My Transportable Banquet

A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway & my (non-exhaustive) Paris recommendations

On a Thursday afternoon in Paris, after looking at Picassos, and discovering a taste for Francis Picabia, and after a truly delicious chicken curry pita, and a surprisingly stirring stroll past the construction at Notre-Dame, I found myself, by no accident at all, exactly where I wanted to be. Shakespeare and Company, the English bookstore started by George Whitman in 1951 is an homage to the original of the same name, owned by Sylvia Beach, haven to writers, publisher of Ulysses (!!), and as I would soon find out, one time credit lender to none other than Ernest Hemingway.

The store itself is maze-like, all stones and cool air, with wooden benches and shelves. And pages, of course, lots of pages. It’s sectioned out in a pleasing enough way—poetry and art in the back, philosophy amusingly close to self-help (if one doesn’t work, try the other), children’s books over in a side nook, literature seemingly everywhere, hopping from one shelf on one side of the room to another on the other. I set out to find what I always set out to find, which is the bookseller recommendation section.

At Shakespeare and Company that manifests in the form of a shelf right up front dedicated to all the writers who have haunted the shop at one time or another—both in it’s current incarnation and the former. Allen Ginsberg, AnaÏs Nin, Henry Miller, James Baldwin. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald.  And of course, Ernest Hemingway.

Loyal readers may recall that my first foray into old Hem’s work took place only six(ish) short months ago with The Old Man and the Sea. It felt appropriate given the setting and my general mood (wistful, observant, awed, Parisian), that my second foray be A Movable Feast. This would be the one—my Paris book for my Paris trip. And so it was. I read 75% of it on the flight home and the other 25% the morning after I arrived back, when my internal clock woke me at the crack of dawn.

I am pleased to report that it is a truly very good book—the type of memoir that forces me to recall why I love reading memoirs and also why I so rarely do. My nostalgic nature is too powerful! My nostalgic nature is just powerful enough! Written by Hemingway towards the end of his life as a long-plotted reflection on his early and poor years in Paris, it strikes exactly the right note.

Short and sweet—just under 200 pages—it’s separated out into very digestible chapters, many of which almost read as stand alone essays. Many but not all. He moves fairly chronologically as far as I can tell and often strings together multiple chapters about a specific person—Gertrude Stein or F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example—that very much go together.

It is the sort of gossipy vibe (for lack of more literary terminology) of these stories that makes the book so entertaining. He writes so openly about the people he didn’t like and the things he didn’t like about them. Wyndham Lewis is described as the “nastiest man” he’d ever seen and Francis Picabia’s work is “worthless”—imagine my disappointment at finding this out, so soon after I had discovered that I liked it! And for all the insults he spells out plainly, there are so many digs and subtle embarrassments that he doesn’t. Even his friends—Stein, Pound, Fitzgerald—aren’t safe. They are loved and humbled in at least equal measure. He includes an incident in which he had to take F. Scott Fitzgerald to the Louvre to look at statue penises, all to ensure him that there was nothing wrong with his “measurements.” Can you imagine!?

But I don’t mean to make it all sound flippant or unkind because it’s not. It’s really a very tender book, and I think that shines through most in the dialogue he writes—particularly that with his wife Hadley, but also with the others—famous and not, writers, artists, waiters in the cafe—who litter the pages. Who can say to what extent the events in the book are recorded accurately—lifted from a journal perhaps? Though did Hemingway journal? At moments he admits failure of memory, and in the introduction he even says it’s okay to consider the whole affair as fiction. So, we know it’s not all straight historical record. It’s memory, it’s imagination—are those two things very different at all?

I backed my unwitting lover into a highly theoretical discussion of memory and imagination over dinner at La Fontaine de Mars on our first night. I started with Proust and ended up I don’t even remember where, though I could make it up and make it be the same thing as if I did remember. I actually think that’s exactly where I ended up. We were both half asleep, but there was a madeleine with our creme caramel (very good).

Aside from the few moments when Hemingway admits that he doesn’t recall the exact details of one thing or another, Hemingway’s dialogue is where the curtains surrounding his stage set flutter in the breeze just ever so slightly revealing that it’s all a a bit of a screen. I wanted to say that the dialogue is where the curtains are torn, but they’re not tears. They’re not rough or disorienting. These holes and glimpses into the story making of it all are winking and affectionate and ultimately true—not only because he made them so by remembering them so, but also because they seem to touch at the emotional core of his experience.

At the end of his chapter about discovering Sylvia Beach’s lending library, the following exchange takes place between Hemingway and Hadley:

“‘Let’s go walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops.’
‘Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new cafe where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.’
‘We can have two drinks.’
‘Then we can eat somewhere.’
‘No. Don’t forget we have to pay the library.’
‘Well come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.’
‘And we’ll never love anyone else but each other.’
‘No. Never.’
‘What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we’d better have lunch.’”

