A moveable feast
October 21, 2009
I met an officer of the Navy in an airport bar somewhere in Arizona some two years back. I was reading Across the River and Into the Trees, and it was lying askew on my beat up satchel of a carry-on. As I recall, he started the conversation after a waitress handed him a hamburger. He said "Hemingway," nodded at my book with a smile, and went on to recommend A Moveable Feast.
"It's Hemingway's greatest work," he said, blinking his clear blue eyes.
I lit up.
A quick digression: If I were a girl, it's disconcerting how far I would get with myself with just a few scratches of literary knowledge.
I was delighted to talk about books, particularly Hemingway. It's a weakness. I replied that I hadn't read A Moveable Feast because I'd never had a great impression of any artist's posthumous works; I considered them, in fact, the terrifying patch-work zombies of literature. (I'm thinking, say, that festering embarrassment of a film that grew on Douglas Adam's corpse, among others.) I'd read both The Garden of Eden and True at First Light and had been pretty let down, and I told my new officer friend as much.
For a moment, there was a timid little vacancy in his placid blue eyes. He chewed his hamburger with a blank face. I should have taken a clue. I've mentioned my weakness; I suppose I wanted to believe.
"Oh no," he assured me, taking another bite out of his hamburger, "it's definitely his best work."
I'm sure more happened but everything after that was kind of hazy. I was in a bit of a frenzy knowing "His best work" was a sad little baby I'd abandoned to the bathwater of zombified literature. I had a hard-back copy in less than six hours.
In defense of A Moveable Feast: Scott Fitzgerald is in it. That was interesting, I guess.
Really, the book reads more like an awkward, hacked together People Magazine of post World War literary circles, which sounds tolerable because I'm interested in some of those people. Mary Kathleen, a bag-lady created by Vonnegut, shares my sentiments concerning accounts of high class hobnobbery:
"I find this magazine called People in the garbage can, but it's not about people. It's about crap."
Agreed. I don't read People, I didn't like A Moveable Feast, and I don't recommend any book published after its author's death.
Tags for this piece: vonnegut books travel arizona hemmingway navy