Up Close and Personal with the 1920s “Lost Generation”- Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” – A Short Book Clip

Short Book Clip

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, 1960

This book, published after the death of Ernest Hemingway, but written in 1960 is a little gold mine of insights about the personalities and places that made Paris in the 1920’s the home of the post- World War I “lost generation” (Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age denizens when they travelled abroad). Hemingway notes that these memoirs can be treated as fiction but that one can still gain some insight even through that lens. Certainly the writing is as sparse and well turned as any of his short stories, including the characteristic last sentence or two of each section built to sharply give the point he was trying to get across.

Of course Hemingway was young , newly married and fairly poor in this Paris but apparently his reputation was such that all the great American and British expatriates crossed his path (or he theirs). Literary arbiter and art patron Gertrude Stein (“a rose is a rose is a rose,” okay, along with a cameo by lover Alice B.) gets plenty of space. As does unjustly neglected Ford Maddox Ford, overblown T. S. Eliot (not overthrown until “beat” mad monk sent him howling in that 1950s good night, made monk wordsmith celtic blasphemer James Joyce, mad monk, mad for real Ezra Pound and a smaller group of secondary writers and poets. All worthy of mention in the modern Western literary canon (of that time, if not now, now in some purified politically correct passé deconstructed corners). Hell, I believe that you had to have been in Paris at that time if you wanted to fertilize your work, those who stayed strictly in America suffer somewhat by comparison.

A special note should be taken of the sections dealing with his relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. From Hemingway’s perspective this was a very difficult man but one who he tried to befriend. And of course there, as always, was the Zelda problem. If you want to understand the inner strain of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night read Hemingway’s tidbits. At some level Hemingway was trying to ‘save’ Fitzgerald as a writer but as we know it was not to be. Read his take here and then go out and read other books on, and by, the literary lights of the “lost ‘generation.” Some of it will make more sense then.

***As We Approach The 75th Anniversary Of The Barcelona May Days In The Spanish Civil War- Another Look By Ernest Hemingway At The Spanish Civil War.

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry on the Barcelona May Days of 1937 in the Spanish Civil War (as usual with political events, past and present, be careful using this source).

Book Review

THE FIFTH COLUMN AND 49 OTHER STORIES, ERNEST HEMNGWAY, P.F. COLLIER&SON, NEW YORK, 1950

I have written reviews of many of Ernest Hemingway’s major novels elsewhere in this space. I have reviewed his major novel on the Spanish Civil War For Whom the Bells Toll, as well. Here I review a short play of his concerning that same event. This play is the main item of interest for me in an anthology that also includes his first 49 short stories. I will make a few minor comments on them at the end. However, here I wish to address the main issue that drives the play, The Fifth Column. I believe that this is fitting in the year of the 75th anniversary of the Barcelona May Days-the last chance to save the Spanish Revolution.

The main action here concerns the actions, manners, and love life of a seemingly irresolute character, Phillip, in reality is a committed communist who has found himself wrapped up intensely in the struggle to fight against Franco’s counter-revolution. His role is to ferret out the fifth columnists that have infiltrated into Madrid for intelligence/sabotage purposes on behalf of the Franco forces in the bloody civil war that was shaking Republican Spain. The term “fifth column” comes from the notion that not only the traditional four columns of the military are at work but a fifth column of sympathizers who are trying to destabilize the Republic. What to do about them is the central question of this, or any, civil war.

At the time there was some controversy that swirled around Hemingway for presenting the solution of summary executions of these agents as the correct way of dealing with this menace. I have questioned some of Hemingway’s political judgments on Spain elsewhere, particularly concerning the role of the International Brigades, but he is right on here. Needless to say, as almost always with Hemingway, a little love interest is thrown into the mix to spice things up. However, in the end, despite the criminal Stalinist takeover of the Spanish security apparatus and its counter-revolutionary role in gutting the revolutionary promise there this play presents a question all militants today need to be aware of.

49 short stories

I recently reviewed this same compilation of short stories in an edition that included the short play The Fifth Column that I was interested in discussing concerning the problem of spies and infiltrators from the Franco-led Nationalist side-and what to do about them- in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. This edition does not contain that play and therefore I can discuss the short stories on their own terms. Although Hemingway wrote many novels, most of which I have read at one time or another, I believe that his style and sparseness of language was more suitable to the short story. This compilation of his first forty-nine although somewhat uneven in quality, as is always the case with any writer, I think makes my point. In any case they contain not only some of his most famous short stories but also some of the best.

