Necessity Of Hunger In Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast

Janessa McLane

200344259

ENGL 110-397

Prof. Craig Melhoff

October 13, 2015

The Necessity of Hunger in A Moveable Feast

Published three years after his death in 1961, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast illuminates the author’s time spent as an expatriate in 1920s Paris. Though the chronicle was written in a time of great turmoil for Hemingway, (divorces, poor health, paranoia, and alcoholism plagued him for many years), he reflects on the time spent there with respect and fondness. Though the life of a expatriate author in Roaring Twenties Paris seems like a dream to many, Hemingway reveals that not all times were good, in fact, there were times he and his first wife, Hadley, could not afford three meals a day. Despite his hunger, Hemingway manages to use it as a driving force in his creative venture. Through alluring descriptions of fine foods, Hemingway uses this as a distraction

from the two realities he must face: the literal hunger from being penniless at times; and yet, the necessity of hunger for his creativity to flourish.
A Moveable Feast is a memoir that plays on the senses of the reader through the description of food, and as Hemingway would say, has a way of transplanting the reader, to a degree one can almost taste the dish being described, if not visualize it. The mentions of such satisfying dishes are actually numerous. Alone, Hemingway would snack on mandarins and roasted chestnuts while working in his room, spitting the seeds and throwing the skins into the fire that was warming his room (21-22). With his wife Hadley, he illustrates their lunch of “little radishes, a good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and endive salad, [and] apple tart” (34). While in Gertrude Stein’s apartment, of whom Hemingway has nothing but apparent fond memories, he eloquently describes the food and drink served while visiting, as he writes:
They gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums, or wild raspberries. These were fragrant, colorless alcohols served from cut-glass carafes in small glasses and whether they were quetsche, mirabelle, or framboise they all tasted like the fruits they came from, converted into a controlled fire on your tongue that warmed you and loosened your tongue (23-24).
With F. Scott Fitzgerald, another fond contemporary, he remembers sharing the poulet de bresse, Lyon-area chicken, with bread and wine (138). Hemingway also writes of a meal consisting of “a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of dry white wine” (18), scoffing down the oysters “with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture” (18). Perhaps the most pleasant description is that of the Seine fish Hemingway loved to eat. Along the Seine, at the head of the Île de la Cité, the freshly caught fish, called goujon were served (37). Hemingway says that “they were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful. They were plump and sweet-fleshed with a finer flavor than fresh sardines eve, and were not at all oily, and we ate them bones and all” (37). As mentioned before, these depictions of food are actually plentiful, considering that Hemingway, at times could be characterized as the ‘starving artist.’ However, the underlying tone of hunger still permeates through his recollection.
The first way in which hunger makes its appearance in the memoir, obviously, is through the literal hunger that Hemingway so often feels.

Early on, Hemingway describes that he was “always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working” (22). While spending the day with his wife at the horse races, Hemingway wants to “go to a wonderful place and have a truly grand dinner” (47). The two of them head to Michaud’s, a finer restaurant. Though Hemingway debates whether he is truly hungry in the simple sense or in a deeper way, he decides that he is hungry in the simple sense, and they have a “wonderful meal” at Michaud’s (49). There is some sort of practicality of being hungry as Hemingway argues that “in Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries” (83), as though, it is more important to have “luxuries” than it is to have money for meals. This necessity for hunger, is characterized better through the methaporhical meaning in A Moveable

Feast.
Though Hemingway seems to be writing from the stomach, hunger is represented in different ways, as though it is needed for his creativity, or a sense of hunger in ways that eating do not satiate. In a chapter entitled “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” this feeling is personified explicitly. Hemingway had come to the conclusion that he needed to start writing stories again. After running into his friend Sylvia Beach, who tells him he must eat, Hemingway tells himself that “hunger is healthy” (68), as though he must convince himself of this truth. Later in the chapter, he makes this point very clear as he says that “it is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it” (71). For his creativity to move forward, he understands that hunger will be the driving force. Hemingway realizes that he needs to write a novel because it “was what [he] should do if [they] were to eat regularly” (71). In other words, he was to “let the pressure build” (71). In some ways, this hunger is used as a positive creative force perhaps one that habituates his perceptions, propelling his creativity. Hunger becomes something which will allow him to complete the necessary tasks in order to live a “luxorious” life, one in which he his able to eat regularly.