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    A Moveable Feast
    A Moveable Feast
    A Moveable Feast
    Ebook204 pages3 hours

    A Moveable Feast

    By Ernest Hemingway

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    About this ebook

    Ernest Hemingway’s classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, now available in a restored edition, includes the original manuscript along with insightful recollections and unfinished sketches.

    Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway’s most enduring works. Since Hemingway’s personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined the changes made to the text before publication. Now, this special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.

    Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s sole surviving son, and an introduction by grandson of the author, Seán Hemingway, editor of this edition, the book also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son, Jack, and his first wife Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of literary luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford, and insightful recollections of Hemingway’s own early experiments with his craft.

    Widely celebrated and debated by critics and readers everywhere, the restored edition of A Moveable Feast brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateOct 1, 1996
    ISBN9780743237291
    Author

    Ernest Hemingway

    Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His novels include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, he died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.

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    Reviews for A Moveable Feast

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Had read this before so listened to it this time. Unfortunately, there's a reason Hemingway is subject so often to parody. His intentional avoidance of all adjectives or variation in sentences makes him difficult to listen to as well as to read. Enjoyed his portraits of his peers, but would not have made it all the way thru had this not been for a book club.
    • 3/5
      In this collection of short, autobiographical essays, Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley drink, gamble, and hobnob with expatriate writers in post WWI Paris and elsewhere in Europe. Sometimes, in between meals and trips to the racetrack, he settles down and "works" (writes).This book was very different, and not nearly as compelling, as I thought it would be. The essays are too brief and disconnected to allow for indentification with any of the characters, and the narrative (or lack of the same) often failed to hold my interest. It would have helped me if the edition I read had annotations to put the essays into context.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant. Fitzgerald could create a flawless story, Hemingway could create a flawless sentence.
    • 4/5
      I had actually read this last year, but never entered it into my read books. Reading each vignette about Paris (and the mountains Hem skiied in) reminded me of the wonderful time I had there. My favorites were about writing in the cafe, his initial meetings with G. Stein, and the first times they went skiing.
    • 4/5
      I read a lovely high-quality Book-of-the-Month Club edition of this book from 1964 that still had a flyer with discussion by Clifton Fadiman in it. His remarks heightened my appreciation of this interesting book. I hesitate to call it a novel - it is really a memoir of Hemingway's time in Paris in the 1920's - pieces of it told via 20 remembrances of people and places as well as his own struggles with writing and defining himself as a writer. He and his wife Hadley, and son, were quite poor. Hemingway started writing this in Cuba in 1957. Hemingway was writing this thirty years after the events and many of his thoughts do not treat his companions of the times well. Hemingway can flatter and praise some, but he reveals his true thoughts on others quite a lot. Altogether this was a fascinating look at life, love, racing, cafes, just all the places in Hemingway's rather small area of Paris that is just fun to read and drift back into history.There are some lines throughout the book that just zing you when you come across them. Perhaps the most famous is the epigraph: 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. Ernest Hemingway to a friend, 1950" The very last words of the book zinged me: "But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy." I think I got teary-eyed there.
    • 5/5
      I'm an author and I enjoy reading Hemmingway to see how he creates his stories. In [A Moveable Feast], Hemmingway describes life in Paris with his wife Hadley among American expatriates like Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. He gives vivid personality portraits with very few words. His descriptions of weather and food are also terse, yet vivid. Hemmingway also discusses writing and his process at that time, as he was becoming a known author.The book is a series of vignettes that hang together chronologically over a year in Paris. It was written long afterward in the 50s, and there is an aura of nostalgic melancholy about the book.This book is an American classic; one of the few that has been read for 60 years and will continue to be read as long as there is an America.
    • 4/5
      One of the ones you sometimes re-read, partially or entirely.
    • 4/5
      My first experience of Hemingway as a writer and as a man. That perhaps made understanding all the relationships more difficult. An intriguing portrait of the method of a writer and a snapshot of history, beautifully told.
    • 4/5
      This memoir, published posthumously, covers Hemingway's early days in Paris, right after he decided to leave journalism to become a writer of fiction. He was married, a father, constantly writing, friends with some very intelligent and very successful writers (Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald), and - to use his words - "very poor and very happy." In this series of short essays, he sheds his skin to expose his heart.

      I was struck with the sense that Hemingway found every day an adventure. He is constantly stringing together sentences as run-ons with the connectors of "but" and "and." It's like he is spinning some yarn and can't wait to get to the end. So he rushes and avoids the periods and the commas. He is ready to tell his tale no matter what comes. Such was his sense of determination to become a writer while in Paris.

