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Dilara Gök

Prof. Tibor Frank

Relations Between the U.S. and Europe

December 29, 2021

American Geniuses in Paris

The Lost Generation

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the

rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” (Hemingway)

1. Introduction

War and literature… Although there are many things that bring these two together in

history, this time it is a subject with a little more depth: The Lost Generation. A generation

who felt the sociological ruins of the First World War in America, the traumas it created, the

obscurity of being in a state of war, and a group of literary figures who reached the peak of

their careers while living in exile in Paris in the 1920s. The term "Lost Generation" refers to

the generation of people who reached adulthood during or just after the First World War.

When psychologists used the term “lost" they were referring to the "disoriented, wandering,

directionless" states that plagued many of the survivors of one of the most terrible wars in

modern history. In a deeper sense, the lost generation was "lost" because they saw their

parents' conservative moral and social values as irrelevant in a post-war world. In the United

States, President Warren G. Harding's policy of "return to normalcy", which was a call for a

return to the pre-World War I lifestyle, left members of the lost generation feeling spiritually

alienated from facing what they hopelessly believed would be the provincials. materialistic

and emotionally sterile lives. After witnessing what they saw as meaningless death on such a

large scale during the war, many members of the generation rejected more traditional ideas of

proper behavior, morality, and gender roles. They were considered "lost" because of their
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tendency to act aimlessly, even recklessly, often focusing on the hedonistic accumulation of

personal wealth.

In literature, the term also refers to a group of well-known American writers and poets

such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S Eliot. Their works

often detail the inner struggles of the "Lost Generation". The term is believed to come from

an actual verbal exchange witnessed by the novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, in which a

French garage owner sarcastically told his young employee, "You are all a génération

perdue1." Stein repeated this phrase to his colleague and student Ernest Hemingway, who

popularized the term when he used it as an epigraph in his 1926 classic novel The Sun Also

Rises.

In an interview for The Hemingway Project, Kirk Curnutt, author of several books about

Lost Generation writers, suggested that they express mythological versions of their own lives.

(Hemingway Project Interviews)

Throughout the novels The Sun also Rises, and The Great Gatsby, Hemingway and

Fitzgerald highlight the vulgar, self-indulgent lifestyles of the Lost Generation characters. In

both the plots of The Great Gatsby and The Jazz Age, Fitzgerald shows an endless stream of

posh parties hosted by the main characters. With their values utterly destroyed by war, the

expatriate circle of American friends in Hemingway's The Sun also Rises and A Moveable

Feast live shallow, hedonistic lifestyles that wander the world aimlessly while drinking and

having fun.

Members of the Lost Generation saw the idea of the "American Dream" as a huge hoax.

This becomes an important theme in The Great Gatsby, as the story's narrator, Nick

Carraway, realizes that Gatsby's great fortune has been paid off in great misery. According to

Fitzgerald, the traditional vision of the American Dream, where hard work leads to success,

1
A lost generation in French
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was corrupt. For the Lost Generation, "living the dream" was no longer just about building a

self-sufficient life but being surprisingly rich in any way necessary.

The Lost Generation, unable or unwilling to face the horrors of war, created incredibly

unrealistic hopes for the future. This is best expressed in the final lines of The Great Gatsby,

where the narrator Nick reveals his idealized vision of Daisy that prevents him from seeing

her as she really is.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes

before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster,

stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back cease- lessly into the past. "

(Fitzgerald, 138)

The "green light" is Fitzgerald's metaphor for perfect futures that we continue to believe

in even as we move away. In other words, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the

Lost Generation continued to believe that our dreams of "one fine day" would come true.

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s is one

of his most beloved works. It is filled with delicate memories of his first wife Hadley and

their son Jack; devoted portraits of literary geniuses such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude

Stein; and discerning memories of his own experiences with his works of art. A Moveable

Feast outstandingly suggests the extravagant life of Paris after World War I and the youthful

spirit, the unrestrained creativity that Hemingway embodied. In the preface of A Moveable

Feast, as Hemingway notes that

“… this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a

book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” (Hemingway)
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For the sake of this research paper, this memoir/fiction novel is regarded as a real-life

event of Hemingway. What is more, it undoubtedly throws some light on how he became one

of the greatest American writers and the glamours years of Paris.

Moreover, Geniuses Together is a collection of the Lost Generation’s stories, mining

diaries, memoirs, and letters. Humphrey Carpenter, the noted biographer of remarkable

authors such as J.R.R Tolkien, W.H Auden, Ezra Pound, plunges the audience into the midst

of this slightly mad community of hopefuls. He evokes a whole world, a world that that

changed the course of American literature. This book, to quote Carpenter himself, “is chiefly

a collage of Left-Bank expatriate life of as it was experienced by the Hemingway generation

– ‘The Lost Generation’, as Gertrude Stein named it in a famous remark to Hemingway”.

