A Moveable Feast, The Restored Edition - Ernest Hemingway

I greatly enjoyed this version of A Moveable Feast.  The first posthumously published edition came out in 1964 and was edited by Mary Hemingway.  The new edition has a forward by Patrick Hemingway and was edited by Sean Hemingway and includes material that was left out of the first edition.

The original title that Ernest referred to the book as was “The Paris Sketches”, although he never decided on a title or ending for the book.  Mary Hemingway gave the book its current title.  This was suggested to her by A.E. Hotchner, who recalls Ernest telling him in a Ritz Bar in Paris in 1950, “ 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.”

The beginning of the project was a result of the management at the Ritz Hotel in Paris convincing Ernest Hemingway to repossess two small steamer trunks that he had stored there in March 1928.  The trunks contained forgotten remnants from his first years in Paris.  He and Mary purchased a large Louis Vuitton streamer trunk to ship the cargo back home to the Finca, in Cuba, on a transatlantic voyage aboard the Ile de France in 1954.  In the summer of 1957, he began work on “The Paris Sketches”, as he called the book. 

To me A Moveable Feast reads like a series of short stories.  The chapters do not follow a strict chronological order and they truly read like “sketches” related to Ernest Hemingway in his early years trying to hone his skills as a fiction writer.  There were ten additional chapters in varying stages of competition that the new editor included in a separate section of this edition from the main text.  These were never finished to the author’s satisfaction and should be regarded as incomplete. 

I had just completed a biography of Ernest Hemingway by Mary Dearborn prior to reading the version of A Moveable Feast.  I believe that knowing the “whole story” of Hemingway’s life while reading this book makes it more interesting, partly because one can tell that he is writing these stories, which can basically be called memoirs, from the perspective of all that followed in his life. 

I am thankful that both Mary and Sean Hemingway decided to publish this book posthumously as it is one of my favorite Hemingway books.