—A Good Café—

Dearest Annika and Yasmine,

I am writing to you both with a cup of coffee on a cold morning and meditating on first lines. Specifically, the first line of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast.

‘Then there was the bad weather.’

What a wonderfully evocative way to begin a book! This one just so happens to be an all-time favourite of mine and I think this is partly because of the light it sheds on the writing process. The deep-down stirrings of a writer’s mind.

I personally resonate, for example, with the strength of feeling that the weather stirs for Hemingway, swirling about him as if willing the story forth. ‘All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter,’ he writes, ‘and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife – second class – and the hotel where Verlain had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.’ 

Driven inside ‘A Good Café’, Hemingway tells us in this first chapter of his memoir about how he takes out a notebook and a pencil to write. Which he does so furiously—abstractedly at times, distractedly at others. And yet those distractions inevitably become threads of the story at hand. Like the beautiful girl he sees waiting for someone. And like the ‘wild, cold, blowing day’ in Paris that becomes the ‘wild, cold, blowing day’ of his story. 

‘The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.’

…

‘Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St James. I was tired of rum St James without thinking about it. Then the story was finished and I was very tired.’ 

I can identify with both of these stages of the writing process—writing the story and the story writing itself. I can identify, too, with the way that Hemingway scoops up morsels of his everyday life to weave throughout his stories. In this sense, those everyday encounters and experiences belong to us, carried in the pockets of our mind from this chapter into the next. Just as Paris can belong to us all in different ways, can be tucked inside and carried along with us as a sort of moveable feast. 

‘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.’ 

What I particularly love about ‘A Moveable Feast’ is the way that it seems to dance this line between fact and fiction, styling itself as a memoir and yet feeling just as richly rendered as a novel. In the Preface Hemingway even writes: ‘If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.’

And I feel this in my writer’s bones. 

‘I finished the oysters and the wine and paid my score in the café’, Hemingway writes towards the end of this first chapter, ‘and made it the shortest way back up the Montagne Ste Geneviève through the rain, that was now only local weather and not something that changed your life’.

And I wonder: can you recall a mundane experience, like the weather, which stirred a great depth of feeling in your own writings? 

x Rosie

…

Hi Rosie and Annika,

I hope you're both well!

Thank you for your email, Rosie. I loved reading your thoughts on the writer's process prevalent inside A Moveable Feast. I relate, too, to the weaving of tiny everyday moments, taking notes on my phone, in my journal, in word documents, wherever I am. The pulling together of these tidbits, I find, will always reveal something larger about how we move through our days. And how 'tiny' can become amplified with time.  

My friend Jane says that she doesn't consider chatting about the weather 'small talk', in fact she insists that it reveals much about the person, and their observations. That they are present in their environment. That they have felt their world. I had not thought of this before, I had always enjoyed weather talk (haha), and, together with those who were also cc-d in on Jane's email, we responded with detailed accounts of our own current weather situations - each being from different locations. It was a vibrant read, poetic, and joyful to hone in on one physical element and describe how your body felt there. Meditative, even. 

I wonder if this act of reducing the senses to something physical, helped Hemingway to write. By focusing on the weather, and observing his own reaction to it, gave way to the flood of a wider view of his position, as a husband, a writer, a father, a friend, an addict? Maybe harnessing the tension between micro and macro unravels bigger epiphanies, larger stories?

x Love Yasmine  

…

Dearest Reader,

What keeps you present in your environment?

We hope that this Book Club exchange will help inspire you to pick up a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. And, in it, discover both the mundanity and the magnitude of everyday things like the weather. For anything can be fertile ground for creative inspiration.

 x JANE