      It is good for this aspiring writer to read of his struggles. He knew not how to make money. He just worked on his craft. This is good advice for anyone starting off in any profession or station in life. Work on the craft; be dedicated to the work; hone your skills; don't be discouraged by rejection. Such was Hemingway's time in Paris, whose lesson of being "very poor and very happy" is the path to success.
    • 4/5
      The passages about Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald and writing and Paris are fantastic. The stuff about horse racing and skiing vacations, much less so. But then, maybe that says more about my interests than anything else.
    • 1/5
      Boring dribble about Hemingway and people he interacted with. Though the people were famous I really do not care what they had to eat and drink. A total piece of useless information. Sorry I wasted my time with this.
    • 3/5
      My favorite Hemingway book thus far. Moving, funny and interesting - but concise in a mostly non-annoying way. Also, he really hated Zelda Fitzgerald, huh?
    • 4/5
      Absorbing reading. Features a snarky "new introduction" by Jane Kramer that wasn't even bound into the book, and badmouths him pretty much from start to finish. He probably deserved it.
    • 4/5
      A good book and true. Read in conjunction with The Paris Wife, they fit nicely together. Best chapters are about Schuns and several about f Scott.
    • 3/5
      Hemingway is not one of my favorite authors, but in this book his description of Paris in the 20s is wonderful. He plays around with some of the facts, but captures a time and a place in history that fascinates me. Paris was the center of the world then and so much that was groundbreaking was happening there in the way of music (jazz), painting (cubism), and writing. Hemingway shows us his take on this magical time.
    • 3/5
      3.5 really, I couldn't go the whole four. I listened to the audio version of the restored edition, and the narration was out of this world. The type of narration that lifts a story up. There are a number of fragments at the end, from his historical collection, and I have to say that audio is perhaps not the best venue for really soaking this sort of thing up. One of things noted about this restored edition is that it did not flow chronologically, which did in fact end up a little confusing, but that is not a major issue.

      I am keeping this book - I keep only a fraction of the books I read, that is notable. There were a number of parts of this memoir/work of fiction (in his words), that I really enjoyed. I loved hearing about their winters in Schroontz, which I am entirely sure I have misspelled, but hey, I never saw it in writing. And I absolutely adore the dialogue. There is something unique about his dialogue, and between his words and this narration, it was just outstanding. Some of the things that were really small were amazing to ponder, such as leaving their baby son home alone in the crib with the cat as a babysitter

      His writing about Scott Fitzgerald was sadly distressing. I will follow up soon by reading Z, about Zelda, as it also fits in my challenge.

      If you like Hemingway, this is worth your while. If you don't already care for him, this probably won't, change your mind.
    • 4/5
      My god, they were so young. I mean, I know this intellectually, but to read this is to really get the full sense of literary boyishness. Your 20s are your 20s no matter what era, no matter which arondissement, and there is something very sweet about this book for just that reason. Boys bragging, boys fronting, boys writing. The whiff of youthful exuberance here is a little intoxicating, feels good; this is well worth reading, or rereading. I'm glad I didn't even think about the updated version.This is a hardcover I bought for $2 or $3 on the street in 2009 or so, but I'd never looked inside until I opened it to read. I noticed that it had the original Book-of-the-Month Club insert inside, so I checked the front matter and hey! -- looks like I've got myself a first American BOMC edition (it came out in London a bit earlier in 1964). Not worth much, and it's in pretty lowly shape, but that still made me happy, and gave it a little extra gravitas.
    • 4/5
      GLBT interest tag is for Sylvia & Adrienne and Gertrude & Alice; for Hem's & Gertrude's homophobia concerning male sexual predators; for confusing predators with non-predator queer people; and for scads of intimate contact with Scott Fitzgerald.

      Is it bad that now I want to read fic where Hem & Scott were together? Where is the AU where Hem took Scott skiing in Austria and they spent weeks skiing, writing, drinking, etc. Someone should write that.

      Interesting: his description of Gertrude's "You're all a lost generation" as her tirade at a WWI veteran motor mechanic refusing to skip her ahead in the line for car repairs. Only later did it become "literary".

