Hemingway

"em seu derradeiro dia
Hemingway acenou para
alguns garotos indo para a escola,
eles acenaram de volta, e ele nunca tocou o suco de laranja
à sua frente;
então ele enfiou aquela arma em sua boca como um
canudinho
e apertou o gatilho
e um dos poucos imortais da América
era sangue e miolos pelas paredes e pelo
forro da sala"

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994). As pessoas parecem flores finalmente. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2015, p. 238

Foto: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ezra Pound

"Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble. He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T. S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet. 

Ezra founded something called Bel Esprit with Miss Natalie Barney who was a rich American woman and a patroness of the arts. [...].

The idea of Bel Esprit was that we would all contribute a part of whatever we earned to provide a fund to get Mr. Eliot out of the bank so he would have money to write poetry. This seemed like a good idea to me and after we had got Mr. Eliot out of the bank Ezra figured we would go right straight along and fix up everybody."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984, p. 76 (It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris).

Foto: Ezra Pound (1885-1972), poeta americano, em 1923, em seu estúdio em Paris

In Paris

"But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong, nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984, p. 45 (It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris).

Spring in Paris

"When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984, p. 38 (It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris).

Hungry

"You get very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg Gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg Museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984, p. 50 (It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris).

Imagem: "Gardanne" (1886), de Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), pintor francês

Shakespeare and Company

"In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l'Ódeon. [...]

I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984, p. 31 (It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris).

Pascin

"He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984, p. 73 (It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris).

Aqui Hemingway se refere ao pintor búlgaro Jules Pascin (1885-1930), que se matou no dia 2 de julho de 1930, cortando os pulsos e se enforcando em seu atelier, em Montmartre.

Imagem: "Retrato de William Howard" (1909), de Jules Pascin

In Paris

"When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself." (p.38)

"The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers. [...] We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." (p. 39-40)

"But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong, nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight." (p. 45)

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984 [It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris]. 

A very good story

"I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen 'portugaises' and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint mettalic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984, p. 13

Spring in Paris

"With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was though a young person had died for no reason.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). A Moveable Feast. London: Granada, 1984, p. 37