AUTHOR: linda TITLE: A Moveable Feast DATE: 4:21:00 PM ----- BODY:

A reader's rash and heavy pen marks within Hemingway's famous memoir of his time living among the ex patriots as a young man in Paris in the 20's, are themselves as true and as sustaining as the very feast he found.

Stein's Paris address is now a point of historical interest and "still there!"; the girl in the cafe who sat by herself at a table near the window is "a writer's visitor;" Stein "confuses homosexuality with pedophilia;" "things become sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry" with a different kind of hunger; the casual dropping of names like Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Pound; the reading of a boxer's eyes as those of an unsuccessful rapist; the mot juste of a most trusted critic, and the "Rooshians" who made people come alive at times like almost no one else did;" the heavily underlined generation perdue (that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be); the allusions to his second wife who symbolizes the end of an innocent era, marked in The End of an Avocation with "racing never came between us, only people could do that."

Written a year before he committed suicide in 1961, these memories were as compelling 40 years later as the memoir's filling sense of food and drink and writing, and its tragic undertones of madness-- illustrating the point that happiness often occurs in hindsight.

"After writing a story, I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had just made love."

--------