Monday, January 7, 2008

On Hemingway, hunger.

I have always thought of Hemingway as a food writer, so today I pulled out my copy of A Moveable Feast to find the parts that made me hungry when I read them in high school. They abound. Eating runs through the book like a baseline of pleasure, each story tethered by the fundamental ritual of hunger and its satisfaction. And what hunger! The book reinforces the old stereotype that an empty stomach fuels genius. Feast is a memoir of Hemingway's time spent in Paris as a young, struggling, and sometimes starving writer:

"By any standards we were still very poor and I still made such small economies as saying that I had been asked out for lunch and then spending two hours walking in the Luxembourg gardens and coming back to describe the marvelous lunch to my wife. When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavyweight, missing a meal makes you very hungry. But it also sharpens all your perceptions, and I found that many of the people I wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of them were looking forward to having a drink"(101).

And what does Hemingway eat when his hunger finally gets the best of him? A beer and some potato salad, but he writes it like no other beer and potato salad I've ever read:

"The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes a 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. After the first heavy draft of been I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes a l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce"(73).

He does not shy away from the verb "to be," simply stating how things are, delivering their taste with the sparing use of adjectives like "wonderful" and "delicious." From Hemingway, these sound both effusive and special. Most importantly, he describes what it is like to eat after being very hungry, the effort of holding oneself back, of eating slowly to make it last. Taste and flavor are not, as many food writers would have it, constants. They are the most variable of variables, as much a product of a specific moment in time, a single eating experience, as they are of the ingredients used. This is why I remember spectacular meals at mediocre restaurants, and why a three-star meal can be spoiled by a sour dining companion.

I can't decide whether to eat lunch or skip it, and write one instead.

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