If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
-Ernest Hemingway’s inscription to his 1964 book, A Moveable Feast.
When I visited Paris in May 2010, I decided to reread A Moveable Feast (and when I returned the next year, I read The Paris Wife, a fictional account from the viewpoint of Hemingway’s first wife Hadley). Reading A Moveable Feast gives extra resonance to tracking down literary landmarks around the city (you can’t open a guide book without striking upon a mention of Hemingway or other American writers or French writers and philosophers who have gathered in cafes and written and died in this artistic city).
In this somewhat nostalgic collection of reminiscences about his time in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, in the 1920s, Hemingway provides us with inside looks at American expatriate writers Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and others. There’s a funny story of a road trip with the lightweight drinker and hypochondriac Fitzgerald, and cutting insights into how Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda jealously kept Scott from his writing and turned him into an alcoholic before she lost her mind. Ezra Pound comes out looking like a kind and generous friend of writers, as doesSylvia Beach, the founder of the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, who loaned Hemingway books when he had no money to buy or rent them.
Perhaps there are thousands (millions?) of websites and blogs detailing famous writers’ lives in Paris, so I don’t want to belabor this one, but I will share a few photos collected while on my literary treasure hunt.
![2010-05-20-21 Paris020.jpg](http://www.personal.psu.edu/acj137/blogs/engl_232w_jaenicke/assets_c/2010/05/2010-05-20-21%20Paris020-thumb-250x333-132544.jpg)
A particularly good website, David Burke, Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light, offers details that relate to a Hemingway story we’ll read this semester:
When young Ernest Hemingway lived in the Place de la Contrescarpe area in the early 1920s, it was solidly lower class. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the writer Harry, dying of a wound in Africa, thinks back to his life in this neighborhood:
. . . And in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine-cooperative he had written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard.
Hemingway was twenty-two, his wife Hadley twenty-six, when they moved to No. 74 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, three weeks after arriving, on January 9, 1922. By then he was already cultivating his diamond-in-the-rough persona, and it suited him to be living among real people, rather than the eggheads in the Latin Quarter or the expatriate phonies in Montparnasse.
Our syllabus includes more American expatriate writers in Paris than just Hemingway and his group. The Beats (Kerouac and Ginsberg, for example) and a number of African-American writers found Paris a welcoming place to write.
African-Americans in Paris are discussed in a 2001 New York Times article entitled “Literary Tour Traces Richard Wright’s Left Bank: A Black American in Paris”
In addition to telling visitors where to go to find the ghost of Wright in Paris today, the article discusses why black writers found Paris a better place than the U.S. to write:
“…In the United States he could never escape the label “Negro writer.” Invited to Paris that year [1945] by the French government, Wright met authors and intellectuals who treated him as a writer first, and black second. He stayed seven months and then decided to move his family permanently to Paris, following a path trodden by other well-known black Americans such as Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.”
My goal for the coming year: read more books by American writers reflecting on their time in Paris.
![2010-05-23 25 Paris130.jpg](http://www.personal.psu.edu/acj137/blogs/engl_232w_jaenicke/assets_c/2010/05/2010-05-23%2025%20Paris130-thumb-200x266-132550.jpg)
(originally posted 5-27-10; updated 6-9-11)