A very British bildung

Over the long weekend I read a couple of bildungs-romans; one a revisit after many years, the other a recent work. In Hemingway’s words, A Moveable Feast was about living in Paris ‘when we were very poor and very happy’. The poverty was relative. Hemingway did occasionally have to skip lunch, but there was always enough to drink, even if some of it, from Corsica or Cahors — rough in those days — was better mixed with water. Fishermen still plied the banks of the Seine. Simple restaurants sold the catch, delicious with Muscadet, and our author does not mention ill effects.

Nor does he inflict any on his readers. Yet there is an obvious question. How good a writer was Hemingway? Although one forgives him a great deal because he exalted bullfighting, his style is basic, deliberately so, with lots of ‘ands’. There is plenty of vin ordinaire; hardly a sentence worthy of long savouring. At 20, I devoured him. Now that I am slightly older, he is on the rereading list. Is he much more than John Buchan with a Nobel prize? Not that I would dissuade anyone from A Moveable Feast. One would love to have visited Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway evokes a pre-lapsarian existence with a son, a cat, an adorable wife and a rarely shaken confidence in his literary gifts: bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Yet he was about to destroy that stability and fling himself into tempest after tempest. Perhaps that was necessary for his bildung to reach fulfilment. But there is also sadness: a anticipatory sense of ultimate loss.