Franz Kafka wrote "A Hunger Artist."

George Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London.

It's hard to take someone who eats at Michaud's and goes to a pension in Austria to ski serious about missing meals, but after Hemingway quit writing journalism for the Toronto paper and tried to live on what he made writing short stories he did miss meals, was hungry, knew firsthand that it sharpened the senses.

Orwell was a soldier in Spain. He was shot through the lungs and was never really healthy again.

He wasn't a journalist, fucking Martha Gellhorn, and living like a movie star in a hotel behind the lines.

One thing that took Hemingway's mind off hunger was looking at Cézanne. He felt that Cézanne might have painted hungry.

Here again he wonders if Cézanne might not have been hungry for something besides food.

What would that have been? Wealth, fame, an artistic vision, the respect of his peers?

We know what Cézanne thought of the academy. He was in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés.

Hemingway walks to Shakespeare and Company to see if he has any mail.

He complains about not selling his stories to Sylvia Beach.

She tells him not to worry. They will sell.

She looks, and he has a letter, from a magazine in Germany, with 600 francs in it.

Hemingway tells himself,

You God Damn complainer. You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord.

I can identify with feeling frustrated at not being able to earn money writing, and not knowing what to do about it, and complaining, and feeling like a heel for expressing it, for feeling sorry for yourself, when you were the author of your own misfortune, after all.

Now that Hemingway has 600 francs he eats at Lipp's.

He has pommes à l'huile, potatoes marinated in olive oil, with a large glass of beer, a distingué, a liter, then he has a demi and a sausage with a mustard sauce. He mops it all up with the good French bread.

He knows he must write a novel.

He has the work.

He doesn't know yet that it won't always be there. That, one day, what was natural, then, will be difficult.

When A Moveable Feast was published we did not know, or get any hint from A Moveable Feast, that Hemingway could not complete the book, and, in despair, killed himself, because he could no longer write.

Is this what he meant by the quality of what you leave out?