johnbyronkuhner.com

Life has been moving terribly quickly of late. In less than two months I have managed to get married, go on a honeymoon, get my wife pregnant, work the all-important spring months in a plant nursery, install a garden for a friend, do a Latin tour of the Bronx Zoo, and get my own garden up and running to the point where we can now get our greens from home. I’ve also been nourishing all kinds of little seedlings of some unusual plants – hundreds of them which I’ve been potting up, Asclepias speciosa, Penstemon Cobaea, Asclepias incarnata, Allium stellatum, Vernonia noveboracensis, Asclepias viridis, Asclepias verticillata, Asclepias exaltata, Prunus maritima, Aralia racemosa – so many. But in the springtime there’s no substitute for work, and so work we must.  Soon we go to South Africa for a month, which will be yet more excitement.  But probably not easy.

So one night, knowing my wife would be working late waiting tables, I went over to a friend’s house and ran myself a bath, which as my readers know I find rather a delectable luxury. And once we have given ourselves over to luxury, we may as well go all out – if you feel yourself slipping, says Jung, it is best to let go. I hunted over my friend’s fine bookshelves for a bathtub companion, and chanced upon Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I tossed it on my towel next to the tub, and after a few good minutes of soaking I dried my hands and opened it up, and in the next half-hour I completely lost myself in the pleasure of it all – the hot water, the electric lights, and the book itself.

When I told another friend I had never read the book, she expressed surprise – “You haven’t read it already?” – and it is pleasant that there are so many fine books out there, that we can keep discovering them through our whole life. And it is a fine book – which we may determine from the fact that it has called forth the efforts of naysayers. A 2009 Christopher Hitchens review in the Atlantic calls it a “slight book” whose appeal is based on “nostalgia… as we contemplate a Left Bank that has since become a banal tourist enclave in a Paris where the tough and plebeian districts are gone, to be replaced by seething Muslim banlieues all around the periphery.” Hitchens alas never had much feel for literature, and claims the book has much to do with Hemingway’s sexual anxiety about being dressed up as a girl by his mother. I will let the reader determine how relevant they think that particular claim is. But I can say that any book that requires someone to pan it fifty years later can’t be all bad, as a glimpse at the writing will convey:

With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smoke-stacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great elms on the stone banks of the river, the plane trees and in some places the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed. (26)

Hemingway is writing about Paris of course, but really it could be anywhere. Here in the Catskills, and growing up in New York City, it is much the same: the trees tell you the calendar date, but the air sometimes does not; and a cold, miserable spring still feels like theft – just as Hemingway describes it. And all those lovely nouns – it’s the kind of passage you read to the other person in the room, if there is one. There are many such passages in the book.

And this one is typical of another aspect of the book, which is standard for Hemingway’s style and he even describes this technique in this book – the art of leaving things out, the art of suggestion. This is not my favorite technique – it always strikes me as a bit lazy, to make the reader do all the hard things, and in general I do enough hard things, so I like to let my writers do some for me. But many people whose brains are undertaxed by life like the pleasure of having their writers allude and wink, and to have things be unsaid but understood. Somehow what Hemingway says about spring “in those days” is suggestive – suggestive of World War I, suggestive of the Great Depression, suggestive of World War II, suggestive of Hemingway’s entire life – suggestive of the fear that, yes, the good things of this world continue, but perhaps it is possible that they will not.

One of the reasons why I dislike this style is that the suggested things, the unspoken things, fade with time – they become unintelligible. I’m not certain a young person can read A Moveable Feast with very much profit, because those unspoken things would not, I don’t think, be understood. Nowadays you can write a story about a Jewish family living in Germany in 1938 and you don’t need to mention the Holocaust, because the average reader will know that information already: the coming catastrophe can all be implied. But if we discover a book about a family living in Jutland in 1938 B.C. we had better hope the writer spelled things out for us, because all the unspoken things in Jutland in 1938 B.C. have now become completely unknown. Even in Hemingway, Lord knows there are many things I don’t understand – for instance, the end of Hemingway’s friendship with Gertrude Stein. Hemingway indicates the friendship became untenable after something he overheard when he dropped in unannounced. Here is how he describes it, after being given a whisky by the maid and told to wait for Stein:

The colorless alcohol felt good on my tongue and it was still on my mouth when I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever.

Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.”

I swallowed the drink and put the glass down on the table and started for the door. The maidservant shook her finger at me and whispered, “Don’t go, she’ll be right down.”

“I have to go,” I said and tried not to hear any more as I left but it was still going on and the only way I could not hear it was to be gone. It was bad to hear and the answers were worse.

That was the way it finished for me, stupidly enough, although I still did the small jobs, made the necessary appearances, brought people that were asked for and waited dismissal with most of the other men friends when that epoch came and the new friends moved in. It was sad to see new worthless pictures hung in with the great pictures but it made no difference any more. Not to me it didn’t. She quarreled with nearly all of us that were fond of her except Juan Gris and she couldn’t quarrel with him because he was dead. I am not sure that he would have cared because he was past caring and it showed in his paintings. (68)

I can say honestly that I am not sure how this other person was speaking to Stein, and why it hollowed out the friendship Hemingway had with her. All Hemingway says is that he had “never heard one person speak to another” that way, but that is all. He gives no description of it. The rest is to be inferred. I infer that this scene is one of domestic abuse, though why that would cause Hemingway to abandon Stein I don’t understand; Hitchens seems to infer that this scene refers to Stein’s lesbianism. In either case, I would love to hear what Hemingway had to say about either topic; but all he says is “that was the way it finished for me.”

But I didn’t, and don’t, need to understand everything. The things he actually does say are sharp, and brilliantly characterize the disillusionment that comes with the end of friendship. He thought her art collection was superb, when they were friends; now he finds it “sad to see new worthless pictures hung in with the great pictures”; she had lost her taste (he thought). Hemingway has been accused of being unjust to her, and perhaps he was, but the description is excellent, and of someone (even if not of Gertrude Stein): someone who picks quarrels with everyone from a certain period of her life, until they are all gone and the slate has been cleaned. Many people fight a battle with their own guilt, and do not rest until all the reminders of it are gone. Of course, there is always the possibility that the person who really was like this was Hemingway himself. But when writing is true in a deep sense names are all interchangeable. In fact, it is even likely that Hemingway’s portrait of Stein is a bit of self-portraiture:

Finally she even quarreled with the new friends but none of us followed it any more. She got to look like a Roman emperor and that was fine if you wanted your women to look like Roman emperors. But Picasso had painted her, and I could remember her when she looked like a woman from Friuli.

In the end everyone, or not quite everyone, made friends again in order not to be stiff or righteous. But I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst. But it was more complicated than that. (69)

Thus once more Hemingway consigns the more difficult, complicated material to a place off the page – I’d love to hear about the way irreconcilability really works, at least for Hemingway. And as for his demeaning of Stein’s looks, I don’t find it sexist, really, as others do – a man could have been substituted in the above, with very little alteration – “if you wanted your men to look like Roman emperors.” The same can be said for another line which is quite nice, and in which “men” can be effectively substituted for “women,” and which is another great example of his elliptic, allusive style:

There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers. (67)

Of course he never explains what “better or worse” means, though presumably it means “turns into romance or turns into hostility.”

Hemingway has also been accused of being unjust to the other famous people in the book – F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford – and this of course may be true, but it is one of the things that is always true. Memoirs are always a little unjust to the other people. Hemingway does look suspiciously good in most of the stories, but they are good stories nonetheless, and perspective will always warp narrative. My versions of shared experiences barely agree with anyone else’s once five years have passed, and while I will note that my memory is famous among my friends for being excellent, I can barely vouch for many of my most cherished stories, knowing that my friends tell the same tale otherwise. Hemingway was writing thirty-five years later, about people who must have excited contradictory feelings in him, and he was writing for publication and must have been tempted to use the juicy stuff, especially since everyone else was dead. The material about F. Scott Fitzgerald as a namby-pamby hypochondriac (I quote much of it below) is hilarious, regardless of whether it has been stretched a bit or not. There is a lot of dialogue in the story, which is always suspect, after thirty-five years; it is also very perfectly written dialogue. But who knows. Both men were excellent writers and known to be good talkers too. Here they are in a hotel room, on a mission to get Fitzgerald’s car, which the Fitzgeralds had abandoned in favor of a train when it began to rain (its roof had been taken off). Fitzgerald believed he had “lung congestion” and believed he was gravely ill:

We had sent our clothes to be dried and were in our pajamas. It was still raining outside but it was cheerful in the room with the electric light on. Scott was lying in bed to conserve his strength for his battle against the disease. I had taken his pulse, which was seventy-two, and had felt his forehead, which was cool. I had listened to his chest and had him breathe deeply, and his chest sounded all right.

“Look, Scott,” I said. “You’re perfectly O.K. If you want to do the best thing to keep from catching cold, just stay in bed and I’ll order us each a lemonade and a whisky and you take an aspirin with yours and you’ll feel fine and won’t even get a cold in your head.”

“Those old wives’ remedies,” Scott said.

“You haven’t any temperature. How the hell are you going to have a congestion of the lungs without a temperature?”

“Don’t swear at me,” Scott said. “How do you know I haven’t a temperature?”

“Your pulse is normal and you haven’t any fever to the touch.”

“To the touch,” Scott said bitterly. “If you’re a real friend, get me a thermometer.”

“I’m in pajamas.”

“Send for one.”

I rang for the waiter. He didn’t come and I rang again and then went down the hallway to look for him. Scott was lying with his eyes closed, breathing slowly and carefully and, with his waxy color and his perfect features, he looked like a little dead crusader. I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life I was leading, and already I missed not working [sic: I might have left out the “not”] and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life. I was very tired of Scott and of this silly comedy, but I found the waiter and gave him money to buy a thermometer and a tube of aspirin, and ordered two citron pressees and two double whiskies. I tried to order a bottle of whisky but they would only sell it by the drink.

Back in the room, Scott was still lying as though on his tomb, sculpted as a monument to himself, his eyes closed and breathing with exemplary dignity. (96-7)

Later they get the whiskies but it only brings out Fitzgerald’s aggression:

“You’re a cold one, aren’t you?” Scott asked and looking at him I saw that I had been wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis, and that the whisky was working against us.

“How do you mean, Scott?”

“You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.”

“Do you want me to call a doctor?”

“No. I don’t want a dirty French provincial doctor.”

“What do you want?”

“I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.”

“Our clothes won’t be dry until morning and there aren’t any express trains,” I said. “Why don’t you rest and have some dinner in bed?”

“I want my temperature taken.”

After this went on for a long time the waiter brought a thermometer.

“Is this the only one you could get?” I asked….

“It is the only one in the hotel,” the waiter said and handed me the thermometer. It was a bath thermometer with a wooden back and enough metal to sink it in the bath. I took a quick gulp of the whisky sour and opened the window a moment to look out at the rain. When I turned Scott was watching me.

I shook the thermometer down professionally and said, “You’re lucky it’s not a rectal thermometer.” (100)

Again, whether Fitzgerald was really like this or not makes little difference; the experience is archetypal enough, and Hemingway may as well have been describing two parts of himself, a self-pitying, self-doubting baby and a competent, unfazeable pro. I think it is fair to say that both sides are in all people. The same dynamic is set up in another exchange with Fitzgerald about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis:

Finally when we were eating the cherry tart [a hilarious detail] and had a last carafe of wine he said, “You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I thought I had told you.”

“No. You told me a lot of things but not that.”

“That is what I have to ask you about.”

“Good. Go on.”

“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”

“Come out to the office.”

“Where is the office?”

“Le water.”

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.

“You’re perfectly fine,” I said. “You are O.K. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.”

“Those statues may not be accurate.”

“They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.”

“But why would she say it?”

“To put you out of business. That’s the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business. Scott, you asked me to tell you the truth and I can tell you a lot more but this is the absolute truth and all you need. You could have gone to see a doctor.”

