When Papa Was Tatie

A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemmingway. 21 1 pages. Scr/bner. $4.95.

Unlike the glum testaments and boring memorabilia most men bequeath to the world, Ernest Hemingway left behind an invitation to laugh with him amid the scenes of his youth, where he was happier than he would ever be again. Almost, it seems like a last-minute appeal from a man who suddenly felt himself trapped in his own latter-day legend as "Papa."

These 20 well-tooled tales are of "how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," when "we" meant a part-time correspondent for a Canadian newspaper and his redheaded wife Hadley. They were "Tatie" and "Binney" to each other and nothing to anybody else except a handful of fellow writers who shared the 25-year-old Midwesterner's tough belief in his own talent. He had sold a few short stories for marks in Germany and peanuts in the little magazines like transatlantic review. Gertrude Stein had told him he was not yet good enough for the Saturday Evening Post, and he was trying to beat the horses at Auteuil and Enghien to stake a trip to Pamplona to see the bullfights.

Nifty Thoughts. Paris may have been the capital of genius-in-exile, but Hemingway's feet were firmly planted on the pave. When he remembers looking at James Joyce dining en famille in Michaud's on the corner of the Rue Jacob, he remembers also that he envied neither Joyce's genius nor his fame, but the tournedos the "Celtic crew" could afford to eat and he and Binney usually could not. On the one occasion they treated themselves to a Michaud dinner after a pony came home for him, the meal did not sit well. In a wistful, almost clumsy way, he tells how he was plagued by dark night thoughts. "Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper. 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 nor wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."

Strange Talk. The reader may notice a peculiar thing about the way people talk in Hemingway's book--like Hemingway characters, in fact. Some characters--in or out of fiction--did learn to talk this way, but that was later. Yet here they are in the early 1920s, before A Farewell to Arms was ever written, talking like Lieut. Henry, Hemingway, of course, knows what he is doing, and it shows in the fact that he does not try to work the old conversational trick on those well-enough known to have a recognizable style of their own. Ezra Pound, for instance, who appears in the book as a tennis and boxing partner, gets to say very little. Neither James Joyce nor Wyndham Lewis gets to say anything at all.

Gertrude Stein is something else again. Indeed, A Moveable Feast should settle for all time the question of whether Hemingway learned his style under the tutelage of that strange lady. Hemingway was a generous man, and if a debt of this kind existed, he would have acknowledged it. He does not, and is at some pains to make clear that her experiments in written speech--simple rhythms, using repetition and echo for subtle psychological effects ran parallel with his own. Hemingway's sketch of her is a masterpiece of controlled malice in which she appears as a monster of obtuse egotism presiding over her manless menage as over a shrine dedicated to herself, served by Miss Alice B. Toklas and dominated by Pablo Picasso's portrait of herself.

Fact or Fiction? Perhaps it is better to read the book as fiction; Hemingway recommends just that in an introduction where he says, ironically, that it "may throw some light on what has been written as fact." Take his account of Scott Fitzgerald. The indictment-by-anecdote is irresistibly funny, but was the author of The Great Gatsby such a petulant clown, fatuous snob, and pathetic simpleton about sex?

On Hemingway's saying, Zelda Fitzgerald almost destroyed Scott through her insane envy of his talent by convincing him that he was sexually inadequate. Hemingway claims that he realized she was insane long before Fitzgerald was forced to accept the fact. As evidence, he cites the time that Zelda asked him: "Don't you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?" Perhaps the lost generation was not really lost after all, merely mislaid.

Tragic Grace. The gay and artless sketches (with a lifetime of craft behind each deceptively negligent line) have a heartbreaking quality when the reader recalls that these glittering trivia were cut and polished by a man soon to take his own life. So the reader searches for a clue to the tragic flaw in a nature that seemed all confidence and gallantry, and finds it in a pride so vast that it demanded others live according to Hemingway's own stern and complicated code (even when they could not know the rules), a pride so touchy that it could make the humdrum business of ordering a cup of coffee a mortal combat.

Hemingway had to win, even when others were unaware that anything was at stake. In lesser men, this is now called oneupmanship, and it made taxing for Hemingway the ordinary business of living. He aspired to the natural grace and integrity of the truly simple man, but often seems to have achieved something closer to the contrived spontaneity of the method actor. The exactions of pride were made tolerable by an equally vast joviality--a humor that could be gentle or sardonic, and served as mask, armor and weapon of his severe stoicism.

He knew this well enough himself. In one anecdote, he brilliantly re-creates a scene at the Dome cafe, where the doomed painter Pascin is drinking with two model-tarts or tart-models. "He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the '90s than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dome. They say the seeds of what we do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

Is this a man writing the obituary of another man or his own?

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