      Sexism aside, I'm very fond of Hem. Sure, sometimes I want to throw him off a cliff, but I've always loved adventure stories.
    • 5/5
      I recognize that Hemingway's memories of Paris are flawed and romanticized, but I still love this book, one of my go-to comfort reads. I never get tired of it.
    • 2/5
      I read this book because I had just read The Paris Wife, and it was a good companion to that book. However, I am just not a Hemingway fan, and I can't say I liked this book at all. He really seems like he's full of himself. Sorry to all Hemingway lovers!!
    • 4/5
      Half-ass read in college, but really enjoyed this revisiting. Vintage Hemingway, written by a master at the top of his game. Insightful and poetic and terse.
    • 4/5
      I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Hemingway's stories of life in Paris as a young man.
    • 4/5
      A Moveable Feast is a series of stories about Hemingway's life in Paris in the 20s with his first wife, before the publication of his first novel. Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald all have a chapter. This is a fun Hemingway (perhaps the only one), and everything has a happy nostalgic patina, even when he's digging viciously at Zelda Fitzgerald.
    • 5/5
      Hemingway allows the reader to see things as they really were.
    • 3/5
      Yes, Hemingway is a giant of American literature. Still, I do not like his writing style. His descriptions are literal but his sentences can be long, rambling and nonsensical. While this was interesting to read as a writer, only readers well versed in Hemingway’s biography will be able to fill in all the blanks Hemingway leaves.
    • 4/5
      Published after Hemingway's death, "A Moveable Feast" is a progressive dining experience with some of the great (and some lesser) lights of the post WWI expat literary community in Paris. It interesting to see what personal qualities he zeroed in on, while spending time with Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others. While moving distinctly from person to person, the backdrop throughout is 1920s Paris and its café culture. Sales of this book spiked in Paris after the extremist attacks in November 2015; perhaps a touchstone for how Parisians see themselves and a vision they don't want to slip away after such a shock. The most quoted paragraph of the book --- one that could be a suitable hook -- lies at the very end. Hemingway sums it up: "There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it."
    • 5/5
      In the Preface, Hemingway writes: "If the readers prefer, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw light on what has been written as fact".... One feels intrigued and disappointed at the same time about such a statement. But one reads eagerly nonetheless. Because right from the start, Hemingway's way of narration flows so easily, not overrun by flowery metaphors and yet so compelling. A certain unavoidable feeling of rhythm to his writing. Yes, probably romanticized a bit - or even more than a bit! - it having been written so much later in life, but I couldn't let that bother me: the writing was just too good.During these years in Paris (1920s), still as a young writer, Hemingway encounters interesting personalities and describes them to the fullest: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald are in particular given colorful portraits. Also, I couldn't help being impressed at his fascination with the Russian writers - Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky:"From the day I had found Sylvia Beach's library, I had read all of Turgenev, what had been published in English by Gogol,... translations of Tolstoi and Chekhov.... In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the sanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops , the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi.... To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you." Strangely enough, there is only faint mention of Hemingway's wife Hadley and their child in the whole of the narration. She comes through as a pale background to all his wanderings on Paris streets and meetings at cafes. Her portrayal (or what there is of it) is very sweet and genuine in the few words that the writer allots her, but not sufficiently "real" for a constant companion. He gives much more colorful description to the character of Zelda Fitzgerald (who, as he witnessed, turned out to be a bad influence on her husband) than to his own wife.As for Scott Fitzgerald, his portrait is probably the most revealing. At first we see certain contradiction of attitude during their first meeting, during their unusual and troublesome car trip, but little by little (and especially after reading "The Great Gatsby") Hemingway puts aside the weird idiosyncrasies of the man, his hypochondriac character, his problems with his wife Zelda - to give him full credit as a great writer - and gives himself a promise to always be there for him.Among the good times, there were bitter disappointments - like when all his manuscripts were lost in a robbery, and he had to start writing all anew. Or hardships - when he had to go hungry and "invent" meal invitations (while simply going on long walks and later retelling his wife at home the menus and what he ate at such "invitations") to save money on food. But the general feel to this time in Paris (as well as short trips and stays outside the city during the winter) is a good and treasured one, one that probably stayed with the author throughout his life.