Humphrey Carpenter was a well-known biographer and children’s writer. He wrote

biographies of J.R.R Tolkien, W.H Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ezra Pound and many more.

This paper aims to find the influence of Paris on American writers post-WWI era, known

as “The Lost Generation” by analyzing and finding evidence in Ernest Hemingway’s memoir

A Moveable Feast and Geniuses Together by Humphrey Carpenter. There is no doubt that the

Americans writers who left their country and moved to Paris, and found themselves with

other intellectuals having the same purpose contributed to the American literature and art.

2. The Lost Generation in Paris

Before Hemingway settled in Paris with his wife and his son in 1921, he had volunteered

as an ambulance driver on the Italian front but has been seriously wounded. The penniless

writer became part of the American expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald,

and Ezra Pound. With the appearance of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway became not

only the voice of the lost generation but also the foremost writer of his time. When he moved

to Cuba and travelled most of his time for his profession as a journalist to Spain, Italy, Africa,

and Turkey, he published A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell
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Tolls and his most well liked work The Old Man and The Sea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize

in 1953. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in literature “for his powerful, style-formatting

mastery of the art of narration.

Paris was a very well-chosen city for a person who wanted to be a writer; it meant good

food, legal alcohol, a flourishing cultural life, and cheap living conditions for Americans.

Hemingway was only in her mid-20s when he was walking in and out of Gertrude Stein's

house, buying a book from the oldest bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare and Company

run by Sylvia Beach, chatting with important names in the literary world such as James Joyce

and Ezra pound. Trying to learn to write in Paris, Hemingway would one day become a

world-famous man of letters with his writing style inspired by American literature, or rather

writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker. He was working for

short, straight texts, clear and understandable style, sensitive dialogues; these were the basic

rules of the author.

Hemingway, created the book A Moveable Feast from the notes he kept in his youth, was

a seriously ill, depressed, devastated man with the traces left by the electroshock and alcohol

while writing the book. When he committed suicide in 1961, the manuscript of the book was

not yet finished. The book, which was published three years after his death, was edited by the

author's fourth wife, Mary, the order of some parts was changed, many parts were left

incomplete and completed with a preface composed of different articles. Moreover,

Hemingway mentions many subjects and life conditions in the memoir: his wife Hadley, the

first cold winter rain in Paris, the unhygienic environment of the hotel they stayed in, the

house they lived in later, their visit to Gertrude Stein, horse races, writing, cafes, restaurants,

and the lost generation.

In the second chapter Miss Stein Instructs, we clearly see his challenges as a writer, but

the only thing was helping him was the city of Paris:
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“… when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going…I would stand

and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always

written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true

sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally, I would write one

true sentence, and then go on from there.” (Hemingway, 12)

Furthermore, he admits that he was learning a lot from the artistry side of Paris while

wandering around Musée de Luxembourg, Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. There is no doubt

that he had the inspiration of writing simple and minimalists from the French paintings that

he was exposed to.

“... I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and

the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in

the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of

Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the

stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.” (Hemingway, 13)

As much as the influence of the city itself on those preeminent artist and writers of the

generation, these expatriates and their a kind of cooperation gave the strength intellectually.

Undeniably, Gertrude Stein, American herself, lived in Europe her whole life, was a huge

influence on those future successful intellectuals of American culture. Stein, a poet, writer,

and a mentor, got an apartment on the Left Bank of Paris with her brother. This apartment, at

27 rue de Fleurus, soon became a gathering spot for many young artists including Ezra

Pound, Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. (Carpenter, 23)

In A Moveable Feast, when Ms. Stein saw Hemingway’s stories in her studio, she liked

them except one called “Up in Michigan”. She gives him a somewhat harsh criticism saying

that:
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“It’s good she said, “That’s not the question at all but it is inaccroachable2. That

means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he

has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either.”

(Hemingway, 15)

Additionally, Hemingway admits that it was a habit of stopping in at 27 rue de

Fleurus for the conversation with Stein. (Hemingway, 25)

Sylvia Beach, an important person and element for the lost generation, opened a shop in

Paris that was a half bookstore and half lending library. Shakespeare and Company became a

frequent destination for Parisian book lovers and a meeting place for writers from 1919 until

1941. It attracted the great expat of the time, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound. Also,

among the regulars of the book shop were prominent female voices and artists of the period

such as Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, Kay Boyle and Mina Loy. Sylvia Beach

also contributed to modern literature as a publisher. He encouraged the American writer

Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Paris, to publish his first book. Doing a job that no one

would dare easily, she published Irish writer James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, in 1922.