“I didn’t want to. I wanted you to tell me truly.”

“Now do you believe me?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Come on over to the Louvre,” I said. “It’s just down the street and across the river.”

We went over to the Louvre and he looked at the statues but still he was doubtful about himself.

“It is not basically a question of the size in repose,” I said. “It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.” I explained to him about using a pillow and a few other things that might be useful for him to know. (112-3)

This is an odd sequence, Lord knows, and really almost inconceivable nowadays, when information such as average penis size is so easily available. In fact, as it is written, it is a bit inconceivable eighty years ago as well, but one must hope, for the sake of the good humor God takes in human life, that it really did happen that Hemingway and Fitzgerald did walk around the Louvre looking at the penises on the statues, just for reassurance. Many of those penises are still there, of course, and it would make a fine essay to go back to the Louvre and visit them. But I suppose a knowledge of averages is irrelevant: whatever Scott had to offer, Zelda wanted something else. The carpet, says the old Arab wisdom, needs to fit the room.

Again, if someone claimed that this story was true, but in fact it was Hemingway who was worried about his measurements, I would believe it, and wouldn’t care too much either way. You can tell that Hemingway was ambitious in a worldly manner, and honesty can only abide with a quality like that as a kind of accident. The names mean little anyway; the story may as well be an internal dialogue. The stories are all good, and however the details may be, there is some kind of honesty that underlies the whole book, a kind of sad honesty, which seems to come along with the fact that Hemingway was old – the book was published posthumously – and the ambition was fading. He might have been trying to make himself out as the only real man among all those writerly namby-pambies, but he is also confessing to some kind of loss as well. Hemingway never discusses it directly – he doesn’t discuss the hard stuff – and I wish he had. Usually he refers to this loss glancingly, when he is moving on, often as a chapter finish, aware that readers like to be alerted to the presence of the big fish, the big issue, even if they never get to land it by book’s end. Here’s how he ends one of the early chapters, discussing things with his wife:

“My,” she said. “We’re lucky that you found the place.”

“We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too. (22)

At the time he was so lucky, he was poor, living without plumbing in one of the poorer sections of Paris, supporting his wife and child; later he was to be a famed writer, wealthy, living in a fine home in the Caribbean, with a Nobel Prize for Literature in his pocket. What precisely made the first condition so much luckier than the latter? I think I know my answer to this question, but Hemingway’s would be particularly interesting to have, because in so many ways his perspective was so different from mine. I don’t doubt that he disliked his later life; he did, of course, commit suicide in the end. And was it bad luck that brought on the bad end, or something else – something harder and more difficult to write about?

He quickly finishes the book on this note, talking – elliptically, of course – about what happened to him once he had published The Sun Also Rises and become famous:

Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila’s horses’ hooves have ever scoured. (124)

The Attila simile is stretched, but we do get the idea. The poor are the producers, and in the end they have a dignity that comes from this; for the rich to live richly, however, they must consume: they must take. Further meditation on a topic like this – or meditation on how he got utterly snared by the rich and their culture – is not Hemingway-work. It’s too difficult. But since he has less than a page left in his book, he can begin to quickly unload, and tell something of the process which took him from young, poor, innocent, and happy and left him none of those things:

Before these rich had come we had already been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both.

Then, instead of the two of them and their child, there are three of them. First it is stimulating and fun and it goes on that way for a while. All things truly wicked start from an innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war. (125-6)

Again, this leaves me curious. Did he think, as a young man, the way Hemingway the writer thought when he wrote the above paragraphs? If there was a difference, what created the difference? That feeling of embitterment, of knowing that some beautiful thing has been marred and lost by one’s own choices – and which Hemingway intriguingly, and seemingly rather guiltily and lamely calls “bad luck” in this narrative – gives the whole book its adult, almost confessional flavor. One hopes to catch some wisdom from an age like this, that seems to have experienced the bitterness in great banquetfuls. I know people who think that infidelity is fine – if you are clever enough you can get away with it, and why shouldn’t you have, in life, what you want? Was Hemingway like this, and did he change?

