#moveable feast

An unmovable beast: How depression and anger plagued Ernest Hemingway until the moment 'it was time for him to die'

'He loved everything up to a certain point, and then nothing was good anymore'

Author of the article:

Robert Fulford

Published Aug 02, 2016  •  4 minute read

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The most famous writer of the 20th century, Ernest Hemingway, had such an eventful life that he created enough myths to keep his story alive well into this century and possibly beyond.

For instance, his renown as a two-fisted drinker led 36 years ago to the creation of an annual Hemingway look-alike competition at Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, FL. This year Sloppy Joe’s showed up on the news because a man actually named Hemingway won, over 119 other shaggy-bearded entrants. Dave Hemingway said he’s unrelated to the author, but shares the same interests: fishing, drinking, women and having a good time.

He and most patrons of Sloppy Joe’s probably take a light-hearted view of Ernest Hemingway’s drinking. According to legend, he was a happy drinker who had a good time with liquor. But in the same week Dave Hemingway was declared best-in-show, Mariel Hemingway was in Miami to give a speech on depression.

She’s the actress who played Woody Allen’s teenage girlfriend in Manhattan, but has become better known in mental health circles as a woman dealing with seven suicides in her family, including her grandfather Ernest, her great-grandfather Ed and her sister Margaux. At age 54, Mariel spends much of her time as a mental health advocate. Last year she wrote her memoirs, Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family.

At a butcher shop in Jeromesville, Ohio, four meat processors situate their labor within their own minds and bodies. Directed by Lydia Cornett Music composed and performed by Lydia Cornett Slamdance Film Festival 2023Ann Arbor Film Festival 2023(Winner of the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker) Running time: 7 minutes ~~~~ When the film premiered in January 2023 at Slamdance,…

Last night, my coke dealer boyfriend told me that he wanted to do his part to celebrate Palm Sunday by starting to read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I should have known better than to believe his intentions were pure, however, when I caught him cutting open the inside into a box shape to stash a few bags of cocaine inside of it. I couldn’t imagine why or for who he would need to do this for. He hasn’t been discreet in so long that I forgot how much game he actually had when it came to concealment. He knew better than anyone that no one reads, and would never bother to open a book even in the most desperately boring of situations. 

I didn’t let on to him that I knew he wasn’t really reading A Moveable Feast in honor of Palm Sunday, but I did sneak back into his room that night to steal a bag from the book for myself. I started reading a little bit from one of the still intact pages, finding myself skeeved out by the line: “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.” God, Hemingway was such a douche bag. 

By Motoko Rich

June 27, 2009

Besides its tart portraits of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of his early days in Paris, “A Moveable Feast,” provides a heart-wrenching depiction of marital betrayal.

The final chapter, “There Is Never Any End to Paris,” is a wistful paean to Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, whom the writer left for her best friend. The friend, Pauline Pfeiffer, the wealthy woman who became Hemingway’s second wife, is portrayed as something of a wily predator, and it is Hemingway’s “bad luck” that he falls for her.

It turns out that the story behind the editing of the book is nearly as juicy as the tales within it, and has become something of a multigenerational custody battle over how to cast the larger-than-life author’s stormy romantic history.