FOREWORD
A new generation of Hemingway readers (one hopes there will never be a lost generation!) has the opportunity here to read a published text that is a less edited and more comprehensive version of the original manuscript material the author intended as a memoir of his young, formative years as a writer in Paris; one of his best moveable feasts.
From the very beginning, there have been different editions of important works of literature. Take the Bible, for example. When I was a young person being raised in the Roman Catholic religion of my maternal grandmother, Mary Downey, born in County Cork, I heard it read from the pulpit during sermons on Sundays and feast days, and I read it myself, the Douay-Rheims Version (DRV) of the Bible, which is not the King James Version (KJV) although the DRV is literally closer more often to the Latin Vulgate Version (LVV).
Consider just the two opening lines:
DRV:
1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
1. In the beginning God created heaven, and earth.
2. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.
LVV:
1. in principia creavit deus caelum et terram.
2. terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus dei ferebatur super aquas.
After googling all three of these versions, I was left with the distinct impression that I had a choice, because of the ambiguity of the LVV, between the Spirit of God being carried along floating on the stream like a piece of Sargasso seaweed or, alternatively, soaring along just above it like an albatross on the southern seas.
To me, anyway, soaring seems more godlike, and evidently, the Protestant clergymen in charge of the KJV thought the same. Neither the Protestants nor the Catholics could turn to God for answers to such ambiguities, and such is the case with Hemingway. He died before he had decided on a preface, chapter headings, an ending, and a title for his memoir, and no one, just like the case with the old gaucho’s mother in Hudson’s Far Away And Long Ago, has been able to reach him so far regarding these matters.
Now what can I say about the title? Mary Hemingway derives it from a remark made by her husband to Aaron Hotchner: “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.”
When my father was free to marry my mother, Pauline, he agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism and undergo a course of religious instruction in Paris. Hemingway, of course, as a boy had received quite a bit of religious instruction as a properly brought-up Protestant, but he had received the sacrament of last rites from a Catholic chaplain in the battlefield dressing station during the night after his mortar wound on the Italian front, and like the famous French king whose statue he mentions in the Paris memoir, he knew that Pauline was worth a mass.
I imagine that the priest, most likely from Saint-Sulpice, the church where Pauline attended services near her Paris apartment, took his role as instructor very seriously. One of the concepts he must have discussed with my father was that of the moveable feast. He would have explained that these are important church feast days linked to the varying date of Easter, so that they also have varying dates. Hemingway must have remembered then one of the most memorable speeches of Shakespeare, the feast of St. Crispin speech, the Agincourt address to his troops by Henry V. St. Crispin’s day is not a moveable feast. It is the same date in the calendar of every year, but if you fought there on that day, it becomes your moveable feast.
The complexity of a moveable feast lies in the calculation of the calendar date for Easter in a given year, from which it is simple enough then to assign a calendar date to each and every moveable feast for a given year. Palm Sunday is seven days before Easter.
The calculation of the calendar date for Easter is no simple matter. This calculation has a special name, the Computus. No less a mathematician than Carl Friedrich Gauss came up with an algorithm for the computation. How those two, instructor and pupil, must have enjoyed themselves with these arcane discussions. I wonder if James Joyce might have joined in!
In later life the idea of a moveable feast for Hemingway became something very much like what King Harry wanted St. Crispin’s Feast Day to be for “we happy few”: a memory or even a state of being that had become a part of you, a thing that you could have always with you, no matter where you went or how you lived forever after, that you could never lose. An experience first fixed in time and space or a condition like happiness or love could be afterward moved or carried with you wherever you went in space and time. Hemingway had many moveable feasts besides Paris: D-Day on a landing craft going in to Omaha Beach among many others. For this to work, however, you need memory. With memory gone, and knowing that it is gone, is likely to come despair, the sin against the Holy Ghost. Electric shock therapy can destroy memory like dementia or death does, but, unlike dementia or death, you are left aware that it has been destroyed.
Now that I have tried to prepare you for it, here is the last bit of professional writing by my father, the true foreword to A Moveable Feast: “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”
Patrick Hemingway