Book Review: A Movable Feast

Tulsa World

"If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact."

From the preface to the original version of "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway. In the last paragraph of the possible last chapter of the last book Ernest Hemingway struggled to finish before taking his own life, the great writer reiterates that he had mined the storage places "of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist."

The line is an exceptionally poignant moment in the newly released "Restored Edition" of "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway's fictionalized memoir of life in Paris in the early 1920s.

And, as is typical of Hemingway, there is much below the surface of the sentence to ponder. Which has been tampered with -- his heart or his memory? And which no longer exists?

It's April 1961. A few months earlier, Hemingway had undergone electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Soon he'd attempt suicide, and less than three months after writing that last paragraph, he would succeed in the act, dying of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head.

If anything, as he wrote it in the last years of his life, drawing from notebooks that had been stashed in a Paris hotel for 30 years, "A Moveable Feast" was an attempt to revel again in youthful happiness.

Since its publication 45 years ago, Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" has been heralded as one of the great literary memoirs. Exaggerated and acidly dismissive of one-time friends, the book carries an overriding spirit of a 20-something artist in love with his wife, Hadley, and finding himself in the creative cauldron and vivacious cafes of post-World War I Paris.

Now comes a new edition of the book, endorsed by Hemingway's son Patrick and edited by a grandson, Sean Hemingway, who is a curator of ancient art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and editor of two previous collections of Hemingway material (on war and on hunting).

In his introduction, Sean Hemingway argues that this new edition is truer to Hemingway's intentions, given that it's "based on a typed manuscript with original notations in Hemingway's hand -- the last draft of the last book that he ever worked on."

For its first publication in 1964, Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary, edited the manuscript along with Harry Brague of Hemingway's longtime publishing house, Scribner.

Mary Hemingway has been long criticized by scholars for what they consider some heavy-handed preparation of the original "Moveable Feast." But, as she wrote in 1964, editing is something "even the most meticulous manuscripts require."

Sean Hemingway agrees with scholars that decisions made in compiling the original book were questionable. Now he is likely to face a barrage of criticism for creating this alternate version of what has become, despite its possible flaws, a comfortable favorite.

Charles Scribner III, scion of the publishing house that -- like Hemingway's heirs -- made a fortune on Hemingway, weighed in recently in a letter to The New York Times. "I am sure," Scribner wrote, "that the new edition will be of passing interest to scholars and students, but there is no doubt in my mind that Hemingway would not approve of the deconstruction of his classic."

Scribner reminded readers that Mary and his father, Charles Scribner II, who was editor and publisher when "A Moveable Feast" first appeared, "knew the author intimately; his grandson, the new editor, did not."

Adds Susan Beegel, author of a forthcoming Hemingway biography and editor of the scholarly journal The Hemingway Review: "Of all the posthumous books, the original edition of 'Feast' is closest to canonical and it was edited by people who discussed the manuscript with him."

So, let the bullfight begin. There still is never any end

One of the most significant alterations involves the ending.

The 1964 edition closes with a chapter titled "There Is Never Any End to Paris." In it, Hemingway reiterates his love for Hadley -- "I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her." There's an allusion to the affair with Pauline (Sean Hemingway's grandmother) that in 1926 broke up the idyllic life with Hadley. Then Hemingway closes on the wistful note that all that came before in this book reflected "how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy."

Sean Hemingway's new edition tucks a variant draft of that chapter, now called "Winters in Schruns," farther up in the book, just ahead of the long-familiar three-part portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so its effect seems diffuse.

There may be a valid chronological reason for closing the book with Hemingway's reflections on Fitzgerald, but the final, send-off tone is far less effective or emotion-stirring than the original.

Hemingway never came up with a satisfactory ending for the book, his grandson says.

"Although this manuscript lacks a final chapter," Sean Hemingway writes in the introduction, "I believe that it provides a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish."

This edition ends with a short section of fragments, paragraph upon repetitive paragraph by a writer who seems lost, unable to find his way to clarity. Only an obsessive comma counter could find this material useful or revealing of something we didn't already know: that at the end, Hemingway -- whose art and reputation were already well-established -- was in trouble. And no amount of tampering -- then, as now -- could help. SUBHEAD: Hemingway's grandson edits new version of posthumously published Paris memoir.

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