A Moveable Feast

This article is about Ernest Hemingway's memoir. For holy days without a fixed date, see moveable feast. For the album, see Fairport Live Convention.
A Moveable Feast

First American edition
Author Ernest Hemingway
Country United States
Language English
Genre Autobiography
Publisher Scribners (USA) & Jonathan Cape (UK)
Publication date
 December 1964

A Moveable Feast is a memoir by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as an expatriate writer in Paris in the 1920s. The book describes Hemingway's apprenticeship as a young writer while he was married to his first wife, Hadley. Other people featured in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, Pascin, John Dos Passos, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Hermann von Wedderkop.

The book was not published during Hemingway's lifetime, but edited from his manuscripts and notes by his fourth wife and widow, Mary Hemingway. It was published posthumously in 1964, three years after Hemingway's death. An edition revised by his grandson Seán Hemingway was published in 2009.

The memoir consists of Hemingway's personal accounts, observations and stories. He provides specific addresses of cafes, bars, hotels, and apartments, some of which can still be found in Paris today.

The title, a play on the term for a holy day whose date is not fixed, was suggested by Hemingway's friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner, who remembered Hemingway saying, in a letter which is referenced at the beginning of the book: "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."[1]

Background

In November 1956 Hemingway recovered two small steamer trunks that he had stored in March 1928 in the basement of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The trunks contained notebooks he had filled during the 1920s. He had the notebooks transcribed and then worked them up into a memoir during the period when he was working on his book The Dangerous Summer. He rewrote several key passages and prepared a final draft, but after his death, his fourth wife, Mary, in her capacity as Hemingway's literary executor, edited the manuscript.

Gerry Brenner, a literary scholar at the University of Montana, and other researchers have examined Hemingway's notes and initial drafts of A Moveable Feast, which are in the collection of Ernest Hemingway's personal papers opened to the public in 1979, following the completion of the John F. Kennedy Library, where they are held in Boston. In a paper titled "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?" (1982), Brenner documented Mary Hemingway's editing process and questioned its validity. He concluded that some of her changes were misguided and that others derived from questionable motives.[2] He also suggested that the changes appeared to contradict Mary's stated policy for her role as executor, which had been to maintain a "hands off" approach.[3] Brenner indicates that Mary changed the order of the chapters in Hemingway's final draft, apparently to "preserve chronology." This change interrupted the series of juxtaposed character sketches of such individuals as Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company, and Gertrude Stein. The chapter titled "Birth of a New School," which Hemingway had dropped from his draft, was reinserted by Mary. Brenner alleges the most serious change was the deletion of Hemingway's lengthy apology to Hadley, his first wife. This apology appeared in various forms in every draft of the book. Brenner suggests that Mary deleted it because it impugned her own role as wife.

In contrast, A.E. Hotchner has said that he received a near final draft of A Moveable Feast and that the version Mary Hemingway published is essentially the draft he had read in 1957. Therefore, in his view, the original publication is the version that Hemingway intended, and Mary Hemingway did not revise or add chapters on her own initiative, but simply carried out Ernest's intentions.[4]

Preserved video of two critical reactions from 1964

The basic cable channel GSN has rebroadcast the kinescope of an appearance that Sheilah Graham made on the American television show What's My Line? 23 years after the death of her boyfriend F. Scott Fitzgerald.[5][6] She appeared on an episode that was telecast live on CBS on June 7, 1964, when A Moveable Feast was on bestseller lists.[5][6] Graham appeared on the show to promote a book she had written, and she did not bring up A Moveable Feast.[5][6]

Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House publishing who was also a regular panelist on the network television series, initiated talk of Hemingway's new bestselling book.[5] Cerf, who was two years younger than Fitzgerald and one year older than Hemingway, had the following exchange with Graham according to the kinescope of the telecast that is available for viewing on YouTube.

Cerf: Miss Graham, after, after this new Hemingway book, I hope you're going to answer some of the remarks that were made in that book about Scott Fitzgerald.
Graham: Well, I would like to. I'm not sure I'm the right person, although I am the right person...
Cerf: Ah, you certainly are the right person.
Graham: ... to answer that. I thought it was rather dreadfully cruel to Scott Fitzgerald and, untrue in, uh, in certain areas, shall we say.
Cerf: Well, I hope you'll straighten the record.
Graham: [unintelligible] ... try

[7]

Publishing history

In 2009 a new edition, titled the "Restored Edition", was published by Seán Hemingway, assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and grandson of Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer. He made numerous changes:

From the new foreword by Patrick Hemingway:

[H]ere is the last bit of professional writing by my father, the true foreword to A Moveable Feast: "This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist."[9]

A.E. Hotchner, a friend and biographer of Hemingway, alleged that Seán Hemingway had edited the new edition, in part, to exclude references to his grandmother, Hemingway's second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, which he had found less than flattering.[4] Other critics also have found fault with some of the editorial changes.[10] Irene Gammel writes about the new edition: "Ethically and pragmatically, restoring an author's original intent is a slippery slope when the published text has stood the test of time and when edits have been approved by authors or their legal representatives." Pointing to the complexity of authorship, she concludes: “Mary's version should be considered the definitive one, while the 'restored' version provides access to important unpublished contextual sources that illuminate the evolution of the 1964 edition.”[11]

Film and television adaptations

On September 15, 2009, Variety announced that Mariel Hemingway, a granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway and first wife Hadley Richardson, had acquired the film and television rights to the memoir with American film producer John Goldstone.[12]

Cultural references

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hotchner, A.E., Papa Hemingway, New York: Random House, 1966, p.57
  2. ↑ Brenner, Gerry. "Are We Going To Hemingway's Feast?", American Literature, Vol. 54, Num. 4, Dec 1982, p. 528
  3. ↑ Hemingway, Mary. How It Was, New York: Ballantine, 1977, p.?
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Hotchner, A. E. (2009-07-20). "Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast'". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-03-30.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 video of the June 7, 1964 What's My Line episode on which Sheilah Graham and Bennett Cerf comment on A Moveable Feast
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 text written by people who watched the 2006 GSN broadcast of the 1964 What's My Line kinescope
  7. ↑ YouTube video containing kinescope of What's My Line episode that aired live on CBS on June 7, 1964, cue it to 10 minutes 19 seconds
  8. ↑ Hemingway, Ernest; Hemingway, Seán (ed.) A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. Scribner's: New York, 2009. p. 4
  9. ↑ Hemingway (2009) p.xiv
  10. ↑ Massie, Allan (5 August 2009) "Rewrites and Wrongs" The Spectator. Accessed 16 February 2013.
  11. ↑ Gammel, Irene (21 August 2009). "A Changeable Feast", The Globe and Mail. Accessed 16 February 2013.
  12. ↑ Fleming, Mike (2009-09-15). "Hemingway's 'Feast' Heads to Screen". Variety. Retrieved 2010-04-05.
  13. ↑ Buchanan, Kyle (14 March 2012). "Fifty Years Ago Woody Allen Plotted Midnight in Paris in this Stand Up Routine", "Vulture". Accessed 9 May 2014.

References

Further reading

External links

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