Hemingway

I have been thinking a lot about the act of writing in a notebook, and that it's something I have been doing all my life at on time or another, without realising it. I have usually only kept a diary when emotions have been rife; when I've been living life at the extremes- day to day mundanities have not been chronicled. My diary therefore consists of a string of highly charged, passionate entries connected inately to the ups and downs of my emotions. As Nicole Ward Jouve says on what her diaries have been for her in 'On Keeping a Diary', that they are 'the beginning of a voice of my own...I could hang onto a sense of self. In the choices one makes to write this or that in one's diary, year after year, out of the flow, the shape of who one is appears.'

I am really interested in looking into what other authors' notebooks contain, and my research arrived me at Ernest Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast'. This is a memoir of Hemingway's time spent as a struggling young writer in post-war Paris, when he lived there as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s. In 1956 Hemingway discovered an old trunk full of the notebooks he had filled during his time spent in Paris, so he had them transcribed, and he worked on this manuscript during his later years, rewriting key passages and had produced a final draft at the time of his death in 1961. 'A Moveable Feast' was published posthumously by Scribers in 1964.
It contains Hemingway's personal accounts, observations and stories of his experience of Paris. So detailed is his description that many of the cafes, bars, hotels and apartments can still be found in the modern day city. On the Moleskin notebook website it says Hemingway spent much of his time as a struggling young writer sitting in Parisian cafes watching the world go by and recording it in his Moleskin notebooks. In the memoir he reflects on this simple act- ordering a cafe au lait, pulling out his notebook and starting to write; 'that comfortable feeling that even whilst in the the midst of a bustling cafe one can immerse oneself into writing.'
The writing in "A Moveable Feast' is considered by some critics to be his finest ever produced- perhaps because it is taken direct from his very own notebooks, themselves rich with first hand imagery and thought.
Today I just bought a copy of 'A Moveable Feast' and on a quick flick through it has got me itching to get out my pen and write... so off I go to Telford to sit in Costa coffee house and do some people-watching. Hey, it's not Paris and it's not the 1920s, but it's all I have so it'll have to suffice!