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I have to confess that I have never understood the acclaim afforded to Ernest Hemigway, and this book has done nothing to assuage my doubts. I know that he is revered as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and seen as some sort of embodiment of the writer as a man of action, but his works simply leave me cold.I was looking forward to this account of his life in Paris between the World Wars. After all, with such a setting, and the added frisson afforded by accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of my all-time literary heroes), how could the book fail to enthral? Well, somehow, it managed to overcome the integral advantages, and somehow claw back defeat from the jaws of victory. The foreword and preface to this edition, written by one of Hemingway’s sons, and one of his grandsons, made much play of the considerable efforts to edit the manuscript undertaken by Mary, Hemingway’s final wife, and the rest of the family. I must say that if this manuscript was the consequence of intense and dedicated editing, I dread to think how dreadful the original must have been.Far from an enlightening selection of memoirs recounting scintillating encounters between prominent figures of the world of the arts, it is a series of inconsequential and rambling recollections of tedious meetings, recounted in appalling, inchoate prose. I think we would all have been better served if this book had been edited through the medium of a shredding machine.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I loved this book! This is a memoir of Hemingway's early years in Paris of the 1920s. In many ways it seems like a collection of short stories. Each chapter has the unity and feel of an intimate first person narrative, yet in this case the characters and events are real. Even though it was published posthumously, Hemingway had edited and reedited the chapters so that they were fairly well finished and almost suitable for publication.Between his encounters with Gertrude Stein, Silvia Beach, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others, we get a feel for his life as a writer, where he worked and why, his discipline, the way he honed his style. Sometimes he wrote in cafés, especially in winter where it was warm, but otherwise he rented a room at the top of a cheap hotel where he could work undisturbed. Hemingway admits that he had a short temper as a young man, and it angered him when someone came into "his" café where he had staked out his writing territory and insisted on prattling on and on when it was clear he was working and wanted the interloper to clear off.He first met Gertrude Stein while strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens. They became friendly and she let him know she was at home every day after five in winter. She was a great talker and had many prejudices about other writers, depending on whether they spoke favorably about her work or not. Hemingway credits her with coining the term "lost generation."The first time he went to Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach's bookshop — which also had a large lending library, Hemingway had no money with him, and she very kindly registered him, sent him away with an armload of books and trusted him to pay the rental fee later. This was before he had written anything but the journalistic pieces for foreign newspapers that paid his bills, so he was like any stranger coming in off the street.Ezra Pound was a saint in Hemingway's eyes. He was ". . . the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste — the one and only correct word to use — the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives . . ."F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is the subject of the longest piece in the book, was one of Hemingway's closest friends, although I cannot think why based on Hemingway's own characterization. Fitzgerald actually made him quite angry the time they went down to Lyon by train to pick up Scott's car, which had been left there because of bad weather on account of its not having a top. Things got off to a rocky start when Fitzgerald missed the train. A flurry of wires back and forth got them together in Lyon where Fitzgerald immediately showed his hypochondria, going straight to bed and demanding that Hemingway go out and get him a thermometer — never mind that the pharmacy was closed. He insisted he was dying of pneumonia even though his forehead was cool to the touch and he showed no signs of distress other than having had too much to drink.So Ezra Pound was a saint, but Wyndham Lewis had the appearance of the devil. Ford Madox Ford behaved like a stuffed shirt (my words) and Ernest Walsh, a poet, was a bit of a con man, promising a thousand-dollar literary award to both Pound and Hemingway, and possibly also to James Joyce. Hemingway doesn't say whether anyone ever got the money!Hemingway prematurely gave up his journalistic income to devote full time to writing, and this meant that he and his wife Hadley went through some lean and hungry times. They both loved the horse races, and in those days a lot of doping was going on, and the savvy horse player could do well. Hemingway eventually gave up the gambling for several reasons, but the most important was that it ate into his writing time too much.On one occasion Hemingway had been staying and working down in Lausanne where Hadley was to join him later for a holiday. As a surprise, she had packed up all his yet to be published manuscripts so he could work on them. Her bag was stolen at the Gare de Lyon. When Hemingway later realized that "typescripts and carbons" were in that suitcase, the loss was devastating. It took him a while before he could pick up a pen to write again.Hemingway's "stories" about his life in and sometimes out of Paris in the early twenties are just wonderful. He puts the reader right there in the milieu of the Left Bank. If one knows Paris at all and is interested in the time of the lost generation, A Moveable Feast should be a very satisfying read.
    • 4/5
      Book on CD performed by James Naughton