Hemingway mentions the bookstore that he was borrowing books from the rental library of

Shakespeare and Company. It was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables

and shelves of books, and photographs of on the wall of famous writers. When he didn’t have

money, Beach did not make a big deal and always lent the books he wanted. In A Moveable

Feast, Hemingway wrote of Beach:

“Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive

as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s… She was kind, cheerful and

interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer

to me.” (Hemingway, 35)

2
Gertrude Stein’s mixing French and English word to say unable to be published (for a book). Literally
“unhangable”, from French accrocher (to hang)
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In New York Times 1972 article, “Library Display Recalls the Year 1922 in

Literature”, it is mentioned that T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land, with Ezra Pound’s editorial

comments, James Joyce’s Ulysses, published at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company

bookshop in Paris in February 1922. It quotes Dr. Lola L. Szladits, the curator the Berg

Collection:

“A year that opened with the publication of ‘Ulysses’ and closed with that of

‘The Waste Land,’ can by now, from the vantage point of 50 years, be only

regarded as an extraordinary one,” (Library Display)

Gertrude Stein made her first visit to Shakespeare and Company about six months

after it had opened, she was paying 50 francs for a year’s subscription to the library. Sylvia

was very joyful over her new customers. She also appeared at the Saturday-night salons at 27

rue de Fleurus, and she began to bring American writers to meet Stein, because they were too

nervous to approach her. (Carpenter, 41-2) One of them was Sherwood Anderson, who later

worked under the influence of Gertrude Stein. In Paris, Anderson explained to Beach what

Stein meant to him, and asked if she could introduce them. The news of Shakespeare and

Company spread in American literary circles and encouraged today’s legends of American

literature.

“It was the first thing the pilgrims looked up in Paris…Many of them looked

upon it as their club. Often, they would inform me that they had given

Shakespeare and Company as their address, and they hoped I didn’t mind.”

(Carpenter, 43)

When Modernist models and styles started to prosper among English and American

writers and poets during the 1910s and 1920s, Ezra Pound was one of the prominent personas

of the movement. As an American expatriate in Europe, he was a symbol making a bridge

between America and Europe that assisted worldwide lovely patterns to shift and merge.
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Critics state that Pound created the authoritative examples of what a Modernist poem ought to

look like. Moreover, he advanced and mentored the work of such major contemporaries such

as W.B Yeats, Robert Frost, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T.S Eliot. He

helped him edit The Waste Land and publish. In Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, he reveals

that “Pound was always a good friend” (Hemingway, 107) Later, Pound served as

Hemingway’s mentor and agent, editing his work, and sending his poems to several

magazines in the United States. In Geniuses Together, Carpenter is explaining that Pound was

indeed influential. Even though Hemingway was a bit suspicious about him, later he received

an invitation to Pound’s studio.

“…Pound was influential: he had been responsible for much of the early success

of Poetry. But Hemingway was suspicious of what he heard. Eventually he sent

off the letter, and received an invitation to the Pound’s studio at 70 bis rue Notre

Dame des Champs, a side-street much favoured by painters, near the Dome café in

Montparnasse.” (Carpenter, 65)

Following, as Hemingway went to his studio that they had after living in hotel,

Carpenter quotes that Pound’s studio was “as poor as Gertrude Stein’s studio was rich”.

Although Hemingway was irritated and resentful about Pound’s absurd clothes, they had

also a lot of similarities between them. Pound had left a conventional ‘village’ on the edge

of a big city, and the restraints of a strictly Christian home just like Hemingway.

Additionally, he had fled to Europe at the age of twenty-two and had arrived in London in

1908 with a book of privately printed poems. Just as Hemingway sought out Gertrude Stein,

Pound was a very admiring student of W.B Yeats and Ford Madox Ford. (Carpenter, 65-6)

Hemingway devotes one of the chapters in A Moveable Feast for the name of F.

Scott Fitzgerald. What is more this chapter named Scott Fitzgerald, the longest chapter in
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the memoir, starts much more differently than the others, with an introduction of praising

Fitzgerald’s talent with metaphors:

“His talent was natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly

did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became

conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think

and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only

remember when it had been effortless.” (Hemingway, 148).

Before Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda relocated to France in 1924, they had escaped to

Europe to escape the press’ intrusion upon their lives. The Fitzger- alds made their

transatlantic voyage aboard the Aquitania, whose guest list as Scott noted, lacked “glamour”.

