A Moveable Feast

Background

In November 1956, Hemingway recovered two small steamer trunks that he had stored in March 1928 in the basement of the Hôtel Ritz Paris. The trunks contained notebooks he had filled during the 1920s.[2] Hemingway's friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner, who was with him in Paris in 1956, later recounted the occasion of Hemingway's recovery of the trunks and notebooks:[2]

In 1956, Ernest and I were having lunch at the Hôtel Ritz Paris with Charles Ritz, the hotel’s chairman, when Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s Louis Vuitton had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it. Charley had the trunk brought up to his office, and after lunch Ernest opened it. It was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: 'The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!' There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a café crème. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life.

Hotchner, A. E. (2009-07-19). "Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast'". The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-12-08.

Having recovered his trunks, Hemingway had the notebooks transcribed, and then began working them up into the memoir that would eventually become A Moveable Feast.[3] After Hemingway's death in 1961, his widow Mary Hemingway, in her capacity as his literary executor, made final copy-edits to the manuscript prior to its publication in 1964.[2][3] In a "Note" with which she prefaced the posthumously published 1964 edition of the work, she wrote:

Ernest started writing this book in Cuba in the autumn of 1957, worked on it in Ketchum, Idaho, in the winter of 1958-59, took it with him to Spain ... in April, 1959, and brought it back with him to Cuba and then to Ketchum late that fall. He finished the book in the spring of 1960 in Cuba.... He made some revisions ... in the fall of 1960 in Ketchum. It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris. - M.H.

Mary Hemingway's prefatory note to: Hemingway, Ernest - A Moveable Feast, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1964, p. xi.

Gerry Brenner, a literary scholar at the University of Montana, and other researchers have examined Hemingway's notes and the initial drafts of A Moveable Feast, which are in the collection of Ernest Hemingway's personal papers opened to the public in 1979, following the completion of the John F. Kennedy Library, where they are held in Boston, Massachusetts. In a paper titled "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?" (1982), Brenner undertook to document Mary Hemingway's editing process and questioned its validity. He concluded that some of her changes were misguided, and others derived from questionable motives.[4] He also suggested that the changes appeared to contradict Mary's stated policy for her role as executor, which had been to maintain a "hands off" approach.[3] Brenner states that Mary changed the order of the chapters in Hemingway's final draft, apparently to "preserve chronology". This change interrupted the series of juxtaposed character sketches of such individuals as Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and Gertrude Stein. The chapter titled "Birth of a New School", which Hemingway had dropped from his draft, was reinserted by Mary. Brenner alleges the most serious change was the deletion of Hemingway's lengthy apology to Hadley, his first wife. This apology appeared in various forms in every draft of the book. Brenner suggests that Mary deleted it because it impugned her own role as his wife.

In contrast, Hotchner has said that he received a near final draft of A Moveable Feast in 1959, and that the version Mary Hemingway published is essentially the draft he had read then. In his view, the original 1964 publication is the version that Hemingway intended, and Mary Hemingway did not revise or add chapters on her own initiative, but simply carried out Ernest's intentions.[2] Hotchner describes Hemingway's memoir as "a serious work", that Hemingway "certainly intended it for publication", and contends: "Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book.... What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba [in 1959] was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.[2]


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