Preserved video of two critical reactions from 1964
The basic cable channel GSN has rebroadcast the kinescope of an appearance that Sheilah Graham made on the American television show What's My Line? 23 years after the death of her boyfriend F. Scott Fitzgerald.[10][11] She appeared on an episode that was telecast live on CBS on June 7, 1964, when A Moveable Feast was on bestseller lists.[10][11] Graham appeared on the show to promote a book she had written, and she did not bring up A Moveable Feast.[10][11]
Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House publishing who was also a regular panelist on the network television series, initiated talk of Hemingway's new bestselling book.[10] Cerf, who was two years younger than Fitzgerald and one year older than Hemingway, had the following exchange with Graham, according to the kinescope of the telecast that is available for viewing on YouTube.[12]
Cerf: Miss Graham, after, after this new Hemingway book, I hope you're going to answer some of the remarks that were made in that book about Scott Fitzgerald.
Graham: Well, I would like to. I'm not sure I'm the right person, although I am the right person...
Cerf: Ah, you certainly are the right person.
Graham: ... to answer that. I thought it was rather dreadfully cruel to Scott Fitzgerald and, untrue in, uh, in certain areas, shall we say.
Cerf: Well, I hope you'll straighten the record.
Graham: [unintelligible] ... try
Reactions to the 2009 edition
A.E. Hotchner alleged, among his other criticisms of the 2009 edition, that Seán Hemingway had edited it, in part, to exclude references to his grandmother (Hemingway's second wife Pauline Pfeiffer) that he found less than flattering.[2] As Hotchner's over-all assessment of the 2009 edition, he wrote:
"Ernest was very protective of the words he wrote, words that gave the literary world a new style of writing. Surely he has the right to have these words protected against frivolous incursion, like this reworked volume that should be called “A Moveable Book”.[2]
Other critics also have found fault with some of Seán Hemingway's editorial changes.[13] Irene Gammel writes about the new edition: "Ethically and pragmatically, restoring an author's original intent is a slippery slope when the published text has stood the test of time and when edits have been approved by authors or their legal representatives." Pointing to the complexity of authorship, she concludes: “Mary's version should be considered the definitive one, while the 'restored' version provides access to important unpublished contextual sources that illuminate the evolution of the 1964 edition.”[14]
