Until recently, I’d only read two of Hemingway’s books, The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea, and I was good with that. I never felt the urge to read more of him as there were other writers I preferred, but friend from the pub is a big fan, mentions Hemingway frequently, urges me to read more, so I figured to give it a shot when I came across a copy of A Moveable Feast in a used bookstore for only $3.00. I bought it and started reading on the bus yesterday, and I must say, it’s $3.00 very well spent. It’s a memoir about his days in Paris when he was still struggling to make it as a writer. I’m only halfway through, but I already know I’ll read it again. The stories are good. The writing is good. It contains a passion I hadn’t seen in his novels, and it gives me this week’s passage about writing.
“A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
I love that bit about belonging. It’s quite true. It’s something that I touched on in The Music Book, the idea of capturing something in writing, a detail, a person, a moment, getting that thing down. It’s gives it a kind of permanence and also a kind of ownership. That beauty in the cafe will always be there looking out the window at the street, always in the pages of Hemingway’s book, and also in the readers imagination, so she belongs to us too. What will she do? Who is she waiting for? She moved Hemingway enough for him to note her in a notebook while writing in a cafe in Paris in the 1920s and to then include her years later when going through those old notebooks to write A Moveable Feast. She did belong to him, and when Hemingway shares her with the rest of the world, she hasn’t aged. She hasn’t even moved. She will forever be there enticing Hemingway, forever waiting for someone to come along, perhaps another writer to tell us her story.