He also suffered – as did so many in his family – from depression. He was becoming increasingly convinced ( rightly as it turned out) that the FBI were trailing him. He'd been through three divorces and his children – especially his youngest son, Gigi – were all troubled. Elsewhere, his literary friends (and enemies) were dropping like flies. Add to that his wounds from the first world war, insomnia, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, and a dangerously increased alcohol intake to counter all the pain, and you have a sick man. Then he was caught in a bush fire for good measure. Two successive plane crashes in 1954 gave him severe concussion, a broken skull, cracked discs, burns, kidney and liver ruptures and a dislocated shoulder. His once-powerful body, already softened by years of good living and hard drinking, took a pummelling in the years after the war. (Most writers would settle for a fallow period that included The Old Man And The Sea and A Moveable Feast.) Physically and mentally, however, there was no question that he was struggling. Plenty of people said his writing had long since gone into decline, although that's a debate we could profitably have here. Papa: the tall, handsome, heavyweight alpha male.īut by 1956 all that was heading into memory, if it had ever really existed. His life outside writing was just as celebrated: the bull fight aficionado, the boxer, the big game hunter, the fisherman, the friend of Spanish Republicans, the man who liberated Paris. He'd sold hundreds of thousands of books. He had done it all by 1956, when he was spurred into reminiscence following the rediscovery of some old Paris notebooks which had lain for many years in a trunk in the basement of the Ritz hotel.

It speaks as loudly of Hemingway at the end of his career as it does of the beginning.Īnd that career was remarkable. But it's pretty much the last word from someone on the way out. But as Mogger64 noted in his original nomination, it's significant that A Moveable Feast was 'written at the end of his life'. I n looking at In Our Time and A Moveable Feast, we've mainly focused on Hemingway as a young man: fit, young and heading for the stratosphere.

A movable feast book