Nada y Pues Nada

The final sketch from Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast,¹ “Nada y Pues Nada” is a conversation and an apology, but also a sort of epilogue to the book. As he states in the first sentence of the sketch, “[t]his will give you some account of the people and the places when Hadley and I believed we were invulnerable.” Which, in typical Hemingway fashion, is an understatement of what “this” truly accomplishes. 

In this, as in Hemingway’s fiction, the author practices his “principle of the iceberg” with “seven-eighths of it [the text] underwater for every part that shows.”² He structures the narrative around a gap, a lack: “[a]nything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.” But in A Moveable Feast, a memoir, unlike in Hemingway’s fiction, it is not entirely certain where the gap, the lack, is located. In many instances, Hemingway omits some specific detail, some “knowledge”³ (about a relationship, a person, a conversation, an event, an idea), so as to construct a gap for his reader to fill in (as in his fiction). But in others, he omits some detail, or rather, circles around it, because he, himself, is uncertain of what it is, exactly, that he is writing of or how to write it. 

And so, in “The Pilot Fish and the Rich,” the second to last sketch of A Moveable Feast, immediately preceding “Nada y Pues Nada,” Hemingway tells much of the story in the second person, displacing the perspective onto the reader, because to tell the story of the collapse of his first marriage in the first person⁴ situates the gap, the lack, the unspeakable experience, within himself. Like the psychoanalyst I have written of, Hemingway gets the patient to speak, to undergo the talking cure through his writing, but in A Moveable Feast the patient is himself. He is analyst and analysand, putting his own early life on display, and so the reader encounters the shifting of you and I that indicates Hemingway’s own ambiguity of consciousness, the hunger⁵ that characterizes his work, and of which he writes extensively in the memoir. 

It is precisely this hunger which Hemingway encounters and contends with in his writing, that he can only contend with in writing, because to speak it, to speak his secrets,⁶ those things even partially hidden from himself, is to give voice to the unsignifiable unconscious, to the hunger and lack and desire that plagues him, that drives him into writing, into hunting and fighting and gambling, into affairs and four marriages. And it is precisely this lack, this hunger, situated within his own unconscious, that fuels his desire, a desire which is never satisfied, because he does not know what it is that he lacks in the first place, because lack is always unknown, unsignified.⁷

Thus, in the final, heartrending sketch of A Moveable Feast, as Hemingway and his poet friend Evan Shipman (who is dying of cancer), talk, Evan begs “Hem” to continue writing “for all of us … us of the early days and the best parts and the bad parts and Spain. Then this other one and everything since and the times now. You have to put in the fun and the other that only we know who have been at some strange places in some strange times. Please do it even when you want to never think about it. And you have to put in now. I am so busy with the horses that I don’t know about now. Only my now.” So he does. Unable to write his own now, to fully put it into words, Hemingway writes the now of another, because the hurt that must be spoken is a hurt they all share. It is the Nada of which Hemingway writes so “awfully well,” to which Hemingway bitterly retorts, “Nada y pues Nada,” nothing and for nothing. 

But perhaps the nothing of which Hemingway writes is exactly that: no thing. It is the emptiness, the longing, the hunger, that he, and all of them, cannot make sense of, that he can only hope to make known, even if, in so doing, the knowing is only a knowing of, not understanding, but simple awareness of its existence. He does not write things, but, nevertheless, he writes. But what? What is it that he writes? It is Jake musing, at the end of The Sun Also Rises,⁸ “Yes … Isn’t it pretty to think so?” It is that question, that implication, that secret, that even, after Hemingway’s death, remains simply that: a question, an implication, a secret. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s attempt to finally make visible his I, his secrets, his hunger, to make sense of himself and his mission, his life and those who lived it with him, to turn the lens of fiction—greater, of the written word—upon himself, and, in so doing, draw the emptiness into the light.

Notes