Moveable: unfixed in time or place; a form mutating and metamorphosing; or moving in relation to or alongside something.
A moveable feast is, in its religious sense, a feast day which occurs on the same day of the week each year, but which changes its date from year to year. In Christianity, for instance, there are many temporal feasts relating to Easter – Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, and so on, as opposed to fixed feast dates, like 25th December. These feasts of varying dates often relate to one another, so that each temporal, mutable day relates to another temporal, mutable day.
Across religions, feast days of celebration and exultation demarcate the year and serve to elevate quotidian life. A sense of scientific structure emerges through the calendrically-fixed dates, whereas the feast days occurring on a particular day of the week convey more of a sense of ritual; a social understanding of an underlying structure attached to them.
Moving beyond the liturgical meaning, a ‘moveable feast’ in Ernest Hemingway’s use of the term can be used to think about memory and place. The phrase is taken from the author’s avowal that: "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." A memoir of his years in Paris as a young man, A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, after Hemingway’s death in 1961. Ever since, the idiomatic meaning of the phrase has been fittingly fugitive. Here, though, we’ll use it to describe that which shifts in form but not in essence, the moveable feast being a metaphor for a time or place that exists in memory and is carried with you. In a foreword to a restored edition in 2009, Ernest’s son Patrick suggests that a moveable feast is the idea of “a memory or even a state of being that [has] become a part of you”; “an experience first fixed in time and space or a condition like happiness or love could be afterward moved or carried with you wherever you went in space and time.”
Hemingway, born in 1899 in Illinois, was a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, author of novels including A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and the short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recreates and mythicises not one specific view or location, but an entire city. His years as an expatriate American in Paris, from 1921 to 1926, constitute a time and a lost part of himself that is ‘carried with him’ through his life.
Hemingway was a great traveller, and lived most of his life outside the United States – in France, Cuba, and England – or on its periphery, living in Key West, Florida for 13 years with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. Andrew Lytle writes that Hemingway lived in a form of self-exile: “he had doomed himself to the life of the perpetual tourist, forever in foreign parts, wandering to and through the wonders advertised”. Hemingway of days past strides up avenues, reciting the route like a proud tourist who feels like a local:
“I walked down past Lycée Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St.-Etienne-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 cafe that I knew on the Place St.-Michel.”
The memoir of a novelist will naturally have an artful crafting to its form and content. As a man troubled by a life full of the violence of war, grief over the suicide of his father and estrangement from his mother, and the fire of his later partnerships, Hemingway’s years in Paris are understandably mythologised into a carefully moulded series of events and encounters. In recounting this life in his memoir, the reader is often aware of the novelisation of the man’s formative years; so resolutely clutched to, portioned out into neat accounts of fine habits and glamourous friends, that it cannot help but feel like a fiction. Indeed, the reissued memoir ends with fragments of “false starts” of an introduction in which Hemingway begins, over and over, with the assertion: “This book is fiction”. He tries to explain the necessity of having “left out much and changed and eliminated”, for it may “throw some light on what has been written as fact”.
Beyond the aestheticisation and the editing, though, is a more sombre truth. In one of Hemingway’s last pieces of writing, he says that his memory “has been tampered with”, alluding to the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) he underwent in 1961, to treat his severe state of depression, which had provoked a suicide attempt. The rounds of ECT greatly damaged Hemingway, exacerbating the memory loss that had begun to plague him. Hemingway died by his own hand later that year, in July 1961. In those final years, as his memory failed him, he sought out what had been preserved, re-kindling and re-imagining it through writing. The Parisian years were what made Hemingway. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), was published during his time there. For six years he lived in harmony with his first wife Hadley Richardson and their son, until his ‘new beginning’ with Pauline. Over the course of A Moveable Feast, we (for the reader is addressed familiarly as “you”) are swept along the Seine to take tea with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, on country drives with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and into cafés and studios with James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford.
So how does a ‘memorable feast’, as place or as experience, shift and mutate; and how does it remain, or retain? While a city or landscape may change, the memory of it and oneself within it remain an integral part of one’s own myth-making. We are made of the landscapes where we have been. Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the term ‘inscape’ – inner landscape – which folds in the expansive sense conjured by ‘landscape’ to connote the inner nature of a person or object. Place inhabits our bodies and minds as much as we do it.
In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane explores the root of our verb ‘to learn’. Stretching back to its Proto-Indo European root, lois-, meaning furrow or track, we get Proto-Germanic lisnojanan, to follow or find the track. So, to learn is to follow a track, and the touch of the foot onto the ground is the meandering root to knowledge; an earthy trail of knowledge and memory, its traces lie in the learner’s wake. In the process of retrieving memories that have altered over time we pace back over these tracks of knowledge, perhaps taking diversions, or else muddying the way.
In the physical realm, concrete changes complicate the route: the felling of trees or development of once-open land; high-risers blocking out the horizon; a steady stream of corporate takeovers of buildings once housing libraries, community centres, and
other public spaces. Yet while landscapes are always shifting, they retain a trace sense of their prior state, whether that is through what remains, or the ghost of what is lost. “Places call up the
places they were”, writes Tim Dee. Many of the places mentioned in Hemingway’s Paris do still exist; my copy of A Moveable Feast came from the shelves of Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop founded by Sylvia Beach, Hemingway’s friend and champion of his work. But Hemingway’s Paris isn’t quite real: it is one recreated at the end of a life.
In a letter to his friend William D. Horne, 24-year old Hemingway, living in Paris, writes:
“We can’t ever go back to old things or try and get the “old kick” out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.”
To the young Hemingway, memory is a constant depository of inconstant moments. Yet Paris migrates with him through the years: a talisman to keep close by; a place to which he could return, in person or in reminiscence, throughout his itinerant life; and a refuge for his troubled mind in later years. Writing the memoir is a re-tracing of the paths he walked, rewriting until something true emerges from within the fictive lines.
Grace Crabtree is an artist and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. You can view her artwork at gracecrabtree.co.uk