The drapes and satins of the Moulin Rouge must have seemed pleasingly far away from the net curtains of Oak Park Illinois. They would also be able to go on long holidays in Spain and the Alps, they could eat oysters, they could take trips out to the races and they could enjoy the varied and risqué Paris nightlife. Hadley had a decent annual income from inheritance, ensuring that while they might go hungry from time to time (if one believes a Moveable Feast), the couple would never starve. Or, to put it more accurately, his wife did. 'Exchange,' he told the readers of the Toronto Star, 'is a wonderful thing.' The dollar went a long way in Paris in 1922 and while Hemingway didn't have that many of them, he had more than enough to get by. Hemingway enjoyed plenty of other advantages. Indeed, in A Moveable Feast he displays mixed feelings about the many characters he encountered during that time (to put it mildly). But it wasn't just this concatenation of literary opportunities that made Paris feel like such a 'lucky' place to live for the young Hemingway. Before Ford Madox Ford came along with the transatlantic review and all the opportunities that offered. Before John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin.

A conjunction of literary influences was about to take place which would forever change the topography of American literature.'Īnd that was before Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald breezed into town.

None of these literary giants knew that Ernest Hemingway was in town, but before the year was out they would know him well. Less than two blocks from the Hemingway's hotel, James Joyce was dressing to attend a party at Sylvia Beach's bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, where he would celebrate the final revisions to his manuscript Ulysses. Eventually Eliot would call it The Waste Land. Close by Ezra Pound was reading through a bit of manuscript left him by a young friend with exhausted nerves, Tom Eliot, on his way to a rest cure in Lausanne. A five-minute walk down Boulevard Raspail, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were planning their Christmas meal. 'Less than two blocks from Hemingway's table, what was left of Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant lay beneath stone memorials in the Montparnasse cemetery.

A moveable feast hemingway