DUE JAN 29: The Lost Generation

Due Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Read these two excerpts from A Moveable Feast—Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about living in Paris in the 1920s. Answer the following questions with one paragraph each

1)    What did Stein mean when she told Hemingway he was part of a “lost generation”? What kind of effect do you think World War I would have had on the youth?

2)    How does Hemingway describe F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda? Does this description tell you anything about the culture of expatriate Americans living in Europe during the 1920s?

“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. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein's ford. Anyway he had not been serieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein's protest. The patron had said to him, ‘you are all a generation 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.'

'Really?' I said.

'You are,' she insisted. 'You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death . . .'

'Was the young mechanic drunk?' I asked.

'Of course not.'

'Have you ever seen me drunk?'

'No. But your friends are drunk.'

'I've been drunk,' I said. 'but I don't come here drunk.'

'Of course not. I didn't say that.'

'the boy's patron was probably drunk by eleven o'clock in the morning,' I said. 'That's why he makes such lovely phrases.'

'Don't argue with me, Hemingway,' Miss Stein said. 'It does no good at all. You're all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said.'

Later when I wrote my first novel I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage keeper with one from Ecclesiastes. But that night walking home I thought about the boy in the garage and if he had ever been hauled in one of those vehicles when they were converted to ambulances. I remembered how they used to burn out their brakes going down the mountain roads with a full load of wounded and braking in low and finally using the reverse, and how the last ones were driven over the mountainside empty, so they could be replaced by big fiats with a good h-shift and metal-to-metal brakes. 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?

Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he'd made of Waterloo, 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. But sitting there with the beer, watching the statue and remembering how many days Ney had fought, personally, with the rearguard on the retreat from Moscow that Napoleon had ridden away from in the coach with Caulaincourt, I thought of what a warm and affectionate friend Miss Stein had been and how beautifully she had spoken of Apollinaire and of his death on the day of the armistice in 1918 with the crowd shouting 'a bas guillaume' and Apollinaire, in his delirium, thinking they were crying against him, and I thought, I will do my best to serve her and see she gets justice for the good work she had done as long as I can, so help me God and Mike Ney. But the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels.

When I got home and into the courtyard and upstairs and saw my wife and my son and his cat, F. Puss, all of them happy and a fire in the fireplace, I said to my wife, 'you know, Gertrude is nice, anyway.'

'of course, tatie.'

'but she does talk a lot of rot sometimes.'

'I never hear her,' my wife said. 'I'm a wife. It's her friend that talks to me.'

* * *

“Scott Fitzgerald invited us to have lunch with his wife Zelda and his little daughter at the furnished flat they had rented at 14 Rue de Tilsitt. I cannot remember much about the flat except that it was gloomy and airless and that there was nothing in it that seemed to belong to them except Scott's first books bound in light blue leather with the titles in gold. Scott also showed us a large ledger with all of the stories he had published listed in it year after year with the prices he had received for them and also the amounts received for any motion picture sales, and the sales and royalties of his books. They were all noted as carefully as the log of a ship and Scott showed them to both of us with impersonal pride as though he were the curator of a museum. Scott was nervous and hospitable and he showed us his accounts of his earnings as though they had been the view. There was no view.

Zelda had a very bad hangover. They had been up on Montmartre the night before and had quarreled because Scott did not want to get drunk. He had decided, he told me, to work hard and not to drink and Zelda was treating him as though he were a kill-joy or a spoilsport. Those were the two words she used to him and there was recrimination and Zelda would say, 'I did not, I did no such thing. It's not true, Scott.' Later she would seem to recall something and would laugh happily.

On this day Zelda did not look her best. Her beautiful dark blonde hair had been ruined temporarily by a bad permanent she had got in Lyon, when the rain had made them abandon their car, and her eyes were tired and her face was too taut and drawn.

She was formally pleasant to Hadley [Hemingway’s wife] and me but a big part of her seemed not to be present but to still be on the party she had come home from that morning. She and Scott both seemed to feel that Scott and I had enjoyed a great and wonderful time on the trip up from Lyon and she was jealous about it.

