Fact or Fiction: Hemingway's As A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published A Moveable Feast is generally characterized as an autobiographical memoir recalling Hemingway's experiences while living in Paris during the 1920s (Perkins and Perkins, 739). However, many literary critics, including Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin (1, 9), have questioned the degree to which this Hemingway book represents a genuinely factual or autobiographical story. Indeed, Tavernier-Courbin (2, 44) suggests that there is as much fiction in the book as there is fact because "he felt that he had been unfairly portrayed by some of his contemporaries" and therefore "A Moveable Feast could hardly be an objective portrayal of its author and his contemporaries."

The research question shaping the present essay therefore is: to what degree does Hemingway's A Moveable Feast represent candid autobiography as opposed to an after-the-fact effort by its author to reshape posterity's understanding of what it meant to be Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s? This is a significant question in the view of Thomas Meier (345) because coming as it did three years after Hemingway's suicide, A Moveable Feast demonstrates that toward the end of his life, Hemingway had recaptured his literary powers and told a story which, if not entirely factual, was nevertheless compelling.

In the preface to the book, Hemingway (i) says that "if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is al

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rental library "we'll 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 a Beaune on the window." To anyone familiar with Hemingway's prose style, it is impossible not to recognize that the "one true sentence" has been carefully written and that while he may have had something like this to his wife, when he came to write about it decades later he did so as an artist and not as a husband recalling a conversation. Frederick Karl (75-76) contends that reading Hemingway necessitates reading about Hemingway. The implication is that no matter what Hemingway may have been writing about at the time - with the exception of journalism - he invariably infused his subject matter with the personal. Hemingway (91) stated that when writing for example of the Michigan woods, he needed to "feel the pine needles under your moccasins." In this book, Hemingway (174) reveals himself as attempting to be a friend to F. Scott Fitzgerald yet aware that Fitzgerald was possessed of "a sickness" which made it difficult to befriend this complex man. In his descriptions of interactions with Fitzgerald, Hemingway (181) indicates that he was somewha
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2232
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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