A call for a new edition of Hemingway’s Garden of Eden

Le Grau du Roi, the setting of The Garden of Eden. Photo by Chichoumeille.

An expansion of a comment I made on the previous Hemingway post:

I like The Garden of Eden as it was published in 1986 – and many critics such as John Updike and E. L. Doctorow were clearly stunned that it turned out to be so readable – although that edition is clearly not an authoritative work by Hemingway. Tom Jenks’ drastic reduction of an unfinished manuscript of 2409 pages (of which over 1500 consitute a version “with evidence of Hemingway’s editorial hand” according to Chris L. Nesmith) makes Mary Hemingway’s tampering with Feast look like mere spell-checking.

But I enjoy the rich language that evokes the 1920s Riviera setting, and the dark portrait of a ménage à trois.

According to Rose Marie Burwell in her excellent 1996 book Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels, Hemingway wrote The Garden of Eden between 1948 and 1959. It evolved from an ur-text he began after the war – from which also grew Islands in the Stream, Across the River and Into the Trees, and The Old Man and the Sea. Thematically, The Garden of Eden evolved at least partially from the discarded “Miami” section of Islands in the Stream (much of “Miami” was published as a short story, “The Strange Country”, in 1987’s not-really complete Finca Vigia story collection). Burwell makes the case that Garden, Islands, A Moveable Feast and Under Kilimanjaro (initially published in edited form as True At First Light):

form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The works form a tetralogy that is Hemingway’s portrait of the artist as writer and painter, and as son, husband and father; but their serial nature, and their place in the body of his fiction, has been unrecognized, misconstrued, and undervalued because of the manuscript deletions made for publication, the order in which the three works appeared [this was written before the publication of True At First Light], and the restrictions of archival material that clarifies much about their composition and intentions.

Of course, it seems some kind of drastic editing was necessary to create a readable and marketable Garden of Eden. The Garden manuscript material, according to Burwell, is immensely repetitious. But Jenks went to an extreme by deleting a whole mirror plot about a love triangle between Nick and Barbara Sheldon and Andy Murray, and as such distorted the very conception of the novel.

I think a judiciously-edited reading edition (with substantial notes) could at the very least restore the deleted plot to give us a better idea of the shape Hemingway intended with The Garden of Eden. The key, I think, is not to expect a masterpiece, and not to expect the book to be a definitive and satisfying text. The book was never finished. But a more expansive edition with scholarly apparatus will make Hemingway’s intentions clearer and give us a much better understanding of his late writing.

Or perhaps the whole manuscript should be published in a facsimile edition in the manner of Norman Mailer’s first novel Transit to Narcissus. It’s essentially a photocopy of the final draft typescript with the author’s annotations intact. Obviously this would have limited market appeal, be expensive, and mainly of interest to university libraries. But the mass market has had their version of the book, and so perhaps its time to open the full version to those who want it.

[See "'The Laws of an Ancient God' and the Editing of Hemingway's Garden of Eden: The Final Corrected Typescript and Galleys" by Chris L. Nesmith (Hemingway Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring 2001)]

First US edition, 1986

Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast – Restored.

I have now had the opportunity to look at a copy of the controversial new restoration of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Seán Hemingway has been viciously attacked for his work on this new edition by A. E. Hotchner and various journalists and bloggers (See my earlier post below). Well, the only conclusion I can come to is that Seán Hemingway has been slandered for an admirable project to return the book to its original state, that of Item 188 in the Hemingway archive at JFK Library – according to Dr Gerry Brenner, “a ‘finished’ typescript of the 19 chapters that Hemingway had composed, completed, and corrected”.

According to Brenner’s 1982 article “Are We Going To Hemingway’s Feast?” in the journal American Literature (vol 54, no 4, pp. 528-544), Mary Hemingway’s changes to this typescript for the ‘64 edition were reordered chapters; the inclusion of the rejected “Birth of a New School”; reversion to a (more negative) draft version of the epigraph to the Fitzgerald chapters; cuts for narrative clarity/continuity as well as more dubious reasons; and substantial cuts as well as interpolations from rejected material (about “the pilot fish” John Dos Passos) for “There is Never Any End To Paris” (now restored as “Winter in Schruns”).

The “pilot fish” material, not intended for the book anyway, was edited as such to remove Hemingway’s acknowledgement of responsibility in the break-up of his marriage to Hadley. Of her cuts, Brenner says “Mary seems intent upon striking from the record any impression that Hemingway suffered either guilt or remorse for his conduct”. He also writes that “after so many chapters in which young Ernest’s ruthlessness or sarcasm stands out in high relief, it rings false at the end to read his self-portrait as a clown or a fond, unsuspected dog that wags its tail for the scraps of approval doled out by the rich….I cannot look so easily at the garnished image of the susceptible young Hemingways, so easily taken advantage of by the rich, particularly after Hemingway has demonstrated so often his skill with the satirical rapier. Indeed, by leaving out the material in Item 126 in which he excuses the rich and accepts the blame for what happens, Mary Hemingway further sentimentalises Hemingway’s view of what happened and who was to blame. His revision of that material shows more maturity in him than does her version, which portrays him as the adolescent, whimpering over the ashes of his and Hadley’s happiness, torched by the rich.”

