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. Sean Hemingway believes that the 1964 version is unjust to his grandmother, Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline, and does not represent his grandfather’s true feelings. He insists that the book was left unfinished and asserts that the last chapter as published was cobbled together by Hemingway’s widow, Mary, who had quarrelled with Pauline and wished to show her in a bad light. (Though Pauline herself had died as long ago as 1951.)
This claim has been rejected by A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway’s friend, disciple, business and literary associate in the last dozen years of his life. Hotchner, in an article in the New York Times, insists that the 1964 book is very much the manuscript which he himself delivered to Scribner’s in 1960, and that Mary had nothing to do with editing or, more importantly, reworking the last chapter. Hotchner is probably right. Nevertheless there is this to be said for Sean Hemingway’s new version: that in April 1961 Hemingway wrote to Charles Scribner, Jr., to say that the Paris book couldn’t be published in its present condition; it was unfair to Hadley (his first wife), Pauline and Scott Fitzgerald. But he also added that everything he had since done to the book had made it worse.
That this judgement was correct is, sadly, proved by the version of the final chapter edited by Sean Hemingway and also published in the New York Times. Certainly it shows both Hemingway and Pauline in a better light. She doesn’t appear so selfishly unscrupulous and deceitful; he takes responsibility and blame for the break-up with Hadley more on himself. We no longer have only the picture of a determined woman breaking up his marriage while posing as his wife’s best friend. Instead this is replaced by a tragic triangle, with Hemingway himself guilty and gnawed by remorse.
No doubt this is to his credit and offers a fairer and kinder picture of Pauline. Unfortunately the new version is garrulous instead of laconic and we miss what Wilfred Sheed called
the appropriate moral poison, the malaise that, as [Edmund] Wilson says, undermines ‘the sunlight and the green summer landscapes of The Sun Also Rises.’
The new version is full of explanations which weaken the impact, and which reek of self-pity. There is self-pity in the 1964 edition too, but it is concealed behind a mask of stoicism. It is nastier, but it is also artistically right. It is effective because in this version Hemingway was true to his own artistic credo: that you can leave anything out, so long as you know what it is you are omitting, and the work is stronger for doing so. ‘I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn’t until we were out of the mountains in late spring and back in Paris, that the other thing started again.’ Cut. Now we have another sentence which dilutes the effect.
Sean Hemingway may have done his grandma justice — but it is at his grandfather’s expense.
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