Things I Like - Books

Hemingway with 1st wife Hadley and 2nd wife Pauline

There’s been an interesting brouhaha developing in the book world this summer. Have you read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast? Yes or no, if for some reason you decide to purchase a copy in the future, you may want to look closely at the edition:

Early next month, Scribner…is publishing a new edition of the book, what it is calling “the restored edition,” and this time it is edited by Seán Hemingway, a grandson of Hemingway and Pauline. Among the changes he has made is removing part of that final chapter from the main body of the book and placing it in an appendix, adding back passages from Hemingway’s manuscript that Seán believes paint his grandmother in a more sympathetic light.
~ NYTimes

I’m not a Hemingway fan but A Moveable Feast is the one thing he wrote that I actually enjoyed. I will admit that I picked it up because I thought it was about food. There was definitely food (I was driven to try oysters for the first time after reading this) but the book is basically a series of Hemingway’s recollections of his time in Paris with his first wife Hadley Richardson – the places they frequented, the trips they took and the people they knew.

From most accounts, it appears that Hemingway was not a nice guy and many of his portraits of the people he encountered in Paris are not particularly flattering. But that’s what he wrote and it’s also what makes A Moveable Feast so compelling – it’s a flat out, straight from the bottom of his nasty little heart picture of how he saw things. But this is not the controversial aspect. The issue causing all the uproar is whether or not heirs of an author’s copyright should be allowed to modify published works.

As an author, I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this “restored edition.” With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in “A Moveable Feast” about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor.

All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work. There is always the possibility that the inheritor could write his own book offering his own corrections.
~ A. E. Hotchner

The book was published in 1964, three years after Hemingway’s death. The two excerpts above come from an article and an opinion that give drastically different accountings of how the original book was put together. If you accept Hotchner’s first person account, and it sounds pretty convincing to me, the book was essentially finished and submitted for publication the way Hemingway wanted it before he loaded that rifle. To ‘restore’ it as done by Hemingway’s grandson seems no different to me than a descendant of Da Vinci adding a second panel to the Mona Lisa depicting the object causing her enigmatic smile because it ‘completes the story’.

Thanks to Mr. White for the link to the article