It would be a shallow mistake to take this book as a return only to the past. And prosperity is far around the crooked corners of Montparnasse. In a carpenter's loft in a street of that April city.įame was quick in coming, though in this book it seems elegiacally slow. Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick Veteran of the wars before he was twenty: 'the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion,' trying to create rather than describe.Īnd what was the upshot? What-as one of his friends of those days, Archibald MacLeish, asked-what became of him? And answered: Wages were precarious for a writer trying to get on paper, in his phrase,

Yet Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and their infant son, lived high on low amounts of money. The feasting was sometimes pretty Spartan. Scott Fitzgerald was wearing a British Guardsman's tie and boxing with Ezra Pound, forays to Pamplona and living above a sawmill at 113 Rue Notre Dame des Champs. And they could not precisely share his astounding fugue of interests, which wove Tolstoy out of Sylvia Beach's bookship with days at the great race tracks, skiing expeditions to the Alps and the Thousands, of course, have given their own bright versions of that unaccountably perpetual springtime, but too many lost parts of their own identities in taking on some Paris in the nineteen twenties as well as Hemingway. Hemingway was aware of that-and how early-appears quite clearly in this memoir of what I can only call his brilliantly obscure emergence as a man of letters. He importance of beating Ernest, someone once said, gave a hopeless target to industrious lit'ry careerists.

Sketches of the Author's Life in Paris in the Twenties.īy Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway's Memoir of Paris in the TwentiesĮrnest Hemingway's Memoir of Paris in the Twenties By CHARLES POORE

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