in high school. I loved it then. But I loved in a way of someone who hadn't yet seen the world. This was before I had lived for a summer in Grenoble with a French family, before I had studied in Nice for the summer after college, and then spent a career flying in and out of Africa--almost always with a stopover in Paris.
All that to say, it hit different this time around reading it at the midpoint of my life. Having walked the same Parisian streets and cafes. Having lived nearly a decade of my life overseas, I feel Hemingway's emotions and insecurities in a much more visceral way. Certainly of course, Hemingway's Paris no longer exists but it's beautiful to hear his young writer's voice developing itself as he describes, the city and its country and the expats that inhabit it.
Below my key quotes below is a list of the various characters that Hemingway name drops as well as some additional information about them. One thing that I forgot was that Hemingway lost his first novel when someone stole his bag at a train station. In retrospect, he he later considered the loss a good thing as he considered the first draft a poor one and in recreating The Sun Also Rises he developed his trademark lean style and terse dialogue.
The other quote I've been chewing on is: "Memory is hunger." The idea of feeling our memories in such a primal way that it creates a void in us is a powerful idea that I'd like to write about more one day.
My Key Quotes and notes
Page 12
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "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."
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
Page 15
"You mustn't write anything that is inaccrochable. There is no point in it. It's wrong and it's silly."
Page 27
I think Miss Stein would have liked the good Simenons the first one I read was either L'Ecluse Numéro 1, or La Maison du Canal but I am not sure because when I knew Miss Stein she did not like to read French although she loved to speak it.
In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Furbank and, later, Scott Fitzgerald.
Page 28
If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back. It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general.
Anderson's stories were too good to make happy conversation.
She was angry at Ezra Pound because he had sat down too quickly on a small, fragile and, doubtless, uncomfortable chair, that it is quite possible he had been given on purpose, and had either cracked or broken it.
Page 29
It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation.
The patron had said to him, "You are all a génération perdue."
"That's what you are. That's what you all are," Miss Stein said. "All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."
Page 30
I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation?
I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill.
Page 57
Memory is hunger.
Page 58
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
Page 62
You watched the prices and all the shifts of odds at every time a horse you were following would start, and you had to know how he was working and finally get to know when the stable would try with him.
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.
Page 73
I knew the stories were good and someone would publish them finally at home. When I stopped doing newspaper work I was sure the stories were going to be published.
Page 76
I knew it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must write a novel.
Let the pressure build. In the meantime I would write a long story about whatever I knew best.
Page 108
Sometimes I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. You can go quite a long time before you criticize families, your own or those by marriage, but it is easier with bad painters because they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm as families can do. With bad painters all you need do is not look at them. But even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.
His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint.
Page 109
Some people show evil as a great race horse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
Page 110
"I call him 'the Measuring Worm,'" she said. "He comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb, sighting on it and measuring it and seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it and it doesn't come out right. He's missed what it's all about."
Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested.
Page 117
There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.
Page 123
Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic and clearly marked for death as a character is marked for death in a motion picture.
[User Annotation at top of page: "Includ list of all ppl mentioned in this book"]
Page 127
It made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con.
I've seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust for all, and you and your marked for death look, you con man, making a living out of your death.
Page 133
Mansfield was like near-beer. It was better to drink water. But Chekov was not water except for the clarity.
In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi.
[User Annotation in margin: "intel"]
Page 134
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
Page 135
...the man who believed in the mot juste—the one and only correct word to use—the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations;
Page 146
"We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem," he once said to me. "The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time."
Page 147
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
[User Annotation in margin: "Scott Fitzgerald"]
Page 149
Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.
The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.
Page 152
"Don't be silly. This is serious. Tell me, did you and your wife sleep together before you were married?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"I don't remember."
"But how can you not remember something of such importance?"
"I don't know," I said. "It is odd, isn't it?"
"It's worse than odd," Scott said. "You must be able to remember."
"I'm sorry. It's a pity, isn't it?"
"Don't talk like some limey," he said. "Try to be serious and remember."
"Nope," I said. "It's hopeless."
"You could make an honest effort to remember."
[User Annotation in margin: "Talk is silly / ppl / funny writer / his interaction / intel"]
Page 154
To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine, and I hoped he would get the book quickly so that I might read it.
Page 156
I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way except the very best he could write without destroying his talent.
Page 166
You could not be angry with Scott any more than you could be angry with someone who was crazy, but I was getting angry with myself for having become involved in the whole silliness.
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary...
Page 175
"I learned one thing."
"What?"
"Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love."
Page 176
But hawks do not share. Scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane.
Page 180
Zelda was jealous of Scott's work and as we got to know them, this fell into a regular pattern.
Page 183
"Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can."
It destroyed his work, and she was more jealous of his work than anything.
When he had very bad times, I listened to him about them and tried to make him know that if he could hold onto himself he would write as he was made to write, and that only death was irrevocable.
Page 184
But when he was drunk he would usually come to find me and, drunk, he took almost as much pleasure interfering with my work as Zelda did interfering with his.
Page 186
Zelda was very beautiful and was tanned a lovely gold color and her hair was a beautiful dark gold and she was very friendly. Her hawk's eyes were clear and calm. I knew everything was all right and was going to turn out well in the end when she leaned forward and said to me, telling me her great secret, "Ernest, don't you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?"
Page 190
"Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly."
"To put you out of business. That's the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business."
Page 207
The rich have a sort of pilot fish who goes ahead of them, sometimes a little deaf, sometimes a little blind, but always smelling affable and hesitant ahead of them.
