On Hemingway and Internal Monologues

I started reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast on the metro ride home from Saint Germaine, after buying the slim volume at Shakespeare and Co.  I felt like a cliché.  The place was crowded thqt afternoon; I've never heard "excuse me" in so many different languages.

I read the first section, where Hemingway describes eating oysters and drinking at the café while writing, and seeing the young girl.  I'm ashamed to say I've never read the book before - it always seemed so stereotypical and I was never in the right moment to take advantage of it.  The passage made me hungry.  Hemingway always lines his sentences up with such devastating cause and effect.  He talks about feeling cold and empty and ordering a drink and feeling it fill him with warmth and being able to write then.  The man was a excellent, well-practiced alcoholic.  I spend the train ride home reading and wondering if it's okay to go through life satisfying our own most basic urges, the urge for warmth and comfort and satisfaction, pushing ourselves to do what we don't want until we can't bear it and then giving in and doing what we want.  I tend toward moral asceticism - I think a lot of learning and growth comes through suffering, less than through pleasure - indulgence is meant to be rare and serves to ,ake suffering more acute.  You save a lot of money on this philosophy.

The next day I read further, through the first section he talks qbout Gertrude Stein qnd her partner.  I'm reading whgile having lunch at a café by myself.  I'm late lunch, it's nearly two, so the place is nearly empty but the waiter still manages to appear harried.  I order wtare and orange juice and an omelette with a salad.  The omelette is much less flavorful than I anticipated but it's warm and this October day in Paris is unseasonably cold - the wind already bites the way NYC reserves for another month.  The orange juice is fresh-squeezed and you can tell, it's like a sun-burst in your mouth.  I haven't been writing very much while I've been here, barely at all, and I realize now it's because I spend all my time reading and writing and trying to think in French.  I can understand French, but I communicate in it very simply - I have to give up the complexity, the nuance and metaphor and subtlety that I'm used to English.  And so my internal monologue, usually zipping along in English and providing me with ideas to write about, has fallen silent, stupefied.  But reading Hemingway always makes me start thinking in short simple sentences and I realize how much I've missed being able to read literature and not have to worry about understanding on the basic level of plot and vocabulary and structure and focus on bigger choices the writer is making; what a gift is fluency.  I finish my orange juice.  The waiter brought me bread but I've decided not to eat any of it.  I eat so much bread here, I have plenty of food, I don't need more enriched flour.

I love the way he describes Getrude Stein.  He clearly respects her even as he levels criticism at her both as a writer and as a person.  It reminds me so much of friends at home.  I think most people who are really passionate in a field keep an ever changing list of ten or so people who they know in that field whom they think are really spectacular; I'm blessed to be close friends with most of my ten.  But even though I think they are way more talented than most young writers out there, all of us are extremely different sorts of writers and we believe very different things about the nature of writing and art, and I know each of us think thqt we are right and the others are wrong.  Wanting to be a writer by nature is a somewhat arrogant goal, and if one were to make a judgment, arrogance might be a defining flaw of the job.  But that's how it goes - your best friends are the people you can argue angrily with and still like.

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