Mary also “deletes Hemingway’s apologies to Hadley.” While Brenner acknowledges Hemingway “blubbers a bit in his gratitude that Hadley lived and fared well after the ‘nightmare winter’…” he also suggests “it is as likely that [Mary] took umbrage at the inferior position his praise of Hadley put her in. After all, Hadley comes away from Hemingway’s writing, once again, as the undisputed, central woman of his life.” Nevertheless, Brenner gives Mary the credit for having ushered this last book into print.

As far as I can see – and until somebody does a comprehesive text analysis to prove otherwise – Seán Hemingway has essentially published Item 188 as it stands, and relegated various rejected material (some used in the ‘64 edition, other parts never published) to an appendix. His approach is admirable. He offers a thorough, methodical (and referenced) introduction as well as photographic reproductions of illustrative manuscript materials (in addition to photographs of the Hemingways in Paris).

Whether this edition makes for a better read than the ‘64 edition is up for debate. But the new version is undoubtedly a closer representation of the text as Hemingway left it before his suicide in 1961. Anybody who reads the introduction can see that clearly.

Seán Hemingway deserves apologies from several quarters.

Now we need a scholarly restoration – a reading copy with annotations – of The Garden of Eden, a huge manuscript left unfinished at Hemingway’s death, and carved into a vastly reduced (and very entertaining) novel in 1986.

[Thanks to Dr. Gerry Brenner for permission to quote from his 1982 article. Brenner is the author of A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation (2 vols. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. 823 pp + xxi)]

UPDATE (August 10): See Q&A: Sean Hemingway on the “restored edition” of his grandfather’s A Moveable Feast at the National Post.

Link to my new article “Peripatetic Burgess”

The former Roman apartment (top floor) of Anthony Burgess at 16A Piazza Santa Cecilia, Trastevere

“PERIPATETIC BURGESS”

Notes on a literary pilgrimage to the former houses of Anthony Burgess.

This travel article appears in the new issue of The End of the World Newsletter published online by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (IABF). This big issue also includes very interesting contributions from Rob Spence, Martin Phipps, Bruce Parks, Yves Buelens, Andrew Biswell and Dougie Milton.

The article begins:

In the early pages of Earthly Powers (1980) Kenneth Toomey, seated at the bar of his Maltese home, imagines a wide-ranging travel memoir structured aleatorically, by a luckydip of souvenir matchbooks from a huge bowl. It is probable that Toomey’s creator had his own collection of international matchbooks. Anthony Burgess was not only a chain-smoker of Schimmelpennincks; he was also a serious peripatetic. I was on his trail.

Anthony Burgess is a daunting challenge for the literary pilgrim. A comprehensive tour would require stops in Manchester, London, Malaya, Brunei, Malta, Rome, Bracciano, Monaco and Lugano. In early 2008 I made do with visits to two former residences that have something more than biographical interest. Burgess often lent his homes wholesale to his fictional characters. In this case I would find the Maltese house given to Kenneth Toomey and the Roman apartment inhabited by characters in both Beard’s Roman Women (1976) and ABBA ABBA (1977).

The full article can be accessed here.

Burgess’s (and Toomey’s) former residence at 168 Triq il-Kbira, Lija, Malta

UPDATE (27/07): Some additional photographs that were not used in the published article.

Strait Street (“The Gut”) in Valletta, Malta

Statue of the poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863) near the Ponte Garibaldi in Trastevere, Rome

Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere

Rome in the rain

[All photographs © 2009 Matthew Asprey.]

Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast – Restored?

I’ve yet to see a copy of the new “restored” edition of Hemingway’s posthumously-published Paris memoir/fiction A Moveable Feast (1964). The text of the original edition is considered among the best of Hemingway’s works, and certainly the best of the long series of posthumous books. Feast is a romanticised evocation of a particular time and place and represents a late revival of Hemingway’s masterful taut prose.

This new restoration is bound to be the subject of exhaustive argument in the coming weeks. A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway’s friend, has published an angry op-ed in the New York Times about the new edition:

BOOKSTORES are getting shipments of a significantly changed edition of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, “A Moveable Feast,” first published posthumously by Scribner in 1964. This new edition, also published by Scribner, has been extensively reworked by a grandson who doesn’t like what the original said about his grandmother, Hemingway’s second wife.

The grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

It is his claim that Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s fourth wife, cobbled the manuscript together from shards of an unfinished work and that she created the final chapter, “There Is Never Any End to Paris.”

He goes on to recount his memories of Hemingway writing the book, and then concludes:

When I was leaving for New York to give the manuscript [of The Dangerous Summer] to the editor of Life, Ernest also gave me the completed manuscript of the Paris book to give to Scribner’s president, Charles Scribner Jr.

