Lesson 5
Finding your own “moveable feast”
***Graphic 010 (book cover)
As a teen in 1960s
Ontario, I fantasized that some heavenly intervention might allow me to pass
high school French so I could go off to Paris and hang out with someone who
might be named Collette, Michèle, or something like that. Ernest Hemingway’s
death, image, and aftermath loomed large in pop culture and in young male minds
at that time.
He told us, “If you’re 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,” adding that celebrated comment: “for Paris is a
moveable feast.”[1]
Paris was not in the cards for me.
Instead, I moved to Vancouver, where I had relatives, a place at Simon Fraser
University, and my own experiences. They eventually led me to meet writer Eric
Nicol and to spend an afternoon at his Point Grey home.[2] For
these and other reasons, Nicol’s book The
Roving I, the first of three to win the Leacock Medal for him, mixed Paris
and Vancouver together in my mind.
In this 1951 medal winner, Nicol tells
of ordinary things: a visit to the library, a ride on a train, and a walk
through city streets. There’s not much interaction with other people. Yet the
book holds your interest because those streets run through Paris, and the train
takes you across the French countryside. Nicol wrote the book during his time
as a graduate student at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s. He assembled The Roving I as a travel narrative aimed
at a Canadian audience, drawing it from the columns that helped pay his
expenses in the City of Light. Eric Nicol’s later books also repackaged
newspaper columns, but those collections often lacked any unifying theme. The Roving I had the story-like
framework of his year in Paris, and this makes it an easier read.
***Graphic 011 (author)
Thousands of Canadians around Nicol’s
age had seen Europe the hard way a few years earlier; Nicol, however, passed
his military service in Ottawa offices, and having been “spared the
hostilities,” he could ride on the postwar wave that regarded Paris with a
smile. Nicol, with his master’s degree in French literature from UBC, had
genuine affection for Parisian life, and this shows, too.
The tone of the book and many of its
observations may seem quaint in an Internet world. Yet some passages could have
been written yesterday, and pretty much all of it remains funny. This is
because Nicol describes the walks through the streets of the everyday with
weird words and silly detail--as he did on his day at the bibliothèque: “A little man saved from midgetdom only by his
bowler. With hands resting on his behind, he fluffs out the wings of his
swallowtail coat (circa 1885), like a nervous blowfly.”[3]
Nicol’s inclination to elaborate on the
ordinary while skating over the elaborate sparkles in his description of a side
trip to Florence. In it, he devotes two and a half pages to the process of
eating spaghetti and only a paragraph to the Uffizi. He not only elevates
mundane events with his descriptions, but manages to generate stories of things
that never happened--like an imagined date with a woman who might have been
named “Collette,” had she shown up. Nicol never fully explains the decision to
leave the Sorbonne before completing his doctorate, but he felt lonely. He laments
not having someone with whom to share his Paris experience.
What Hemingway meant by “moveable
feast,” of course, was that the 1920s Paris of artists, writers, and poets was
his personal foundation: the learning, the relationships, and the experiences
that he would feed upon for the rest of his life. Nicol, at the age of thirty,
had passed out of the young-man stage (his Collette imaginings notwithstanding)
when he attended university in Paris. As a published author and veteran
journalist, he had already found his comic voice and decided that British
Columbia would be his touchstone.
This meant that Nicol brought his own
moveable feast[4]
to Paris and to the book that allowed him to share those Sorbonne days with
thousands of Canadians, including one living in Ottawa who still feasts on
young-man thoughts of Vancouver from time to time.
Writing Exercise
In a paragraph,
explain why Sudbury, Ontario, is your “moveable feast.”
[1] The quote, attributed to Hemingway by his
biographer, A.E. Hotchner, and slapped on the cover of a post-suicide
collection, now strikes me as too cute or rehearsed to be authentic
conversation, but the connotation makes sense.
[2] I interviewed him for Vancouver radio station
CJVB in 1978. Nicol (1919–2011) lived in that same house from 1957 to the end
of his life.
[3] This excerpt was also highlighted by
Michael Nolan in “Eric Nicol,” in Dictionary
of Literary Biography, vol. 362, Canadian Literary Humorists, ed.
Paul Matthew St. Pierre (Detroit: Gale, 2011). Anyone interested in substantive
bios of humour writers should access the St. Pierre collection.
[4] On the subject of
moveable feasts, the ever-modest Nicol said, “In the
feast of life, I have been a digestive biscuit.” Allen Twigg, “Tribute
to Eric Nicol,” BC Bookworld, Spring
2011, 17–18.