The range of subjects that interested Hemingway is reflected here, especially those that defined masculinity in his era. Included here are classics such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro about the big game hunt, The Killers- a short and pungent gangster tale that was made into a much longer movie much in the matter of his novel To Have Or Have Not, many of the youthful Nick Adams stories tracing his adventures from puberty to his time of service in World War I, stories on bullfighting- probably more than you will ever want to know about that subject but reflecting an aficionado’s appreciation of the art form, a few on the never-ending problems of love and its heartbreaks including a metaphorical one, reflecting the censorious nature of the times, on the impact of abortion on a couple’s relationship, and some sketches that were included in A Farewell to Arms. Well worth your time. As always Hemingway masterly wields his sparse and functional language to make his points. Again, as always read this man. This work is part of our world literary heritage.

***Out Of The Swing And Sway 1920s Jazz Night- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Basil And Josephine Stories”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Basil and Josephine Stories.

Book Review

The Basil and Josephine Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner’s, New York, 1973The name F. Scott Fitzgerald is no stranger to this space as the master writer of one of the great American novels of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby. And as one of the key players (many of them spending time in self-imposed European exile) in American literature in the so-called Jazz Age in the aftermath of World War I. For this writer he formed, along with Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and a little, Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein the foundation for modern American writing. But that recognition was a later development, far later, because I knew of Fitzgerald’s work long before I had read any of his (or the others, for that matter) better known works. I knew the Basil and Josephine stories well before that.

As a kid in the 1950s the library that I spent many an hour in was divided, as they are in most libraries even today, into children’s and adult’s sections. At that time there was something of a Chinese Wall between the two sections in the form of a stern old librarian who made sure that kids, sneaky kids like me didn’t go into that forbidden adult section until the proper time (after sixth grade as I recall). The Basil and Josephine stories were, fortunately, in the kid’s section (although I have seen them in adult sections of libraries as well). And while the literary merits of the stories are adult worthy of mention for the clarity of Fitzgerald’s language, the thoughtful plots (mainly, although a couple are kind of similar reflecting the mass magazine adult audience they were addressed to), and the evocative style (of that “age of innocence” just before World War I after which the world changed dramatically. No more innocent when you dream notions, not after the mustard gas and the trench warfare) for me on that long ago first reading what intrigued me was the idea of how the other half-the rich (well less than half, much less as it turns out) lived.

This was fascinating for a poor boy, a poor "projects" boy like me, who was clueless about half the stuff Basil got to do (riding trains, going to boarding school, checking out colleges, playing some football, and seriously, very seriously checking out the girls at exotic-sounding dances, definitely not our 1950s school sock hops). And I was clueless, almost totally clueless, about what haughty, serenely beautiful, guy-crazy Josephine was up to. So this little set of short stories was something like my introduction to class, the upper class, in literature.

Of course when I talk about the 1950s in the old projects, especially the later part when I used to hang around with one Billie, William James Bradley, self-proclaimed king of the be-bop night at our old elementary school (well, not exactly self-proclaimed, I helped the legend along a little) I have to give Billie's take on the matter. His first reaction was why I was reading this stuff, this stuff that was not required school reading stuff anyway. Then when I kept going on and on about the stories, and trying to get him to read them, he exploded one day and shouted out “how is reading those stories going to get you or me out of these damn projects?”

Good point now that I think about it but I would not let it go at that. I started in on a little tidbit about how one of the stories was rejected by the magazine publishers because they thought the subject of ten or eleven year olds being into “petting parties” was crazy. That got Billie attention as he wailed about how those guys obviously had never been to the projects where everyone learned (or half-learned) about sex sometimes even earlier than that, innocent as it might have been. He said he might actually read the stuff now that he saw that rich kids, anyway, were up against the same stuff we were. He never did. But the themes of teen alienation, teen angst, teen vanity, teen love are all there. And while the rich are different from you and I, and life, including young life, plays out differently for them those themes seem embedded in youth culture ever since teenage because a separate social category. Read on.