Ernest Hemingway and the highs and lows of Paris

Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris is, in most regards, a slight film. It's fun, but it's sentimental, schlocky and as subtle as H-bombs. Even so there are a few brilliant flashes. There's a hilarious scene where the painter Dalí goes on and on about rhinoceroses. There's a pitch-perfect portrayal of Hemingway, ostentatiously glugging wine, challenging people to box and roaring on about "true sentences". There's also no arguing with the central premise of the movie: that almost any writer would love to be transported to Paris in the 1920s.

This appeal is summed up by Michael Reynolds in The Paris Years (the second book of his Hemingway biography), when he describes the young Hemingway, fresh off the boat in winter 1921, sitting at out at the Dome cafe with his wife Hadley:

"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 five-minute walk down Boulevard Raspail, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were planning their Christmas meal. 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. Eventually Eliot would call it The Waste Land. 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. None of these literary giants knew that Ernest Hemingway was in town, but before the year was out they would know him well. A conjunction of literary influences was about to take place which would forever change the topography of American literature."

And that was before Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald breezed into town. Before John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin. Before Ford Madox Ford came along with the transatlantic review and all the opportunities that offered. 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. Indeed, in A Moveable Feast he displays mixed feelings about the many characters he encountered during that time (to put it mildly).

Hemingway enjoyed plenty of other advantages. "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. Or, to put it more accurately, his wife did. 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. 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. The drapes and satins of the Moulin Rouge must have seemed pleasingly far away from the net curtains of Oak Park Illinois. Luckiest of all, Hadley's income eventually allowed Hemingway to stop working as a journalist and concentrate solely on his craft.

That craft, honed by hard work, by the vivid first-person reports he wrote for the Toronto Star (which would also provide him many of his subjects) and by the advice of mentors like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound was coming on strong. Within three years of Hadley losing a suitcase containing all his writings to date, he had written two books that would change English literature forever: In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises. He had become the figurehead of the Lost Generation.

Hemingway, in short, had much to celebrate and part of the appeal of A Moveable Feast is its joyful depiction of a writer coming into the full knowledge of his powers. But it's important not to overstate the happiness of that time. Before he was even 20, Hemingway had witnessed a lifetime of suffering and had himself had a near-death experience and serious injury. He had night terrors. He had friends who had died and gone mad. He knew horror. He was seeing more of it all the time too. He saw firsthand the bloody catastrophe in Smyrna. He saw the failures of diplomacy at Lausanne. He was one of the first English-language journalists to interview Mussolini – and realise what a dangerous man he might be. He saw growing economic problems in Germany – and even France. Small wonder that In Our Time should be such a troubled and troubling book. As Reading group contributor Vongreenback said, you only have to look at the vignettes between each longer story (which are, incidentally, some of the best flash fiction ever produced, decades before the form became fashionable) to see: "the horror, indignity and random, violent banality of war and suffering".

Gertrude Stein called Hemingway and people like him – "all of you young people who served in the war" a "lost generation" with good reason. It might seem like it would be fun to visit 1920s Paris – but many who were actually there were going through hell. It was that, as much as the easy living, that helped create the writer Ernest Hemingway.

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