I am eating circles of french bread, lightly toasted with soft wedges of creamy baby brie and cucumbers sprinkled with black pepper. I also have a plum tomato, picked fresh and ripe from my own garden, sliced and salted. Writing this reminds me that I love descriptions of food in literature. For example, Ernest Hemingway's work is full of delicious descriptions of the rustic cuisine that was served in the French cafés where he liked to write and socialize in the 1920's, such as this:
"The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes à l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil ... When the pommes à l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a wide, heavy frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce."
This is where I can begin again, without ever mentioning the yearlong hiatus I've taken from this blog, but it's not too mysterious. I was busy finishing my student teaching and my Master's degree in Education. About a year ago this very month, my friend Claire McAlpine at Word by Word (http://clairemca.wordpress.com) had written a review of "The Paris Wife" by Paula McLain. When I finally had time to read during a brief vacation in June, I was so hungry for literature that I almost ate it. The books had its' flaws but it re-kindled my college passion for literature from 1920's Paris. I began reading Hemingway (and Fitzgerald) for the first time.
I love "A Moveable Feast" partly because it's set at that romantic time and also because I love memoir, and truth-telling in literature (although this statement brings up many questions and ironically, Hemingway may have been a mythomaniac in life.) In the book, he describes his daily activities as a writer, and how he rented a private room to write in, where he liked to treat himself to a drink of kirsch at the end of the day. After that, he felt "free then to walk anywhere in Paris". He writes character portraits of well-known people, some flattering, others brutal. About Sylvia Beach (owner of the famous American bookstore 'Shakespeare and Company') he wrote, "No one that I ever knew was nicer to me".
Without ever stating a desire to help beginning writers, or to leave a legacy, he does exactly that. He scatters clues and advice about the writing life throughout his vibrant prose. He writes about his trademark style, "If I started to write elaborately, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written."
I still have many questions about Hemingway, his life as a man and his legacy as a writer. As I begin blogging again, I also have many questions about my own life as a writer; how to be true to myself but also relevant. What is truly relevant at this time, in the midst of the divisive and ugly political discourse leading up to the election, not to mention the wider global problems of violence, war and economic failure? In "A Moveable Feast" Hemingway answered my question like this:
"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
For me today, this advice seems relevant and good and true.
