" was born of an employee's comment to Hemingway, and it became everlasting just as the foreword for The Sun Also Rises, his first major novel. Actually, this “lost generation” included the postwar generation and the literary movement it produced. As in the 1920s, writers such as Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein rebuked the different and false ideals of patriotism which once led young people contribute to the war, rather than the only benefit of materialistic elders, which those writers considered that the reality was the only truth, and thus life could be always hard. The most importance is that Hemingway was strongly influenced by the tenet.

Later 1920s, it was a time for Hemingway to publish, for example, The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises were published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1926. And in 1927, Hemingway published a short story. Yet what a pity, in the same year, he divorced Hadley Richardson and married another moman, Pauline Pfieffer, a writer for Vogue. They moved to Key West in 1928, where his two sons Patrick and Gregory were born in 1929 and 1932. In a word, 1928 was a year of both success and sorrow for Hemingway. Worth being happy was A Farewell to Arms published in this year,yet his father committed suicide. Clarence Hemingway had been suffering from over-seriousness and diabetes. These painful experiences were reflected in the considering of Robert Jordan in his one more novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

As his personal experiences with war and death, Hemingway's travel in pursuit of hunting and other sports also provided a great deal of material for his novels, Death in the Afternoon, published in 1932. And Hemingway went on safari in Africa, which gave him new themes and scenes on which to base The Snows of Kilamanjaro and The Green Hills of Africa in 1934,, published in 1935.

To Have and Have Not, published in 1937 was his travel to Spain as a war correspondent. And in 1940, Hemingway had one new marriage again, which made him publish For Whom the Bell Tolls in the same year. The following years, his experience provided enough material to the novels and published one every few years.

Hemingway's own life and character are as charming as the stories in his novels. At beginning, Papa to Hemingway was a legendary adventurer who always enjoyed his nice lifestyle and personal celebrity status, because he realized that there was another person deep inside lived disciplined who willingly worked tirelessly in pursuit of literary perfect ion. From these, His living and writing has reflected his success, and in the fact that Hemingway is a hero to intellectuals and rebels alike; the passions of the man are equaled only by those in his writing.

3. comment:

1. Commentary on editing

Ernest Hemingway devoted himself on the manuscript of A Moveable Feast during his later years, which he rewrote it painstakingly after several main essays. Finally, although he had completed the final draft before he died, he had no chance to publish in the rest of his life by himself. Only after his death, his fourth wife, Mary, did editing in consultation with the publisher. Later, the contemporary literary scholar Gerry Brenner from the University of Montana documented about her editions and even questioned her validity in his 1982 paper. Thereof, he had summed up that some details were misleading. He even gave his own suggestions to contradict Mary's stated policy by the changes appear. Whether the opinions of the specialists gave were true or not, obviously, different people had different thoughts, besides, the mind of people was changing every minute. But later, Brenner and other researchers have found that the collection of Ernest Hemingway's personal papers, opened to the public with the completion of the John F. Kennedy Library in 1979, they hold them in Boston, including Hemingway's notes and initial drafts of A Moveable Feast. Then Brenner states that Mary had changed the Hemingway's final draft chapters order, apparently to "preserve chronology". What’s more, he also has a note about his thought of this change, which interrupted the series of character sketches of such individuals as Sylvia Beach (owner of the bookstore "Shakespeare and Company") and Gertrude Stein. Eventually, Brenner points out one chapter, titled "Birth of a New School", which Hemingway had dropped in his draft, was rewritten into the novel by Mary. He considered that she might have not enough reasons for its contents or execution.

Yet Brenner claims that deleting Hemingway's long apology to his wife, Hadley, was the most important edit. Additionally, his apology appeared in every draft of the book in various forms. Brenner advises that Mary should delete it because it embodied her own role as wife.

Compared, A.E. Hotchner has said that Mary Hemingway published the initial draft which he had read in 1957. He believed that they had represented Ernest's intentions.

2. New Edition

The new edition in 2009, called the "Restored Edition," was published by Seán Hemingway (a grandson of Hemingway and his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer), who was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s assistant curator, but before he published it, he made numerous changes as following:

1). He removed the Hemingway’s previous introductory letter, which put various fragments together by Mary Hemingway.

2). He re-added some chapters that had been written or unwritten into the novel, such as "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", even the unpublished "The Pilot Fish and the Rich".

3). In addition, he also changed the order of some chapters, for example, 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.

4). As Hemingway liked using the second person in the book, so his grandson also has been restored them in many places, and gives a change which Seán asserts "brings the reader into the story."

Beyond those, there also adds to the new foreword into the novel by Patrick Hemingway: before that is the last bit of professional writing by my father, the true foreword to A Moveable Feast: "This book contains material from the experience of my life that I had memory from my heart. Even if the one has been changed and the other has not existed."

3. Criticism

A.E. Hotchner, one of Hemingway’s friends and biographers, indicated that the new edition had been edited by Seán Hemingway, yet some parts of the novel, he delete his grandmother’s references, Hemingway's second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, which he had found that the details about her was less than flattering, they had destroyed the image of her more or less dora games. Additionally, there also finds some other mistakes with some of the editorial changes from other critics. Irene Gammel says in his written new edition: "Ethically and pragmatically, when the published text has stood the test of time and when edits have been approved by authors or their legal representatives, then restoring an author's original motivation is a slippery slope." One more, after pointing to the complexity of the author-function, she concludes: “While the ‘restored’ version provides access to important unpublished contextual sources, which has illuminated the evolution of the 1964 edition, at that time, Mary's version should be considered the definitive one,.”

4. Implications of sexual identity and androgyny

With the discussion of other issues, which have related to the memoir, J. Gerald Kennedy of Louisiana State University, the literary critic pointed out that the artificially heroic nature of Hemingway's self-portrait in A Moveable Feast is pretty obviously. After he contrasted it with the sexual ambiguity and fascination with androgyny, he found that in Hemingway's unfinished novel, The Garden of Eden. Kennedy has examined how textual evidence from both published material and unpublished papers from the collection at the JFK Library, which seems to project a contrasting picture of Hemingway's sexuality. What’s more, there notes that the stupid "created" nature of the young Hemingway is well-established as cheated(e.g., Hemingway had access to large sums of money during the time he was in Paris, yet played himself as role of "starving") in A Moveable Feast , and Kennedy further points out that Hemingway writes the roles as if he were the only sexually stable and healthy person in his literary circle in Paris, therefore, contrasting to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. This confident image, however, is in obviously compared with the confused and trying to be the main character of The Garden of Eden.

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

From above all, we have a further realization that although “ A Moveable Feast” is not famous as Hemingway’s other novels, it is the greatest work after the war. In some sense, Hemingway had blended one person into the family of arts in Paris in that time. What’s the most importance, he not only let us realize the former stories, but also taste the splendid of the culture Jeux Dora.