Volume 2, Number 9 · June 11, 1964
Hemingway's Last Novel
By Frank Kermode
A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
Scribner's, 211 pp., $4.95
This is about how Paris was in the early days when Mr. Hemingway was very poor and very happy and handling himself very carefully because he knew there were going to be some rough contests, not only with Mr. Turgenev and Mr. Stendhal but also with life, 'the greatest left-hooker so far, although many say it was Charley White of Chicago.' The sadness of the book comes at the end because it explains that something got lost and the author was no longer making love with whom he loved, an activity to which he attached much importance. But it also speaks very happily about Paris, which is the best place in the world to write in. It explains writing carefully: the great thing is not to describe but to make, not to invent but omit. And to be a good writer, as Hemingway has formerly explained, you need a built-in shit-detector. With one of those, working well, you can purge not only your prose but your acquaintance; so this book tells how Hemingway detected Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis and even Gertrude Stein, though it also tells how and why he put up with Scott Fitzgerald. It also tells about skiing, horse-racing, and fire-swallowing; about fishing in the Seine and the troubles of waiters, and how the Kansas City whores drank semen as a specific against tuberculosis. If I make it sound a little as if the figure of Lillian Ross's Papa must be casting a shadow over the book I do it no wrong. But I do it wrong beyond question if I seem to suggest that it could have been written by any but a great writer. This is, in some ways, Hemingway's best book since the 1920s and that makes it altogether exceptional.
Review, 2605 words
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