Tip-toeing the line between novel and memoir, A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, recounts Papa’s time in 1920’s Paris. The book weaves episodic tales about the author’s Lost Generation peers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Gertrude Stein to John Dos Passos, into a compelling narrative commentary on the now-romanticized epoch most associated with Hemingway. But how does A Moveable Feast differ from, say, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, or even For Whom the Bell Tolls, which draw heavily from the author’s personal experiences?
Listed under “Biography/Memoir” on Amazon.com, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition makes this unusual negotiation easy for the average reader: it seems to promise that, though Hemingway’s other books may are interpretations of personal experience, this is what actually happened. But The Restored Edition promises commentary and reorganization from Papa’s heirs, Sean and Patrick Hemingway; not to mention the fact that Hemingway wrote AMF far removed from the 1920’s, and had quite a memory-clouding thirst for vino tinto at the time. So is Hemingway’s memoir what actually happened, what the author thinks actually happened, or what his estate wishes had happened?
Though we’ll never know for sure, the answer falls somewhere in the middle. As readers, we are concerned with Hemingway’s life experiences, and if AMF is what the author thought and remembered about the 1920’s, then the question of difference between the memoir and what actually happened seems marginal. All history gets communicated through perspective, and Hemingway’s word is as good as anyone else’s, however, Papa’s stature and unique, reporter-esque style casts a strange light upon A Moveable Feast nonetheless.