Dang, That Was Clear (Reaction to A Moveable Feast)

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast recounts the author’s personal experiences in the post-World War I, expatriate community of Paris. Published posthumously, A Moveable Feast captures many of the intimate encounters he shared with prominent writers of the day, including Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. Hemingway presents these non-fictitious memoirs in a very straight style of writing. He should be applauded for his concise delivery, retaining a wealth of content but with minimal text. Because of his matter-of-fact prose, Hemingway is deliberate in choosing the perfect adjectives and descriptors to express his opinions toward a person he meets or a place he goes.

At many points in the book, Hemingway refers to himself and the audience as being in the present. This is vital to understanding him because envisioning ourselves in his “present” places us at the point of time in which he began writing for a living. Consequently, we fulfill the role of an observer of his ways. We learn that “If [he] started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, [he] found that [he] could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence [he] had written” (Hemingway 22). In the very wording of this statement, Hemingway is succinct in communicating the idea of writing succinctly. So, the aforementioned sample is surely an instance of form-follows-content, just as when he discusses his lean writing style (in a lean manner of course) at many other points in the book.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway represents the ideal writer that George Orwell discusses in his essay Politics and the English Language, a writer that “let[s] the meaning choose the word and not the other way around” (Orwell). In his writing, Hemingway tries not to let the verbiage of his content obscure the “truth” behind it. Fittingly, the title of this essay is also the name of our current unit in English, which further reinforces the link between this book and our current studies. Within A Moveable Feast, there are no narrative problems to solve in terms of comprehension, and that is the sheer beauty of Hemingway’s writing. The absence of complicatedly woven statements makes for coherent prose and a minimization of ambiguities caused by unclear language.

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest, and Séan A. Hemingway. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. New York, NY: Scribner, 2009. Print.

Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language." N.p.: n.p., 1946. N. pag. Print.