The Missing Entry

Hemingway and friends in ParisTo start, this entry is so late because I only started reading my second book two days ago. Not because I didn’t want to read it—from the time I saw the Paris book list for this course, I was looking forward to reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It’s just that I like to be out in the city, not in my apartment, so I usually read on the metro or in cafés; I’ve just been trying so hard to fit seamlessly into Parisian life—to seem like a local on the metro, to not encourage my waiter to start speaking to me in English—that reading things in public that aren’t in French has made me a bit uncomfortable. Anyway, out of either my changing perspective or out of necessity, I’ve made an exception with Hemingway, and I’m so glad I have.

Many aspects of Hemingway’s Paris, which was even to him an “old city,” don’t exist anymore. I haven’t seen any goatherds walking around in the early morning, blowing on pipes and milking a goat into the pot of whoever comes outside and pays. His cafés and bistros no longer exist, as far as I know, and the area around Cardinal Lemoine is no longer poor. But the way he experiences Paris, and writes about it, is so immediate that the city feels alive and recognizable. His Paris isn’t Paris of the sights and the nostalgia, but it’s not wholly separate from them either. And while he knows the streets, wanders without getting lost, knows the names of the waiters in his local cafés, Hemingway often mentions his circle of Anglophone friends, and frequents Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookstore. I suppose it’s this kind of balance between living in Paris and remaining an outsider, in a sense, that I’ve aspired to in my few months here.

As much as A Moveable Feast is about Paris, it’s also about writing. Hemingway describes how and what he writes, what he drinks while he writes (a café au lait, a rum St. James) and where; he mentions Gertrude Stein’s critiques of his stories; he recalls how a suitcase of his manuscripts was stolen from his wife Hadley at the Gare de Lyon. I especially loved reading these parts of the book because I write, or try to, and because despite the clichés and despite Hemingway’s experiences, I have written very very little since I’ve been in Paris.

Of gambling at the horse races, Hemingway writes, “By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.” I wonder if New York will still be that something better when I get back in January.

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