In one of the epigraph’s Hemingway originally intended for A Moveable Feast, he writes, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.
As a result, the truth about those lost years would and could never can be accurately restored. Perhaps, it lies somewhere between a work of fiction and a flawed but ambitious memoir. Thus, due to the many layers of problems getting this book written and to the reading market, its genre is very difficult to categorize. Nevertheless, after his 1961 death, Mary decided to edit and publish Ernest’s material posthumously in 1962, calling it fittingly, A Moveable Feast. Near the end of his life, he instructed his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, and his publishers, Scribner’s, not to ever release the material. As a result of those insurmountable roadblocks, he became more and more frustrated and ultimately gave up on the project.
In addition, his memory was severely damaged due to forty years of hard-living, hard-drinking, and psychiatric shock treatment for depression. Consequently, forty years later, Hemingway had few written records to refresh his thinking about the period. Complicating his difficulties, his wife during this Paris period, Hadley Richardson, accidentally left Ernest’s most authoritative writing about their first three years in Paris on a train, and they were never retrieved. He struggled every day to attempt to recall, justify, and recount the events and dialogues of the principal characters of his narrative. However, attempting to write his memoir at age 61, about his life at 21, became increasingly difficult for him. Much of his writing of the material for his book was undertaken at his homes in Key West Florida and Cuba. Ernest Hemingway wrote, “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.” In the last years of his life, he attempted to write a book about what his life was like attempting to live and love in Paris in the 1920’s.
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