I can’t believe that anyone speaks like this, or has ever. But I can believe the sweetness of it, the life of it. Very certainly I believe the love in it.

---

So what of Paris for me? A moveable feast?

Of course my Paris was different from Hemingway’s. I was there for only a week, and I didn’t even try to find a cafe to write in. I barely wrote at all—aside from my personal records, which I suppose might one day will be published when I’m famous and dead, though I still flip flop on whether I will commit them to the flames before I breathe my last. That’s neither here nor there though, really.

Paris for me was rainy and in love. The rain was in love and so was I. We were both, the rain and I, in love with the city. I was in love, in addition to that, with the butter, with the sound of my footsteps on the sidewalks in the boots that I borrowed from my friend Maddie, with my lover, with it all. The city was in love with me too and maybe also in love with the rain, though on the few days it was sunny, I think the city may have been more in love with the sun. I couldn’t possibly say one way or the other.

All that’s to say that the rain in Paris is sure as hell more romantic than the rain in New York City.

On our first day, a long line of very Parisian looking shoppers along with a heavenly scent drew us nervously into to a butcher shop near where we were staying—a spectacular apartment lent by the DuGans, the most generous friends. Neither of us speak a lick of French, though by the end of the week my bonne soirée tricked more than one person into thinking I might. No matter—on that first day at the butcher shop, we did well enough to get our hands on a rotisserie chicken that we picked at with our fingers as I carved it, alternating bites with hunks of heavily buttered baguette.

We went to the Musée Rodin, and I posed in front of all the Eves and took possibly my favorite photo of the trip—“Lover at the Gates of Hell.” Though “Lover Frightened of Taxidermy Polar Bear” from the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature would be a close second. The Musée de la Chasse was one of a kind, and Holly Cunningham must be thanked. I insisted on going to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson because his photography always reminds me of my mom, though what we found there was actually an exhibition on Weegee—NYC crime photographer extraordinaire of the 1930’s and 1940’s. I flew all the way to Paris to see a dead man on Elizabeth Street.   

We went to Le Caveau de la Huchette and were delighted (understatement) to watch the old French men swing the young French ladies around in circles and circles while the band played. A both young couple right in front of us flirted and laughed and bumped their hips together, and I’ll really never forget the way they looked doing it.

We ate innumerable delicious things, including but not limited to the pork chop at Parcelles, the aforementioned chicken curry pita from L’as Du Fallafel, steak tartare with caper berries at La Rôtisserie d'Argent, clams (yes, clams!) at Marché des Enfants Rouges, winkles and whelks and lamb curry at La Coupole—I liked the whelks, my lover liked the winkles, we both liked the curry. We ate dessert everywhere we went, but the profiterole at Bistro des Tournelles is the one I remember most fondly. We had three different types of cheese from Barthélémy and ate an inappropriate amount of bread every place we went. When I tried to order the Andouillette at Brasserie Lipp, our waiter didn’t let me, and he was probably right. Sit in the front room if you go, and see if your waiter will let you order it.

They serve eggs with mayonnaise almost everywhere, and that was an indescribable treat for me. We had a drink and bar pretzels at Le Select, and a drink with no pretzels at Harry’s New York Bar, where we both spent the entire time scanning the room for one college flag or another. At Colvert, I ate guinea fowl, which was very good, and we drank cognac and chartreuse after dinner, and that was very good too, but the best part was our sweet and funny waiter and the fact that we got to sit at the bar (untraditional though it was) instead of a table.

I should also mention that we both bought vintage Levis from a very special gentleman named Phillipe who guessed my size perfectly from just looking at me, and who made me make all kinds of promises before he would sell the jeans to me. Always wash inside out! That day we had drinks with our friend Emma at Folderol where they also serve homemade ice cream, which we ate as an appetizer. We had dinner together after that—and that was the night of the profiterole. There’s something really sparkly about seeing someone you know from home in a city across the ocean.

That was true too on our last night, when we ate many oysters and other delicious things with my dear friends Lisa & Robbie, before we took off to Moulin Rouge where I was first captivated by a British couple behind us in line who spoke to each other EXACTLY the way they speak to each other on Love Island, and then captivated by a woman literally flying around in circles onstage in roller-skates—and the feathers, and the topless ladies, and the can-can, etc.

So yes, a moveable feast, I suppose. But at the risk of sounding…however I’m about to sound to you…anywhere I go with my lover and anything I do with him is whatever one step up from a moveable feast is. A…transportable banquet? Doesn’t sound so very ooh la la. I guess Hemingway deserves his due. Let’s just call it a moveable feast.

I was lying earlier, this is my favorite photo from the trip.

---