QUOTE OF THE WEEK:


“Paris kills my writing. I have been oppressed and belittled and silenced in Paris. As soon as I leave it, I feel free again, vivid, enthusiastic, fervent, creative .... I have been spiritually crucified in Paris.” (Nin)

“I could not believe, being a man of the American continent, that there were a place on earth where a man could be himself.” (Miller, Up and Down in China)

QUOTES of the WEEK


“You could dictate [the fishing trip to the Black Forest], but you could not dictate the Place Contrescarpe where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the dye ran over the paving where the autobus started and the old men and the women, always drunk on wine and bad marc; and the children with their noses running in the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at the Cafe des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived above.” (Hemingway, Snows of Kilimandjaro)

"Every place is the same [...]. The only thing that matters is who's there. New scenery is fine for half an hour, but after that you want your own kind to see." (Fitzgerald, "One Trip Abroad").

In connection with our reading pages 1-77 of Hemingway’s, A Moveable Feast we have a few questions that we feel would be interesting to discuss:

1. What would make literature “inaccrochable” (unable to be hung)? Would the standard be different in Paris (1920s) than in the United States (1920s)?

2. How did Gertrude Stein meet Sherwood Anderson?

3. The important role that mentors played in Hemingway’s life: Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

4. Who was Janet Flanner who gave Hemingway the first two Simeneons he ever read?

5. Why did Ms. Stein not like Joyce?

6. Are there still edible fish in the Seine?

7. Is there something about being a newspaper correspondent that keeps one from being able to write good fiction?

8. Why did Hadley call Hemingway “Tatie?”

9. We have read that Hadley received about $3,000 per year ($500 per month) from a trust fund. Additionally, they only paid $18 per month for their flat in Paris (two rooms on the fourth floor). Is it only fictional that they were ever poor and starving while living in Paris?

David & Susan Howard

QUOTES OF THE WEEK: Hemingway

“I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things”. (A moveable Feast, p.5)

“He had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about.” (Hemingway, Snows of Kilidmanjaro)

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:


“After all everybody, that is everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.” (Gertrud STEIN)

Bonjour tout le monde,

this is YOUR blog for the Continuing Studies course "American Writers in Paris".
This blog is restricted to students enrolled in the class.

Come and post your questions or comments on the authors, their lives in Paris, your own experience of expatriation or cultural difference, and chat with others in the class.


bienvenue,

cecile