Hemingway’s Code

A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner’s, $4.95 Somewhere in our minds, rescued from time, most of us have an ideal Paris in which people like Hemingway and Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, sip cognac at the Dome, or walk by the Seine among the bookstalls, or meet at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop. It is the Paris of the early twenties, where so many of the great books and poems of our time were being written. Hemingway evokes it here in what, in its special way, is one of his most moving and beautifully written books.

We find that Paris here, but also Hemingway himself, at a time when he was living a kind of ideal literary life, very poor, and sometimes even hungry, but confident of his powers, learning from books and from Pound and Stein, alive in all his senses, and writing his early stories—sometimes writing at a cafe table, sometimes in his chilly room, sometimes at the Voralberg in the Austrian Alps where he went with his new wife on skiing excursions. Though he writes of all this forty years later, he can make one feel how it was, then, to experience Paris for the first time:

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner’s, $4.95 Somewhere in our minds, rescued from time, most of us have an ideal Paris in which people like Hemingway and Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, sip cognac at the Dome, or walk by the Seine among the bookstalls, or meet at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop. It is the Paris of the early twenties, where so many of the great books and poems of our time were being written. Hemingway evokes it here in what, in its special way, is one of his most moving and beautifully written books.

We find that Paris here, but also Hemingway himself, at a time when he was living a kind of ideal literary life, very poor, and sometimes even hungry, but confident of his powers, learning from books and from Pound and Stein, alive in all his senses, and writing his early stories—sometimes writing at a cafe table, sometimes in his chilly room, sometimes at the Voralberg in the Austrian Alps where he went with his new wife on skiing excursions. Though he writes of all this forty years later, he can make one feel how it was, then, to experience Paris for the first time: