Life & Letters | 8 August 2009

Between 1945 and his death in 1961 Ernest Hemingway published only two books, apart from collections of stories mostly written before the war. The two were Across the River and Into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. The first was generally considered a failure, the second a success; and it’s doubtless perversity that makes me much prefer Across the River.

The meagre tally might suggest he was burned out, but for most of the time he was working hard on various projects, and the difficulty was to finish books. This was partly because the economy of his early work had given way to loquaciousness, and he went on and on, partly because his earnings from royalties, adaptations and occasional journalism were so high that he was free from the need of most authors to get work in print as soon as possible.

Five books, not including collections of short stories, journalism and letters, have been published since his death: A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), The Garden of Eden (1986), and True at First Light (1999). Since all were left unfinished, the form in which they have appeared owed much to editors who had to choose from different versions of the same passage and who cut heavily. Of the five books only A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden are, I would say, successes, but they are very considerable ones.

Now a new edition of the Paris sketches, A Moveable Feast, is being published by Scribner’s in New York. The editor is Hemingway’s grandson, Sean Hemingway, and he has made substantial changes. Some chapters have been relegated to an appendix, and the last chapter, ‘There Is Never Any End To Paris’, appears in a very different form.