A Moveable Feast: the Restored Edtion A MOVEABLE FEAST: TO EDIT OR NOT TO EDIT
Ernest Hemingway’s writing life was bookended by two suitcases. The first was stolen from his wife, Hadley, in 1922, containing, except for two stories, all that the young and unpublished Hemingway had written in the preceding two years. He had to start all over, which, he later conceded, might have been good for one just learning his craft.
The second “suitcase” (actually two steamer trunks) was found in 1956 when the Paris Ritz informed Hemingway that his old notebooks of the Paris years had lain safely in storage for three decades.
Their discovery stimulated the mature writer to do something he had long contemplated—to write a memoir of his youth in Paris “when we were very poor and very happy.” The rest, you might say, is history. His “Paris Sketches,” as he called them, appeared in 1964, three years after his suicide, as A Moveable Feast, a title suggested by Hemingway’s friend A. E. Hotchner, who recalled Ernest’s saying to him in the Ritz bar in 1950, “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.”
But like all history, the story of this book depends upon who is telling it. Just as history is written by the conquerors, A Moveable Feast was published by those in control of Hemingway’s estate, his widow, Mary, and editors and friends she consulted. It has long been rumored that, to grind their own axes, Mary and her cohorts produced a book substantially different from the uncompleted and untitled manuscript Ernest had left behind.
Now the issue is resolved with the 2009 publication of A Moveable Feast, The Restored Edition, edited by Sean Hemingway, a grandson from Ernest’s second marriage, to Pauline, friend and successor to Hadley. Sean has assembled, from the Hemingway papers in Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Ernest’s manuscript as he left it, together with several sketches written for the book but omitted by the author on his famous principle that a book should be judged “by the excellence of the material that [the writer] eliminates.”
And what do we have? Yes, Ernest’s manuscript was different from the published AMF. But not much. Mary added a final chapter and a preface, and the title of course, but all skillfully taken from Ernest’s drafts and notes. The Restored Edition gives us interesting additional sketches—including two more about Scott Fitzgerald and kinder words for Scott and the Murphys (“the Rich”)—but to my mind Mary’s version is a more satisfying whole.
Poor Ernest. Since his death there have been no fewer than 12 titles issued from the papers he left behind, including a volume of letters he always refused permission to publish in his lifetime. Now, I have loved A Moveable Feast for 45 years and I am glad to get more of these colorful sketches of the fabled Paris days of the 1920s. Nonetheless, it seems paramount for readers and editors to respect the intentions Ernest had for this poignant memoir before he became too ill to bring it to an authentic and satisfying conclusion.
I think Mary did honor her husband’s literary integrity. But read The Restored Edition, recently acquired by our library, and decide for yourself.
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