Hemingway's Show-and-Tell

Here's a favorite passage from Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I like what the young Hemingway is learning about the Russian writers in general and about reading and writing in particular. I like how he recognizes the mixing of elements and the finding of treasure. He celebrates these great authors and celebrates Paris and the way of life that always moves me with a touch of envy. As the passage finishes I like how Hemingway presents this moment of conflict between mentor and mentee. He explains how he felt about Russian literature and how he admired Ezra Pound, but when Pound's advice doesn't match with what he feels . . . we get this moment of defensiveness and disappointment. Hemingway is scrupulous about pointing out the integrity of the "straight answer" and yet . . . . We can see the student leaving the teacher behind here, not very happily, and how conflicted Hemingway was in that moment. He tells us the "facts," you could say, but the drama beneath the telling is the real heart of the last paragraph.

Hemingway recounts how his world expanded, and expanded again.

Well, that's plenty of telling, so now I'll turn the show over to Hemingway himself. From "Evan Shipman at the Lilas" in A Moveable Feast . . . .

In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; there there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.

"To tell you the truth, Hem," Ezra said, "I've never read the Rooshians."

It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste --the one and only correct word to use-- the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.

"Keep to the French," Ezra said. "You've plenty to learn there."

"I know it," I said. "I've plenty to learn everywhere."