      Early in his career as a writer, Hemingway lived in Paris with his wife and infant son. This is his memoir of that time, when he was young, curious, and soaking up atmosphere with a sponge. He may have been poor but he could still afford to spend an afternoon in a café sipping wine and writing. He could have a nice luncheon and visit with friends, even gamble on the horse races. He and Hadley were in love and had time to enjoy themselves and each other. At the same time, he was immersed in a world that fueled his creative juices. He remembered encounters with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald, among others.

      Here’s a quote wherein Hemingway describes Fitzgerald:
      His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

      Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have shared even one afternoon with these young writers! I’ve been a Hemingway fan since I first read The Old Man and the Sea when I was in high school (or junior high?). There is immediacy to his writing that just draws me into the world of his work. I thank Hemingway for letting me live vicariously through his memories. Naughton does a wonderful job of narrating. His bass is perfect for the uber masculine Hemingway, though his deep voice didn’t do justice to the women, especially Zelda Fitzgerald.

    Book preview

    A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

    A GOOD CAFÉ ON THE PLACE ST.-MICHEL

    Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time, or all of the time they could afford it, mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apéritifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

    The Café des Amateurs was the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard, that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe. The squat toilets of the old apartment houses, one by the side of the stairs on each floor with the two cleated cement shoe-shaped elevations on each side of the aperture so a locataire would not slip, emptied into cesspools which were emptied by pumping into horse-drawn tank wagons at night. In the summer time, with all windows open, we would hear the pumping and the odor was very strong. The tank wagons were painted brown and saffron color and in the moonlight when they worked the rue Cardinal Lemoine their wheeled, horse-drawn cylinders looked like Braque paintings. No one emptied the Café des Amateurs though, and its yellowed poster stating the terms and penalties of the law against public drunkenness was as flyblown and disregarded as its clients were constant and ill-smelling.

    All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

    It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold and I knew how much it would cost for a bundle of small twigs, three wire-wrapped packets of short, half-pencil length pieces of split pine to catch fire from the twigs, and then the bundle of half-dried lengths of hard wood that I must buy to make a fire that would warm the room. So I went to the far side of the street to look up at the roof in the rain and see if any chimneys were going, and how the smoke blew. There was no smoke and I thought about how the chimney would be cold and might not draw and of the room possibly filling with smoke, and the fuel wasted, and the money gone with it, and I walked on in the rain. I walked down past the Lycée Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St.-Étienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Panthéon and cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on the lee side of the Boulevard St.-Michel and worked on down it past the Cluny and the Boulevard St.-Germain until I came to a good café that I knew on the Place St.-Michel.

    It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. 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. But in the story the boys were drinking and this made me thirsty and I ordered a rum St. James. This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing, feeling very well and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.

    A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

    I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

    The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

    I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

    Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James. I was tired of rum St. James without thinking about it. Then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph and then I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she’s gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.

    I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

    As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

    Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night. Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. Traveling third class on the train was not expensive. The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.

    I would give up the room in the hotel where I wrote and there was only the rent of 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine which was nominal. I had written journalism for Toronto and the checks for that were due. I could write that anywhere under any circumstances and we had money to make the trip.

    Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually. Anyway we would go if my wife wanted to, and I finished the oysters and the wine and paid my score in the café and made it the shortest way back up the Montagne Ste. Geneviève through the rain, that was now only local weather and not something that changed your life, to the flat at the top of the hill.

    I think it would be wonderful, Tatie, my wife said. She had a gently modeled face and her eyes and her smile lighted up at decisions as though they were rich presents. When should we leave?

    Whenever you want.

    Oh, I want to right away. Didn’t you know?

    Maybe it will be fine and clear when we come back. It can be very fine when it is clear and cold.

    I’m sure it will be, she said. Weren’t you good to think of going, too.

    MISS STEIN INSTRUCTS

    When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely. The city had accommodated itself to winter, there was good wood for sale at the wood and coal place across our street, and there were braziers outside of many of the good cafés so that you could keep warm on the terraces. Our own apartment was warm and cheerful. We burned boulets which were molded, egg-shaped lumps of coal dust, on the wood fire, and on the streets the winter light was beautiful. Now you were accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky and you walked on the fresh-washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg gardens in the clear sharp wind. The trees were sculpture without their leaves when you were reconciled to them, and the winter winds blew across the surfaces of the ponds and the fountains blew in the bright light. All the distances were short now since we had been in the mountains.

    Because of the change in altitude I did not notice the grade of the hills except with pleasure, and the climb up to the top floor of the hotel where I worked, in a room that looked across all the roofs and the chimneys of the high hill of the quarter, was a pleasure. The fireplace drew well in the room and it was warm and pleasant to work. I brought mandarines and roasted chestnuts to the room in paper packets and peeled and ate the small tangerine-like oranges and threw their skins and spat their seeds in the fire when I ate them and roasted chestnuts when I was hungry. I was always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working. Up in the room I had a bottle of kirsch that we had brought back from the mountains and I took a drink of kirsch when I would get toward the end of a story or toward the end of the day’s work. When I was through working for the day I put away the notebook, or the paper, in the drawer of the table and put any mandarines that were left in my pocket. They would freeze if they were left in the room at night.

    It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

    It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.

    If I walked down by

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