Hemingway The Paris Years by Michael Reynolds

Hemingway in Paris is more than a companion to Shakespeare and Company and A Moveable Feast, it is almost the essential Hemingway book.  Reynold's amazed me with the details and the understanding that cover these years of writing that could be called the apprenticeship.  It details the difficulty of the writer in getting his voice and getting it published.

It is insightful in diagnosing writing and also the writer.  Hemingway is a mix of a good-time companion and a vicious antagonist.  He goes through friends with abandon and seldom recognizes the aid that the Lost Generation Parisians gave him.  Or rather, he used their help, and then because of his own strained sense of who he was, he turned on them.  He did not end friendships easily, he burnt them.

His wife was tremendously supportive, but the new life, like the new book will demand a new wife - lover.  It was appalling to see how Hemingway's psychosis could turn him to a brute.  It is hard to like him, but at the same time it was apparent that there was a mental condition that he could not control.  Like a contemporary - Edith Piaf - he was self destructive, but it was the people around him that would be harmed.  Like Edith, he rose from the ashes, but neither of them could really grasp what was true and worth thanking as they gave themselves to their art.

The love of war, bullfights, boxing, and drinking are all here.  As is his writing and rewriting, the help of Fitztgerald on two primary works, and the bitterness he had towards Ford Madox Ford for reasons no one could understand.

He was a prime player in the Lost Generation - Pound, Stein, Joyce, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, MacLeish, Eliot and all the characters of the Paris scene move through the chapters.  They appear and disappear as they have been used up.

Insights into writing are liberally sprinkled in the text and a person wanting to write will do well to see what they are and how they were applied to Hemingway's work.   The text displays his short stories and then transitions to his novels which is the turning point in his career.  But through events that should have been happy, there is the demon that stalks his mind and mood and threatens to eventually overtaken Ernest - something that will take decades, but it will happen.