A Moveable Feast

“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationary and the newspaper shops, the midwife- second class- and the hotel where Veraline had died, where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.”

Hemingway recalls the dreary winters of Paris. Wintertime instills in Hemingway the desire to leave Paris and he fantasizes about the mountains of Michigan. This scene establishes the changing seasons as a crucial element that represents transitional periods.

“Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.”

Hemingway ponders if one must leave Paris to be able to look back upon it with a critical eye, reflecting his ongoing relationship with Paris as a muse throughout his writing career. This quote foreshadows the fact that it takes him many trips to Paris before he finishes his first novel, which takes place in Paris, as well as the fact that he wouldn’t write A Moveable Feast until years later when he was away from Paris and an established writer.

“‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘That’s not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either.’”

The value of a book is debated throughout the novel. In this quote, Stein asserts her main criteria for judging a work as valuable. For something to be inaccrochable is to make a work of art that cannot be sold or shown to anyone. This critique foreshadows Fitzgerald’s destruction as he adjusts his stories to fit a more sellable formula. Hemingway disagrees with both of these writing philosophies, believing that one should write in the way that tells the particular story the best and not the way that sells the best.