Hemingway and Hitchens

Here's Christopher Hitchens' take on Hemingway's restored "A Moveable Feast:"

What is it exactly that explains the continued fascination of this rather slight book? Obviously, it is an ur-text of the American enthrallment with Paris. To be more precise, it is also a skeleton key to the American literary fascination with Paris (and contains some excellent tips for start-up writers, such as the advice to stop working while you still have something left to write the next day). There are the “wouldn’t be without, even if you don’t quite trust” glimpses of the magnetic Joyce and the personable Pound and the apparently wickedly malodorous Ford Madox Ford. Then there are the moments of amusingly uncynical honesty, as when Stein and Toklas met Ernest and Hadley and “forgave us for being in love and being married—time would fix that.” The continued currency of that useless expression the lost generation becomes even more inexplicable when it is traced to a stupid remark made by Gertrude Stein’s garage manager, and such quotable fatuity, however often consecrated by repeated usage, is always worth following to its source. Most of all, though, I believe that A Moveable Feast serves the purpose of a double nostalgia: our own as we contemplate a Left Bank that has since become a banal tourist enclave in a Paris where the tough and plebeian districts are gone, to be replaced by seething Muslim banlieues all around the periphery; and Hemingway’s at the end of his distraught days, as he saw again the “City of Light” with his remaining life still ahead of him rather than so far behind.