'When you two can go off and have such simply wonderful times together, it only seems fair that I should have just a little fun with our good friends here in Paris,' she said to Scott.

Scott was being the perfect host and we ate a very bad lunch that the wine cheered a little but not much. The little girl was blonde, chubby-faced, well built, and very healthy-looking and spoke English with a strong cockney accent. Scott explained that she had an English nanny because he wanted her to speak like Lady Diana Manners when she grew up.

Zelda had hawk's eyes and a thin mouth and deep-south manners and accent. Watching her face you could see her mind leave the table and go to the night's party and return with her eyes blank as a cat's and then pleased, and the pleasure would show along the thin line of her lips and then be gone. Scott was being the good cheerful host and Zelda looked at him and she smiled happily with her eyes and her mouth too as he drank the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew Scott would not be able to write.

Zelda was jealous of Scott's work and as we got to know them, this fell into a regular pattern. Scott would resolve not to go on all-night drinking parties and to get some exercise each day and work regularly. He would start to work and as soon as he was working well Zelda would begin complaining about how bored she was and get him off on another drunken party. They would quarrel and then make up and he would sweat out the alcohol on long walks with me, and make up his mind that this time he would really work, and would start off well. Then it would start all over again.

Scott was very much in love with Zelda. And he was very jealous of her. He told me many times on our walks of how she had fallen in love with the French navy pilot. But she had never made him really jealous with another man since. This spring she was making him jealous with other women and on the Montmartre parties he was afraid to pass out and he was afraid to have her pass out. Becoming unconscious when they drank had always been their great defence. They went to sleep on drinking an amount of liquor or champagne that would have little effect on a person accustomed to drinking, and they would go to sleep like children. I have seen them become unconscious not as though they were drunk but as though they had been anaesthetized, and their friends, or sometimes a taxi-driver, would get them to bed, and when they woke they would be fresh and happy, not having taken enough alcohol to damage their bodies before it made them unconscious.

Now they had lost this natural defence. At this time Zelda could drink more than Scott could and Scott was afraid for her to pass out in the company they kept that spring and the places they went to. Scott did not like the places nor the people and he had to drink more than he could drink and be in any control of himself, to stand the people and the places, and then he began to have to drink to keep awake after hew ould usually have passed out. Finally he had few intervals of work at all.

He was always trying to work. Each day he would try and fail. He laid the failure to Paris, the town best organized for a. writer to write in that there is. And he thought always that there would be some place where he and Zelda could have a good life together again. He thought of the Riviera, as it was then before it had all been built up, with the lovely stretches of blue sea and the sand beaches and the stretches of pinewoods and the mountains of the esterel going out into the sea. He remembered it as it was when he and Zelda had first found it before people went there for the summer.

Scott told me about the Riviera and how my wife and I must come there' the next summer and how we would go there and how he would find a place for us that was not expensive and we would both work hard every day and swim and lie on the beach and be brown and only have a single aperitif before lunch and one before dinner. Zelda would be happy there, he said. She loved to swim and was a beautiful diver and she was happy with that life and would want him to work and everything would be disciplined. He and Zelda and their daughter were going to go there that summer. I was trying to get him to write his stories as well as he could and not trick them to conform to any formula, as he had explained that he did.

'You've written a fine novel now,' I told him. 'and you mustn't write slop.'

'The novel isn't selling,' he said. 'i must write stories and they have to be stories that will sell.'

'Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.'

'I'm going to,' he said.

 

But the way things were going, he was lucky to get any work done at all. Zelda did not encourage the people who were chasing her and she had nothing to do with them, she said. But it amused her and it made Scott jealous and he had to go with her to the places. It destroyed his work, and she was more jealous of his work than anything. All that late spring and early summer Scott fought to work but he could only work in snatches. When I saw him he was always cheerful, sometimes desperately cheerful, and he made good jokes and was a good companion. 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. He would make fun of himself then, and as long as he could do that I thought that he was safe.”