“I want to remember what Paris was like before the war”, Roger Sterling’s long-ago flame Annabelle tells him over a maybe-business, maybe-romance dinner. “Eating in cemetaries. People were jumping out of windows and we were on vacation.”

1964 is shaping up to be a big year for Mr. Sterling. He’s married his daughter off and taken a wife nearly her age, and set out on a great adventure with his Sterling Cooper brothers (and sisters, and ex-lovers) in arms, working out of a hotel suite and trying, again, to recapture his youth.

What a perfect time, then, for the American release of Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast. Culled together from various notebooks and napkin scribbles, it’s a (mostly, depending on who you ask) account of Hemingway’s life as a member of the Lost Generation—wandering souls falling in and out of love and in and out of bottles all across Europe.

Widely considered to be one of Hemingway’s greatest pieces of writing, A Movable Feast would certainly have been on Roger’s to-read list—fame of the author aside, it captures a moment in time that obviously had great impact on Sterling, a moment when he was young and headstrong and bright-eyed, and, yes, probably in a state of perma-drunkenness, but still! Perhaps a few evenings spent considering the sweetness of pre-War youth might help bring out even further the latent vigor stirred by the new Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce?

In a review of a 2009 restoration of A Movable Feast, Christopher Hitchens observed that many sections are ‘frankly sentimental but nonetheless somehow dry.”

Do we know any silver-haired ad men that might also fit that description?

Footnote by Angela Serratore

11:35pm | 24 notes