Stranger on Earth

Bumby (Jack/John Hemingway) One of the most endearing chapters in the memoir will have to be “The Education of Mr. Bumby,” in which Hemingway the father describes a conversation with his first-born in the Place St. Michel café. Bumby was a precocious and sensitive child. Having been told by his French tutor that the writing profession was a difficult metiér , he asked his father if it was really so. “… Tell me papa is it difficult to write?” “Sometimes.” “Touton says it is very difficult and I must always respect it.” “You respect it.” (204) Then Bumby asked if they could go by Silver Beach’s bookstore (Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company , the mispronunciation affectionately retained by Hemingway) because “she is always very nice to me” (205). Bumby Hemingway then refers to a quarrel he had with Hadley about something in which “she had been right and [he] had been wrong seriously” (205). This had been witnessed by young Bumby, who said: “Mother...

Hadley Hemingway Hadley and Ernest Hemingway in 1922 The intimate passages concerning Hemingway’s first wife Hadley reveal to us Hemingway the husband and lover. Some of these passages (especially those in the intriguing chapter “The Pilot Fish and the Rich”) were expurgated by Mary Hemingway, causing the man to come across as an unrepentant cheat who blamed his adulterous behaviour on Hadley. The Restored Edition tells us that this is quite far from the truth. Hadley and Hemingway had a close bond. They did many things together, even tried to grow out their hair together (humorously described in “Secret Pleasures”). When he describes their love-making, which facilitated his writing process, it is always with a touch of tenderness and hope. Hadley and Hemingway used to go skiing in Schruns in Austria (he had found it an agreeable place to write). Despite the awful avalanches that would occur now and then, Hemingway’s memories of the place were mostly romantic...

HEMINGWAY The ring of that surname alone is enough to conjure up in most people’s minds a host of unflattering descriptions: “male chauvinist pig” (a favourite amongst his feminist readers), “vacuous cad with a drinking problem,” “bullfight enthusiast stricken with machismo,” “Indiana Jones fancying himself a writer.” The man himself might have been all of these things, but what he was not was an unthinking, unfeeling man. This becomes apparent if one approaches his classic works A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises without the above-mentioned preconceptions; but if one really wants to know the man behind the brilliance of For Whom the Bell Tolls , one must get to him through his posthumously published memoir. A Moveable Feast – the 2009 Restored Edition allows the reader to do just that. Though it should be regarded as “fiction,” as dictated by Hemingway himself, it does invite the willing reader into the rambunctious world of the man, and along the way, he is treated...