Hemingway and Our Collective Nostalgia
Key West, March 2023
A member of the “Lost Generation” of expatriate writers and artists inhabiting Paris during the 1920s, American author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was encouraged by a member of his cohorts to visit Key West. He made his way to the island by way of Cuba and soon made it his principal residence, where he was to remain through the 1930s. Visiting the Hemingway Home in Key West now, filled with relics from his many travels across Europe, Africa and the United States, I can affirm that Hemingway was a vagabond in every sense of the word.
While he moved often, Hemingway would regularly visit New York to meet with his publishers at Charles Scribner's & Sons — one of America's most prestigious publishing houses. During one of his visits, New Yorker columnist Lilian Ross profiled Hemingway in her 1950 piece “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? The Moods of Ernest Hemingway.” Reading this article felt oddly nostalgic - perhaps because it is written in a publication that many of us still read today, but 70 years ago. It feels nostalgic, almost mystic even, to read this still modern publication featuring one of the most famous writers of all time, seven decades ago. Why does each word feel even weightier?
The reason, I realized, is that he is no longer living. He can no longer give us a new idea, quote, or body of work. His whole existence is preserved in what has already been. The only things we have left of him are his books, and magazine articles such as this one. Immortalized through literature. That we can never get additional assessments, or new interpretations. This is simply what is, and what shall be.
Is it our sense of nostalgia that keeps us eyeing the past? Whether it be another time period in our lives, or yearning for another era we never lived in ourselves. Some of the most popular photographs or instagram reels of our time are of of cities as they were decades ago - New York in the 1950s or Paris in the 1920s. The idea that where we live now, and the memories and experiences we create here, were once walked in and lived through by many predecessors. The sense of rootedness and continuation. That we are continuing along a long line of many that have come before.
Which is why many of us pick up the novels of writers like Hemingway. To read his experiences and find our own shared experiences within. Experiences that transcend geographies because the overwhelming majority of human experiences are shared, regardless of locality. The memories of being young and needing to get by with little - and the sense of camaraderie, contentedness with “the little things” and zest for life that resulted from making early discoveries and doing it with meager resources. Hemingway often recalled his time in Paris in his twenties, where he was down and out as a struggling writer who had not yet reached acclaim. As he wrote in A Moveable Feast, Paris Est Une Fête, “tel était le Paris de notre jeuneusse, au temps où nous étions très pauvre mais très heureux” - “such was the Paris of our youth - a time when we were very poor, but very happy.”
Like Hemingway, many still today recount with great fondness the beginnings of various stages of their lives. We wear our early struggles as badges of honor, markers of grit. But I don’t think this is the main reason we recall these times. Rather, it is a harking to a past where we made our initial strides into new stages and discovered unfamiliar stimuli around us. That a new discovery was excitement enough in and of itself, which is the reason that these early stages of any path hold so dear to us. The feeling, the experience, the location. The feeling of novelty was itself the enjoyment, and the more years we add under our belts, the sense of novelty may decrease while financial, emotional and physical comfort increases.
But this wonderment at the world, a sense of curiosity and yearning for discovery - is the true thing that keeps us going. And when we take a step back and analyze our own thought patterns, many of us will find that this is the great driver of most of our waves of nostalgia. Of our reaches toward literature of the past, and to authors like Hemingway. As he said in the New Yorker article mentioned earlier, “I love to go back to Paris. [I] want to go to cafés where I know no one but one waiter and his replacement, see all the new pictures and the old ones… find good, cheap restaurants where you can keep your own napkin. Walk over all the town and see where we made our mistakes and where we had our few bright ideas.”
See where we made our mistakes and where we had our few bright ideas. In other words, where we dared to tenter le coup, give it a try. The nostalgia - to a cherished past, but even more so, to a cherished self. A self that, through determined efforts at new things - in a world that was not yet familiar - found joy. Hemingway experienced this in Paris and often formed his narrative around this city, but we all have a Paris. A place where we made our mistakes and where we had our few bright ideas. Where we started to gain our bearings in the world, where we were confronted with multiple types of people who challenged ourselves in multiple ways. A place where we began with very little, but we began nonetheless. And it was this beginning that propelled the rest of what was to come. Mais justement, the beginning was the goal, in and of itself.