I recount this history of “A Moveable Feast” to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it, and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication. Ernest died before the publication of the book could go forward. When I visited him in the Mayo Clinic a few months before his dementia led to his suicide, he was very concerned about his Paris book, and worried that it needed a final sentence, which it did not.

After his death, Mary, as executor, decided that Scribner should proceed with the publication. Harry Brague was the editor. I met with him several times while the book was in galleys.

Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book. However, she did call me about its title. Scribner was going to call it “Paris Sketches,” but Mary hoped I could come up with something more compelling. I ran through a few possibilities, but none resonated until I recalled that Ernest had once referred to Paris as a moveable feast. Mary and Scribner were delighted with that, but they wanted attribution. I wrote down what Ernest had said to the best of my recollection, and this appears on the title page attributed to a “friend,” which is the way I wanted it.

These details are evidence that the book was a serious work that Ernest finished with his usual intensity, and that he certainly intended it for publication. What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.

Since Hotchner’s assertions seem intended to sabotage the success of this new edition – and the average reader certainly has reason to be wary after the publication of books like The Garden of Eden (1986) – it is important to remember that the ‘64 edition of A Moveable Feast has been controversial at least since 1982, when Gerry Brenner of the University of Montana published “Are We Going To Hemingway’s Feast?” in the journal American Literature (vol 54, no 4, pp. 528-544).

Brenner examined the “drafts, revisions, fragments, and miscellaneous notes of A Moveable Feast” at the JFK Library in Boston and concluded that:

these materials show that contrary to [Mary Hemingway's] ‘Note’ in the book, Hemingway had not ‘finished’ it ‘in the spring of 1960 in Cuba’. They also show that she altered, cut and added significant material. Those changes affect emphases Hemingway had sought and modify his discernable intentions in shaping the book and in trying to guide an understanding of them.

Even in 1982 Brenner raised the possibility of Scribners publishing a revised edition. He described the ‘64 edition as a “bastard text.” His article is very thorough and suggests Mary had personal motivations for her textual additions and deletions. This certainly contradicts Hotchner’s claims of Mary’s “little involvement”. Unfortunately this excellent article is not available freely on the web as yet.

Another recent New York Times article presents Seán Hemingway’s case, with an extract from the restored text of one chapter.

As I said, I have not yet had a look at the new edition and cannot assess Seán Hemingway’s editorial decisions. But this project was bound to be controversial, and it’s a pity the restoration of the text was not undertaken by impartial scholars. That is not unprecedented: True at First Light, branded a “fictional memoir” when published by Scribners in 1999 (as edited by Patrick Hemingway), was re-published six years later in complete form (with remarkable and uncharacteristic discretion) as Under Kilimanjaro, edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming (Kent State University Press).

But regardless of these editorial quibbles, either version of A Moveable Feast contains astonishingly fine chapters that recreate (or reinvent) Hemingway’s poverty-stricken bohemian life in 1920s Paris. One reads with joy of the drunkards of the Café des Amateurs, the unbearably delicious smells of the bakeries, Shakespeare & Co. and Sylvia Beach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and of girl-watching in a good café on the Place St-Michel where Hemingway writes an early short story in a notebook. Read it here:

A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel by Ernest Hemingway

UPDATES – LINKS

See Rodger Jacobs’ blog posts Parts 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7. Jacobs has seen the new edition and quotes Sean Hemingway’s introduction (the lines in bold are my emphasis):

Presented here for the first time is Ernest Hemingway’s original manuscript text as he had it at the time of his death in 1961. Although Hemingway had completed several drafts of the main text in prior years, he had not written an introduction or final chapter to his satisfaction. In fact, Hemingway continued to work on his book at least into April of 1961.
<snip>
The 19 chapters of A Moveable Feast published here are based on a typed manuscript with original notations in Hemingway’s hand — the last draft of the last book that he ever worked on. The actual manuscript is in the Ernest Hemingway Collection in the John F. Kennedy Library of Boston.

Hotchner’s accusation that “the grandson” Seán Hemingway has opportunistically made a new version of the book in order to paint a better picture of his mother is clearly guff; it seems the new editor has simply removed Mary Hemingway’s posthumous meddling, following on from the good archival research done by Gerry Brenner, and as a result Seán’s mother has come out looking less nasty.

Let’s hope Hotchner’s venomous and clearly innaccurate op-ed does not scare too many people from this new edition.

See Second serving of a ‘Moveable Feast’ sparks debate at KansasCity.com. A considered and not entirely favourable review of the new edition by Stuart Mitchner at Town Topics: Hemingway’s Paradise Lost — Love and Remorse: Life, Art, and Paris.

See also my earlier essay on Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa

First US Edition 1964

New US edition 2009

Anthony Burgess on D. H. Lawrence

From Canadian Television, 1985:

“[Lawrence is] a man who showed us that literature is essentially a subversive thing. The job of the writer is not to confirm people in their comfortable prejudices but to wake them up a little, lash them into re-thinking their thoughts and reassessing their emotions.”