The Man who cut down the adjectives

 A couple of weeks back I finished reading  "Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway. This is a memoir about his sojourn in Paris while still he was not established as a writer. He had been a journalist earlier. He had a distinct writing style. His words were simple, direct and the sentences mostly declarative. In Paris he dines and drinks with famous and to be famous writers.  He wins and loses horse races. He makes fortune and spends quite a lot. It was here that the seeds of his first novel 'The Sun also rises' was sown in his mind and its draft completed.

Browsing through the 75 odd pages one is left to wonder how this non fictional work makes interesting reading as though it were a fiction.  Ernest Hemingway wrote to his friend thus.. "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" He records what he thinks while starting a new story. "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." It is as though he drops a hint or few for those who want to write. Cut the scrollwork or ornament and throw it away. He always carried a pencil, sharpener and a note book in his coat packet. 

Having no money to buy books he borrowed books from a rental library. The library was that of Sylvia Beach. From here Hemingway read all of Turgnev  Tolstoy and Chekov and Dostoevsky.

We see Hemingway writing about the helpful nature of Ezra Pound. He found him generous  and always helping writers and poets when he knew they were in trouble. They created a fund by inviting contribution from others . The idea was o collect money and get T S Eliot out of bank and ensure he has money enough to write poetry.. The money indeed helped T S Eliot in publication of The Waste Land.

Once Hemingway asked Ezra Pound  what he thought about Dostoevsky. In reply Ezra said  that he had never read the "rooshians".Hemingway felt very bad as it came from the man who taught him to distrust adjectives.

Hemingway left Paris when the winter cold became unbearable. 

There is never any ending to Paris and you always returned to its memory and Paris it was in the early days when they were very poor and very happy. That is how Hemingway ended the book.

Hemingway writes "Everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped, but if it was bad, the emptiness filled by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."

How true!