The Self-Consciousness of the Modern Mind
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS NARRATIVE*
BY ALFRED KAZIN
B EFORE he died, Ernest Hemingway
left a memoir of Paris in the 1920's,
A Moveable Feast, that is just now
published. Anyone who grew up with Hemingway's writing, as I did, and who has always valued his early short stories in particular for the breathtaking clarity and
beauty with which he could develop his effects in this miniature and subtle form, cannot help reading Hemingway's memoir with
amazement. For line by line and stroke by
stroke, in the color of the prose and the
shaping of the episodes, Hemingway's autobiography is as beautiful in composition as
Hemingway's best stories, it is in subject
and tone indistinguishable from much of
Hemingway's fiction, and it is full of dialogue
as maliciously clever as Hemingway's fiction.
He begins here, as his stories so often do,
with the weather, the color of the weather,
the tone and weight of the weather in Paris.
There was the bad weather that would come
in one day when the fall was over-"We
would have to shut the windows in the night
against the rain and the cold wind would
strip the leaves from the trees in the Place
Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the
rain and the wind drove the rain against the
ALFRED KAZIN, born in Brooklyn in 1915,
critic, editor, and author, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellow, distinguished Professor of English
at the State University of New York (Long Island
Center), has demonstrated the power of autobiography in his own sketches of Brooklyn boyhood
and youth, A Walker in the City (1951). This present essay is his Hopwood Lecture at The University of Michigan, May 1964, delivered at the annual Hopwood Awards, just before some $17,000
in prizes was distributed to winning writers of essays, novels, stories, plays, and poems.
* Copyright 1964 by the Regents of the University of Michigan.
big green autobus at the terminal and the
Cafe des Amateurs was crowded and the
windows misted over from the heat and the
smoke inside." Anyone who knows his Hemingway will recognize in these artful repetitions, these simple flat words shaped like the
design in a painting by Braque and gray as a
Paris street by Utrillo, Hemingway's most
familiar touch. And most astonishing, in
what is after all presented as a memoir, there
are conversations with Gertrude Stein, Ford
Madox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, that are as
witty and destructive as those dialogues in
Men Without Women or The Sun Also Rises
that Hemingway used, in exactly the same
way, to get the better of the other speaker
in a dialogue with the hero who in Hemingway's fiction is called Nick Adams or Jake
Barnes or Frederic Henry. Ford Madox
Ford comes on the young Hemingway
quietly sitting in a cafe, sagely observing life
in Paris, but Ford is described as "breathing
heavily through a heavy, stained mustache
and holding himself as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead."
Ford is shown as a heavy, wheezing, distrustful, and confused presence; he scolds
waiters for his own mistakes and, as if he
were a fat actor playing Colonel Blimp and
not the almost over-subtle writer that Ford
Madox Ford actually was, he pronounces
that "a gentleman will always cut a cad."
Hemingway plays it cool. "I took a quick
drink of brandy. 'Would he cut a bounder?'
I asked. 'It would be impossible for a gentleman to know a bounder.' 'Then you can only
cut someone you have known on terms of
equality?' I pursued. 'Naturally.' 'How would
one ever meet a cad?' 'You might not know
it, or the fellow could have become a cad.'
'What is a cad?' I asked. 'Isn't he someone
that one has to thrash within an inch of his
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