Then you have the rich and nothing is ever as it was again.
Page 209
Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and as stupid as a bird dog who wants to go out with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone.
It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unwittingly sets out to marry the husband.
Page 210
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war.
When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.
Page 211
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.
Would you like me to analyze these specific passages for recurring themes or stylistic techniques commonly found in Elements of Style?1
Hemingway Name Drops
Gertrude Stein
Context: A central figure in the book, she mentors Hemingway on writing but eventually clashes with him. In the underlined passages, she scolds him for writing "inaccrochable" (unsuitable/dirty) stories and famously labels his age group the "lost generation"1111.
Significance: An American novelist, poet, and playwright who hosted a famous salon in Paris that became the hub for modernist art and literature.
Learn more about Gertrude Stein
Ezra Pound
Context: Hemingway portrays him as a "saint" and the most generous writer he knows, specifically mentioning his efforts to help T.S. Eliot and his defense of friends2222.
Significance: A major American expatriate poet and critic who played a pivotal role in the early modernist movement, famously editing T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Learn more about Ezra Pound
Sherwood Anderson
Context: Stein praises him as a person but refuses to discuss his work; Hemingway notes that he wrote "simply" but eventually parodied Anderson's style in The Torrents of Spring, causing a rift3333.
Significance: An American novelist and short story writer best known for Winesburg, Ohio, whose simple style heavily influenced Hemingway’s early work.
Learn more about Sherwood Anderson
Wyndham Lewis
Context: Hemingway describes him with intense dislike, calling him the "Measuring Worm" and noting he had the eyes of an "unsuccessful rapist"4444.
Significance: An English writer, painter, and critic who was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement; Hemingway’s physical description of him is among the most vicious in the book.
Learn more about Wyndham Lewis
F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Circle
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Context: Annotated heavily in your text, he is depicted as a man of immense natural talent ("dust on a butterfly's wings") who is plagued by insecurity, alcohol, and his wife's jealousy5555.
Significance: The celebrated author of The Great Gatsby, whose tumultuous friendship with Hemingway is a focal point of the memoir's later chapters.
Learn more about F. Scott Fitzgerald
Zelda Fitzgerald
Context: Though not explicitly named in every underline, she is the "hawk" with "deep-south manners" who Hemingway believes is trying to destroy Scott’s ability to write; she famously claims Al Jolson is greater than Jesus6666.
Significance: Scott’s wife, a writer and artist in her own right, whom Hemingway portrays as the primary antagonist in Scott’s decline.
Learn more about Zelda Fitzgerald
Maxwell Perkins
Context: Scott tells Hemingway he heard from Perkins that The Great Gatsby was not selling well; Hemingway later shows Perkins the manuscript for The Sun Also Rises7777.
Significance: The most famous literary editor of the 20th century, working at Scribner’s, who discovered and edited Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe.
Learn more about Maxwell Perkins
Michael Arlen
Context: During a car trip, Scott recounts the plots of Arlen's books to Hemingway, who dismisses them; Hemingway later remarks that he learned "if I would have listened"8888.
Significance: A popular Armenian-British essayist and novelist of the 1920s, best known for The Green Hat, representing the commercially successful but "unserious" literature Hemingway avoided.
Learn more about Michael Arlen
Dunc Chaplin (James "Dunc" Chaplin)
Context: A "famous pitcher" whom Scott introduces to Hemingway at the Dingo bar; Hemingway finds him much more pleasant and relaxed than Scott9.
Significance: A professional baseball player who pitched in the Major Leagues; his presence highlights Scott's tendency to collect "famous" people.
Learn more about Dunc Chaplin
Paris Literary Figures
Ernest Walsh
Context: Hemingway meets him in Ezra Pound’s studio; Walsh is described as "marked for death" (he had consumption/tuberculosis) and Hemingway views him as a "con man" regarding a literary award10101010.
Significance: An American poet and editor of the literary magazine This Quarter, which published some of Hemingway’s early work.
Learn more about Ernest Walsh
Evan Shipman
Context: A poet and close friend found at the Lilas café; Hemingway admires him for his dedication to writing without ambition for fame, and they bond over gardening and horses11111111.
Significance: An American poet and journalist who was a fixture of the Montparnasse quarter and later covered horse racing for The Morning Telegraph.
Learn more about Evan Shipman
Ralph Cheever Dunning
Context: A poet who smokes opium and refuses to come down from a roof (a scene that amuses Evan Shipman); Ezra Pound asks Hemingway to look after him12121212.
Significance: An obscure American poet living in Paris whose mental health struggles and opium addiction are documented in the memoir.
Learn more about Ralph Cheever Dunning
Literary Influences (The "Dead" Writers)
Katherine Mansfield
Context: Hemingway compares her work to "near-beer" (non-alcoholic) and states he prefers the stronger "water" of Chekhov13.
Significance: A prominent modernist short story writer; Hemingway’s dismissal of her highlights his preference for Russian realism over English stylized prose.
Learn more about Katherine Mansfield
Anton Chekhov
Context: Cited as a "good and simple writer" whose clarity and journalism-like stories Hemingway admired over Mansfield's14.
Significance: A Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered one of the greatest writers of short fiction in history.
Learn more about Anton Chekhov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Context: Hemingway notes that while some parts are unbelievable, Dostoevsky writes truths about "frailty and madness" that change the reader15.
Significance: A Russian novelist known for exploring human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia.
Learn more about Fyodor Dostoevsky
