The question of whether Hemingway was a modernist or not is rather too academic unless its terms and tenets can be fed back into an understanding of the various modernisms we have at our disposal— be they high or low, canonical, or marginal—and the ways in which they fit together—or fail to. In this connection, A Moveable Feast is a very useful text—part cultural history, part autobiography, part retrospective travelscape. It traverses these generic definitions, driven on by a cultural and psychological symptomology of its own. Written (or compiled) at the end of the author's life, the Hemingway who remembers his Paris days attributes the experiences to his former self, a young writer who, though he frequented Pound, Ford, Joyce, and Stein, was forging an aesthetic vision to supersede the grand experiments of the high modernists even as they were coming to fruition around him. Without the constant of Hemingway's symptomatic obsessions to provide a principle of continuity, A Moveable Feast might read like mere nostalgia or score-settling. The tension in the text derives from the fact that Hemingway is still grappling with the issues which preoccupied him back in the twenties. His doubts and vulnerabilities have been exacerbated by the intervening experiences to such an extent that by the time the book was published its author was two years away from death by suicide.

Hemingway's desire to recapture the felicities of his life with Hadley and the excitement of his creative labors amongst the expatriot artists of Paris somehow fixes on the consumption of food and drink and the enjoyment thereof as its objective correlate. The enjoyment of eating and drinking looms so large in the text that it would be fair to suggest that it is this gastronomical pleasure which allows the ill and depressed Hemingway of the late 1950s to connect with the hearty young Hemingway, seizing life and shaking it for experience in the early 1920s. So why should Hemingway's reminiscent testimony to his part in this evolution depend so heavily on the food and drink available in Paris at the time, its affordability, its variety, and the wholesome pleasures it offered?