Rue Cardinal Lemoine: Of Hannah and Hemmingway

“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.”- Earnest Hemmingway, 1950

I have never liked the writings of Earnest Hemmingway. Now, to be fair, I have never before finished something he has written. Some would say that this means I have no right to talk on the subject. However, I have waded my way through Balzac, Stendahl, and Tolstoy, thus I feel the mere fact that I have not been able to have patience with an entire Hemmingway work speaks volumes. Yet here in Paris I felt compelled to read his memoir entitled A Moveable Feast. In them, he discusses life in Paris with the usual totally devoid of emotions or complex adjectives that I often associate with him, only this time I was able sojorn through because Hemmingway and I have had several parallel experiences. I want to pause and note that it also helped that I am currently reading a Villette by Charlotte Bronte, and she more than amply supplies for any deficiet in Hemmingway’s emotional sidenotes. Hemmingway himself admits to “distrusting adjectives.” Once I read it from his own pen, it made the ugly truth easier to swallow. During his early years in Paris, Hemmingway, his wife and son lived on the rue Cardinal Lemoine, only a five minute walk from my apartment. He does take care to flood his memoirs with specific street and café names, and as I read, I could trace his walks in my head, imagine his days. Thus, my unlikely affection for him emerged.

Hemmingway devotes an entire section of his book to the concept of being hungry in Paris, the city renowned for its cuisine. Now of course, he stops on practically every page to have a wonderful meal and drink and brood, but he still fancies himself rather poor and hungry and has several insightful things to say on the subject:
“You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such  good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and  smelled the food. . . . All the paintings [ in the museums] were sharpened and clearer and more  beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to   see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.”
Now I personally feel that people who can be that eloquent about being hungry, are not truly famished. Yet Hemmingway and I alike experience the joys of tight budgets in France. Mine will hopefully end with the processing of my paperwork so I can get paychecks, but until then I am living on simple meals, and avoiding the siren songs of boulangeries and such. And Hemmingway is right, you do get very hungry when you are constantly surrounded by delicious beautiful food. I am not so sure about the Cézanne thing. I think when I am ravenous and in a museum I just get grouchy.

In the past week I have spent approximately 10 hours at Shakespeare and Company. It is the type of bookstore that invites you to sit for hours on end and read. I originally bought several books, but have taken to reading entire works there in several sittings as the paperwork drags. What I really want to read is Dostoyevsky’s. Intending to read it since my freshmen year when my beloved roommate raved about how good it is, this is the first I have had the time to devote to such an undertaking. Shakespeare and Company has all of his other works, except for that one, so I am holding out to get it stateside over Christmas. I felt a flicker of kinship with Hemmingway when he spoke of reading Dostoyevsky in Shakespeare and Company saying:
“In Dostoyevsky there were things to be believed and not to be believed, but some so true they   changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness.”

Even once I have my copy, I may take it back to Shakespeare and Company to disappear behind a crowded shelf and read for hours. Despite his lack of adjectives, I feel like Hemmingway said it best when he explained that: “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.” I think he perhaps romanticizes the poverty, as only those who aren’t poor can, but I cannot dispute his awareness of such a treasure as the reading of a good book in a perfect spot.

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