The Hadley Years in Paris

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, described on the original cover as “sketches of his early life in Paris in the Twenties,” begins during the initial wintry weeks of January 1922, just after Hemingway and his recent bride, Hadley, had moved into their modest quarters at 74, rue du Cardinal Lemoine in Paris’s 5th arrondissement. The twenty-two-year-old journalist for the Toronto Daily Star and his thirty-year-old wife would quickly flee the damp chill of Paris in favor of several weeks of skiing at Chamby-surMontreux in Switzerland. Within the first month of their return to Paris, however, Hemingway would have already met his three most important Parisian allies—Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach (he had, in fact, already found his way to the latter’s lending bookshop even before the Swiss escape)—all of whom had been recommended to him by his stateside friend and literary mentor, Sherwood Anderson, who had steered the Hemingways to Paris. In the first letter of the volume under review, Hemingway summarizes for his mother all the travel—for journalistic purposes and for exploratory pleasure, the latter subsidized by Hadley’s inherited investment income— undertaken during the couple’s first year abroad, 1922: “Last year seems pretty full. In Paris, Switzerland, Paris, Genoa [to cover a European diplomatic conference], Switzerland, Italy again, The Black Forest, The Rhineland, down to the Vendee to see Clemenceau, the Balkans, Constantinople [to cover the Greco-Turkish War; Hadley had quarreled with Hemingway about his leaving her in Paris again for the trip and, in reaction, he may have been unfaithful while away] . . . home again to Paris, a trip through Burgundy for the wine sale, down to Lausanne [to cover the international peace talks being held there], and now here in the Alps where we were this time last year [i.e., back to Chamby-sur-Montreux where the letter in question is dated 10 January 1923].” What Hemingway does not mention to his mother—but he does to his privileged correspondent Ezra Pound in the very next letter of the volume— is Hadley’s famous loss of the small suitcase carrying all of Hemingway’s literary writing to that date. Crestfallen, Hemingway bemoans the theft that had