Fitzgerald was heavily disappointed by the trip, complaining that Europe was merely “of

antiquary interest”, Europe did not provide the intellectual stimulation that Fitzgerald had

craved. They came back to Europe in 1924 because of many factors they had faced such as

the debts they had and the bankruptcy. Moving to Paris allowed the Fitzgeralds to flee the

Prohibition in the United States and get closer to the exciting literary and artistic scene

emerging in Paris. Centered on cafés in Montparnasse and finding new creative inspiration in

Paris, and American literary community the Lost Generation flourished. In 1925, Fitzgerald

met Hemingway at the Dingo Bar, and the two shaped a companionship that would be now

and again turbulent. Having read Hemingway's work in an American diary, Fitzgerald

suggested Hemingway's "In Our Time" to Maxwell Perkins, editorial manager at Charles

Scribner's and Sons. As well as having admiration for Hemingway's writing, Fitzgerald was

likewise enraptured by Hemingway's athletic and military accomplishments, regions wherein

Fitzgerald felt inferior. (Hemingway, 154-167)

Throughout their friendship, Hemingway contributed to Fitzgerald's literary progress.

Hemingway acquainted Fitzgerald with Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein, and the two visited
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Edith Wharton at her salon in 1925. Notwithstanding the Dingo Bar, the two regularly visited

the well-known artistic cafés, including Le Dôme, La Rotonde, La Closerie des Lilas, and La

Coupole. As a dear companion, Hemingway additionally pointed out Fitzgerald's concerns

with liquor and the crumbling of his marriage with Zelda. (Hemingway, 172-3)

3. American Modernism and The Lost Generation

Modernism is an artistic movement that began in the late 1800's, but the majority of

modernist works came after 1910. This movement, in general, rebelled against the Victorian

way of thinking. It involved experimenting with various new styles of writing to separate

modern literature from Victorian era writing. Modernist writers did this because they wanted

to write new stories and felt incapable of doing so without straying from traditional writing

styles. The end of Queen Victoria's reign had a significant impact on the movement because

it emphasized the want to separate modern works from Victorian ideas. The wave of

modernism in Europe had a huge impact on the young American writer who got ‘lost’ during

and after the First World War.

Around the world, around 20 million individuals passed on in World War I and another

20 million or so were injured. Those brought into the world over the most recent twenty years

of the 1800s were intensely affected. Youngsters served in the military en masse and figured

exceptionally in those losses. Numerous who endure the war arose with profound physical or

passionate injuries. Youthful grown-ups lost companions and frequently saw their vocations

and family designs upset. In war-torn districts, family homes and livelihoods were now and

then obliterated. During a period of life when they would normally expect euphoric soul

changing experiences—graduations, new positions, weddings, parenthood—numerous rather

felt alone, debilitated, unmoored from conventional qualities, and questionable or skeptical

with regards to what's to come. As to survivors, the expression "lost generation" recommends

that even though their lives were truly saved, many felt lost. Those disoriented, lost, and
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hopeless writers, artists and intellectuals from the United States were in search of a new

identity for American literature and arts and for themselves.

4. Conclusion

The Lost Generation was a planned escape from postwar self-doubt and a search for new

identity for American literature and arts, shaped by itself thanks to the American and

European intellectuals of the time in 1920s. The expatriates in Paris had more than heritage,

country in common, they shared talent, idealism, and individualism. Moreover, they shared

money, alcohol, books, comments, ideas, and dreams. Gertrude Stein called them the Lost

Generation, it is “lost” in the sense that they were disoriented, alienated, and looking for hope

in a city filled with love, art, flamboyance, intellect and more, Paris. Their lives were made of

fiction, they mostly did not tempt to record, elaborate, rationalize, and romanticize those

magnificent years. This research paper aimed to find those stories by the “lost” writer, Ernest

Hemingway himself and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and

James Joyce thanks to Humphrey Carpenter’s collected memoirs, diaries, letters. Those

recollections and stories might be true or fiction, also, both Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast

and Carpenter’s Geniuses Together feel very real and very fiction at the same time.
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Works Cited

Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Houghton

Mifflin Harcourt, 1988.

Fitzgerald, Scott. The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition (Scribner Classics).

Classic, Scribner, 1996.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. Collier Books, 1987.

“Hemingway Project Interviews.” The Hemingway Project, 2018,

www.thehemingwayproject.com/hemingway-project-interviews.Accessed December

23, 2021

Times, The New York. “Library Display Recalls the Year 1922 in Literature.” The New York

Times, 8 Feb. 1972, www.nytimes.com/1972/02/08/archives/library-display-recalls-

the-year-1922-in-literature.html. Accessed December 27,2021