Distant Dreamer

A Moveable Feast

I have just begun reading my second book for our class, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964. The book recounts the years Hemingway spent as a penniless expatriate in Paris in the 1920's, the decade of the emergence of a brilliant new artistic commmunity, formed in an area of southern Paris called Montparnasse. Besides sketching uncanny portraits of such luminary figures as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway recalls with exquisite tenderness his marriage to his first wife, Hadley, and paints a stunning picture of the old city of Paris.

In his first chapter, Hemingway describes a rainy Paris afternoon spent sitting and writing in a cafe near Place St. Michel. As he sips his St. James rum and looks out at the muddy grey streets, his mind drifts back to the windy days he'd spent in Michigan as a boy, and he begins to write fervently a story of this place, and his youth. Pausing to drink, he muses, "I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things."

I have found this idea to be true. It was while sitting in closed rooms in New York, lying on my tired comfortable bed in my old usual home, that I dreamt and wrote of Paris and how I hoped to live there. It was only in cooped up corners of America that I yearned, really longed for Europe and all its adventures, and it was only there that I wrote it as honestly as I felt it, there, from afar, oceans away. And now I am here, and it is here I can suddenly remember America. I can suddenly write with surprising certainty and pointedness the memories I wanted to put down on paper for so long but felt unable to: the dream-like nights I spent floating around the city of New York, drunk off the blaze of red lights and yellow cabs; the soft green summers of my New England home town by the sea and its night skies awash with stars like freckles on a plump navy face; the dry trips through death mountain valleys of California; the packed family vans roaming somewhere in Italian New Jersey; the endless endless memories of my country, what I know of it. It is from a distance I can admire it, as Hemingway admired from afar a sullen beauty by the window of his cafe, it is from a distance I can love it, understand it. And write it down.

As Hemingway leaves the cafe, clutching his coat around his head in the rain, he dreams of taking his new wife away to the country, away from the grey. "Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan..." he wonders. I wonder the same, for I do not think I know the city well enough to write it here. No, it is only as I sail back across the Atlantic through seas of clouds with New York streaming bright ahead, only then that I will feel, and know, and know how to feel and write the miraculous city of Paris, breathing and falling into memory behind me.