Hemingway's Gossip
I just read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, and I'm feeling a bit nauseous.
I'm generally of the pro-Hemingway camp; his style is original, and many of his stories do stay in one's head. His famously clipped sentences are readily parodied, to be sure, but they do produce a sense of drama if you are willing to go along. Unfortunately, the sentences work much less well in this memoir of writerly Paris in the 1920s, partly because most of the episodes in the book lack the strong sense of tension or anxiety Hemingway was able to achieve in his best fiction. A Moveable Feast is therefore best read for the Paris gossip, though it does have some moments of stylistic ambition.
Gertrude Stein fans and critics have a special hostility to A Moveable Feast because Hemingway says some mean-spirited things about Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Those were the sections I read in graduate school, in too much of a hurry to get a Gertrude Stein seminar paper together to actually read the rest of Hemingway's little book. It was enough for me at the time to note the hypocrisy in Hemingway's emulation of Stein's radical sentence design, in light of his ungracious (and homophobic) dismissal of her as a person.
There's a good deal of other interesting gossip to look for: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Joyce, Picasso, and Sylvia Beach. Scott Fitzgerald comes across as nuts, but likeable in some measure. Ezra Pound is, improbably, a "saint." Wyndham Lewis is grotesque (Hemingway quotes Stein as referring to Lewis as "a measuring worm": he measures the great art he sees, and copies it badly). Ford comes across as a snob, and a liar. Joyce, Picasso, and Sylvia Beach come across as basically harmless, benevolent presences.
There is one section of the book, "Hunger was good discipline," which exemplifies Hemingway at his writerly best and worst. Here is what I think of as the best:
Perhaps he goes a little off the rails into uninteresting idiosyncrasy with the bit about Cezanne forgetting to eat, as opposed to being just flat-out broke and hungry. But the rest seems true. Hemingway is into intense mental states, in which one becomes other to oneself, but not in an ephemeral or feverish way. If anything, the difference is quantum (physics metaphor!); the altered state may be temporary, but it is static and describable. (Altered states are also especially important in For Whom The Bell Tolls, I think).
That for me is Hemingway at his best, at least as far as the rather slim pickings of A Moveable Feast go. He's at his worst at the end of the same section I quoted from above, when he poses the following sentence as a stand-alone paragraph:
Can anyone rescue this sentence, with its disparate and incompatible verb tenses? Can it be anything other than ugly and kind of ridiculous? Somehow it seems much worse than Hemingway's general use of parataxis, which can create a kind of rhythm, or the omission of punctuation, which creates immediacy. Both of those are evident in the first paragraph I quoted (see for instance the first sentence), and they do no harm.
[Cross-posted at The Valve]
I'm generally of the pro-Hemingway camp; his style is original, and many of his stories do stay in one's head. His famously clipped sentences are readily parodied, to be sure, but they do produce a sense of drama if you are willing to go along. Unfortunately, the sentences work much less well in this memoir of writerly Paris in the 1920s, partly because most of the episodes in the book lack the strong sense of tension or anxiety Hemingway was able to achieve in his best fiction. A Moveable Feast is therefore best read for the Paris gossip, though it does have some moments of stylistic ambition.
Gertrude Stein fans and critics have a special hostility to A Moveable Feast because Hemingway says some mean-spirited things about Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Those were the sections I read in graduate school, in too much of a hurry to get a Gertrude Stein seminar paper together to actually read the rest of Hemingway's little book. It was enough for me at the time to note the hypocrisy in Hemingway's emulation of Stein's radical sentence design, in light of his ungracious (and homophobic) dismissal of her as a person.
There's a good deal of other interesting gossip to look for: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Joyce, Picasso, and Sylvia Beach. Scott Fitzgerald comes across as nuts, but likeable in some measure. Ezra Pound is, improbably, a "saint." Wyndham Lewis is grotesque (Hemingway quotes Stein as referring to Lewis as "a measuring worm": he measures the great art he sees, and copies it badly). Ford comes across as a snob, and a liar. Joyce, Picasso, and Sylvia Beach come across as basically harmless, benevolent presences.
There is one section of the book, "Hunger was good discipline," which exemplifies Hemingway at his writerly best and worst. Here is what I think of as the best:
You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry.
Perhaps he goes a little off the rails into uninteresting idiosyncrasy with the bit about Cezanne forgetting to eat, as opposed to being just flat-out broke and hungry. But the rest seems true. Hemingway is into intense mental states, in which one becomes other to oneself, but not in an ephemeral or feverish way. If anything, the difference is quantum (physics metaphor!); the altered state may be temporary, but it is static and describable. (Altered states are also especially important in For Whom The Bell Tolls, I think).
That for me is Hemingway at his best, at least as far as the rather slim pickings of A Moveable Feast go. He's at his worst at the end of the same section I quoted from above, when he poses the following sentence as a stand-alone paragraph:
All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head and until morning when I would start to work again.
Can anyone rescue this sentence, with its disparate and incompatible verb tenses? Can it be anything other than ugly and kind of ridiculous? Somehow it seems much worse than Hemingway's general use of parataxis, which can create a kind of rhythm, or the omission of punctuation, which creates immediacy. Both of those are evident in the first paragraph I quoted (see for instance the first sentence), and they do no harm.
[Cross-posted at The Valve]
4 Comments:
So much to say!
I find Hemingway's disparate verb tenses intriguing not nauseating, though your use of that word is telling: isn't this about the needs of the belly disrupting/resisting intextuation?
I find this passage fascinating given that it addresses the eating theme of the novel: if Paris is a Moveable Feast such that it feeds Hemingway's writing (and n.b. that Toklas did a lot of that feeding, and quite well, if you've ever read her cookbook) here he flips the theme around to address hunger as a space of inspiration and insight.
The shifting tenses then become more about representing his "unsound" but fruitful "illumination." Too, I feel like appetite/hunger - generally thought of as marking quotidian (at times read: feminine) time/space - is here made heroic, alterior to quotidian time. Hence the contradictory tenses.
So nausea might be quite the right response to the delirious vertiginousness (sp?) of hunger.
Dafina,
Yes the tenses could be explained by the delerium of hunger. It's interesting that in the passage I quoted he insists on concealing from his wife the fact that he doesn't intend to eat. She stays at home while he wanders -- aggressively -- around Paris, writing in cafes and meeting writers. It's relevant given that at the end of the book (written 30 years after the fact) he expresses some regret for the failure of that marriage. The domesticity is always sort of crumbling in A Moveable Feast, even though he always demurs from describing it in detail. Hadley (his wife) is a ghost.
And actually, speaking of crumbling, have you read this?
Yum.
(p.s. Ok, ok, I'm changing the link!)
But more than that I think that bellies disrupt narrative temporalities... I'm working on an article about it, and brainstorming on your site, sorry. Should have posted to the Valve.
Thanks for changing la linque.
Hemingway was an admirable t'ief.
Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" comes to mind. The Irish influence in language is pervasive but has probably had no greater influence than in Australia, as any LARRIKAN knows. Combined with Australian Aboriginal language, Irish has had an influence on bottom-up grass roots ways of speaking - as writer-singer-historian polymath Ted Egan has commented on. This is second attempt at a blog but, as Joyce said, "a smart man makes no mistakes - his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery"
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