But page 126 is where the book ends, and Hemingway does not talk about knowing right from wrong, or how we can find a way to do what is right once we know it. I don’t pretend that doing the right thing is easy – fidelity, for people, seems proof against everything but temptation, and the happy ones are the ugly women and poor men, who are not exposed to temptation. Hemingway may well have been an extraordinarily virtuous man, but simply perilously exposed to temptations – he was exceptionally good-looking when he arrived in Paris, and even then his marriage was safe until he became famous.

At this juncture in my life, newly married, hoping for children, poor, working by the labor of my hands, I find myself thinking about money more than normally, whether I will have enough, whether I will truly be able to make my wife, and hopefully children, happy by my efforts; and to see a rich, famous writer writing wistfully about his poverty intrigues me, to say the least. Everyone – well, at least every man – seems to love poverty, once it has receded into the past and is not threatening to return. My wife and I have quoted to each other – perhaps with some effort at self-inspiration – Hemingway’s lines about living with no toilet facilities in Paris:

I thought of bathtubs and showers and toilets that flushed as things that inferior people to us had or that you enjoyed when you made trips, which we often made. There was always the public bathhouse down at the foot of the street by the river. (28)

The line is almost impossible to quote without improving it, however: Hemingway at times has a cultivated ugliness in his arrangement of words, which is odd, and which is perfectly represented by the awkward “that inferior people to us had.” But that is a stylistic aside.  To get back to poverty, Hemingway also talks about the importance of hunger:

It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it. (44)

I think a certain philosophy could be made out of these observations, which values nature in part because nature brings, besides incredible beauty, also some salutary discomfort. I have written about this a little in my essays about Cheryl Strayed: physical discomfort is one of the ways that our bodies make us live in the present, which is necessary for our spiritual health. It’s hard for me to get depressed in the woods, because all tendencies to Fitzgerald (Hemingway?)-like self-pity get squashed by my physical needs. I might get thirsty, for instance. If I get thirsty, I have to go down to the spring, and haul water three hundred feet back up the mountain. By the time this is done, I am either physically reinvigorated by the exercise, or depleted by it; and both vigor and exhaustion prevent depression. Hemingway’s later life – I really don’t know all the details – may well show that craving for salutary discomfort which people find in extreme sports and travel. Poverty gives that to you every day, and not as a spectator, but as a participant. Building a life which is physical enough for our nature, while also comfortable and leisurely enough to allow us to develop our higher faculties, is by no means simple.

The absence of considerations like these – an awareness of the spiritual and moral difficulties of life – in Hemingway’s writing has always made him seem like a lazy writer to me, meaning by lazy not that he did not work on his craft, but that in his works he was disinclined to do anything difficult, and was hence ultimately not very serious. The sign of an unserious writer, to me, is one who takes writing very seriously: the way an unserious politician will be the one who takes politics most seriously. Moving words around on pages makes for entertainment, much as sloganeering and hand-shaking and speechifying does. But ultimately what matters is what the writer communicates, or how the politician works on behalf of justice and flourishing. (Hemingway talks about Dostoevsky in the book, noting that Dostoevsky never used the right word and violated all the “rules” of the craft and yet was great anyway, because of some actual (as opposed to merely technical) greatness). Hemingway certainly seemed to take his writing very seriously, more seriously than one would want; but like a crafty old pollster he is insightful when discussing his passion, and many of Hemingway’s best advice about writing is in this book. But the charm of the book is that all those other things, the fully human things beyond mere writing, shine through: hard work, happiness, the eccentricities of artists, the insufferability of pretense and fastidiousness, Paris in the spring, young marriages, and the wounds we inflict on ourselves, as we look back on how we shaped our lives with folly and selfishness, as a sculptor shapes stone with chisel and hammer. But that is merely the shaping subtext of A Moveable Feast: the predominant note is appreciation of what he once had, a joy in what has been, which is lovely in itself. Here is his conclusion to the work:

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy. (126)