Before he died in 1975, Levi gave instructions that he be buried in the cemetery of Aliano. And there he rests, in the dust among the pines.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
THERE ARE TWO Moveable Feasts— the first one published in 1964, heavily edited and cobbled together by his widow, and fourth wife, Mary; the second, edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway, published in 2009, is truer to Ernest Hemingway's surviving manuscript (some pages are reproduced) and subtitled "The Restored Edition." It was the last book that Hemingway wrote; he committed suicide not long after finishing it. Both editions are worth reading. The first seems better structured and more organized—though this organization was imposed. The restored edition is longer, more ruminative, but kinder to various of the characters—Scott Fitzgerald especially, but also Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, who comes off badly in the 1964 edition.
The subject is Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway knew the city well—he arrived with wife Hadley late in 1921 and lived there off and on until 1928, when he left to take up residence in Key West with his new wife, Pauline. The themes of this memoir of Paris are being hard-up and happy, the love that Hemingway has for Hadley and his son, and his passion for writing. Being poor, hungry much of the time, Hemingway constantly reverts to the subject of food—flavors, aromas, simple food, good wine; the pleasures of eating and drinking. It is a book about physical sensation, and the intensity of such physicality in Paris.
"Then there was the bad weather," the book begins. "It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe."
Streets are mentioned so often they become familiar, as do parks and churches and people's apartments. The book is filled with restaurants, bistros, and bars, and their specialties in food and drink. The result is that, reading A Moveable Feast, especially the fuller version, we are able to make a map of Paris in our imagination and to follow the comings and goings of Hemingway and the literary lions who stalk its pages—James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others. Its fault and its virtue is that it is dated: Paris is no longer as Hemingway describes it, but this is a vivid portrait of the city as it looked and smelled and tasted in the twenties.
At one point, Hemingway, a close observer of the life of the city, takes on travel writers:
Travel writers wrote about the men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing. Most of the fishermen were men who had small pensions, which they did not know then would become worthless with inflation, or keen fishermen who fished on their days or half-days off from work ... I followed it closely and it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a few
fritures
home to their families.
With the fishermen and the lie on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great plain trees on the stone banks of the river, the elms and sometimes the poplars, I knew that I could never be lonely along the river.
The End of the Game by Peter Beard
ALMOST FIFTY YEARS ago, Peter Beard went to Africa and found himself in a violated Eden. Africa possessed him as it does anyone who has wondered who we once were, as humans at our most heroic, thriving as hunters. The Africa he saw was the Africa that transformed me a few years later—and transformed many others. "Before the Congo I was a mere animal," Joseph Conrad wrote. Beard's landmark account of his awakening, The End of the Game (1965), with its unforgettable images, gives fresh meaning to the word "prescience," and it remains one of the classics of unambiguous warning about humans and animals occupying the same dramatic space: "The tragic paradox of the white man's encroachment. The deeper he went into Africa, the faster life flowed out of it, off the plains, and out of the bush and into the cities."
East Africa is not a pretty place in the usual sense of that twinkling word. The elemental and powerful landscape, ranging around the Rift Valley, is one of the earth's monuments to vulcanism, showing as great plains, steep escarpments, and deep lakes. The Africa Beard saw, even then, in the almost undetectable early stages of corruption, was teeming with animals, thinly populated, hardly urbanized, and self-sufficient. Years later, the pressures of human population on animal life and the land itself became apparent in an Africa faltering and fragile, as though after the Fall. Beard's improvisational safari to the edge of Somalia in 1960 was a piece of unrepeatable history. He understood very early that the "harmonies and balances" in East Africa had been deranged, and this dramatic crease in the greenest continent was on the wane.
Mingling personal history with African history, Beard vividly evoked the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. "A railroad through the Pleistocene," Teddy Roosevelt called it in his African Game Trails, playing up the primitive. Roosevelt, a sort of evil twin to the biblical Noah, hunted down and killed two (and sometimes as many as eighteen) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of southern Sudan (total bag, 512 creatures). He wrote, "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number."
"Infinite" is the kind of hyperbole that affects many deluded travelers in Africa. The powerful message of The End of the Game was that the animals were finite, that urbanization was a creeping blight, that a free-for-all was imminent. Most of what Beard predicted came to pass, but even he could not have imagined what an abomination the cities of East Africa became—sprawling, dense with slums, so crime-ridden as to be almost uninhabitable.
The End of the Game is less a wildlife book than a book about human delusion, as important now as it was when it first appeared. Rare among visitors to Africa, Beard went simply to learn and grow. Because he was essentially an observer, patient and keen-sighted, not a ranter, with no agenda, he was able to see a process at work that many had missed, in the convergence of people and animals. One of his book's great virtues, and its lasting value, is that it takes no notice of politics. It is single-mindedly concerned with the living and the dead, predators and prey. Beard was true to what he saw—and the truth of it has made it prophetic.
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
IN 1992, AS he tells us on the first page of his book, W. G. Sebald, a German teacher-writer living in England, decided to strap on his rucksack and circumambulate the flat, featureless, not very large county of Suffolk. The result was The Rings of Saturn, a ruminative work full of free association and arcane lore, with the subtext "Not a lot of people know this!" Sebald claims that the book was "prose fiction" (Chatwin made the same claim about his Songlines) and inspired by Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, but though this is self-serving, the stitched-together anecdotes do have a point, perhaps unintentional, but forceful nevertheless.