"A Moveable Feast - The Restored Edition" by Ernest Hemingway - Book Review

Sean Hemingway, the grandson of Ernest Hemingway, has edited what he calls the "restored version" of his grandfather's memoir of Paris, "A Moveable Feast" but I'm not convinced that's necessarily a good thing. For fans like me, it's no bad thing, either, but the original, though not an approved version by Hemingway since it was published posthumously, has held up well enough since it's publication in 1964. Scholars and fans knew it had been edited by Hemingway's widow, Mary, and there was no reason to believe that what was left out or had been delicately changed or corrected, wasn't anything that Hemingway himself wouldn't have done. Now, Sean has come along and changed all that and made his own decisions and proclaimed the finished product as more like Hemingway intended than the prior version.

Well, who knows? For either version, we don't have Hemingway around to tell us what he really intended. The first version in no less legitimate than the new version and the new version is no less free from the editor's bias than the first. It's all an editorial judgment call though at least for Mary, she didn't announce her bias as Sean has; his clear intent is to repair the reputation of his late grandmother, Hemingway's second wife but I'm not sure he has accomplished this. The Pilot Fish and the Rich remains as a sketch of Hemingway's torment of being caught between the love of his wife and his new love of Pauline. Including the previously unpublished fragments does little to change this. (You might as well publish "restored" versions of "Islands In The Stream" or "The Garden of Eden" or "True at First Light" - wait, that's already been done. Hmm. Sounds like there's already quite a market in place for "restored versions" of prior works. There's no end to second guessing the work of those who came before. And it's probably quite lucrative.)

Oh, get on with it. Is it a good book or isn't it? Of course it's a good book. It's Hemingway and Paris and what could be better? I've previously blogged about my delight of the inclusion of copies of the manuscript pages from Hemingway's draft so in that respect it's a better book than the first. But the book serves as a reminder that the Hemingway myth is large. It's hard to tell where the myth begins and reality ends. Was Hemingway playing to the myth he had already created? It's hard to tell after all these years but for those of us who enjoy the myth, it doesn't really matter. It's good to visit these sketches again and to dream about what it must've been like to be young and talented, on the verge of a breaking through to what would become a major career, and living in Paris.

iTunes Playlist - The S's - Still!

Accountant in the arts. From Wilco's Spiders (Kidsmoke):

Spiders are singing in the salty breeze
Spiders are filling out tax returns
Spinning out webs of deductions and melodies
On a private beach in Michigan

Still in the S's. Either I have a lot of tunes that begin with S or my progress has slowed to a crawl. I suspect more of the latter than the former.

Closerie de Lilas

A clean, well-lighted place:




Not a very good street view I'm afraid. Zoom in, if you want, but when I did I ended up around the block. But you get a sense of the cafe, don't you? Where Hemingway would write in the mornings. The kind of place where myths are made and still lived out.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris

14 rue de Tilsitt, where the Hemingways called on the F. Scott Fitzgeralds:




The Fitzgerald chapter about the car in "A Moveable Feast" is quite hilarious and, of course, make Fitzgerald look foolish and Hemingway look like the wise one. Which is permitted, I guess, since it's Hemingway's memoir. Let Fitzgerald write his own. But the chapter about a matter of size is just unfair. Telling that kind of story just isn't done, old sport.

Henry Louis Gates' Tax Problem

In addition to getting arrested for disorderly conduct, Henry Louis Gates may have tax problems:

A foundation created and led by Henry Louis Gates Jr. is amending its federal tax form after questions were raised about $11,000 paid to foundation officers -- funds that the original tax form called research grants, but that should have been classified as compensation, ProPublica reported. When the payments are accounted for accurately, the foundation's administrative expenses will account for 40% of its spending in 2007, not 1% as originally reported to the IRS. Gates created the Inkwell Foundation with the goal of supporting work on African and African-American literature, history and culture, the article said. The report by ProPublica also noted that some of the actual grants went to people close to Gates. Gates told ProPublica that the foundation's second-largest grant, for $6,000, went to his fiancée, Angela DeLeon,. DeLeon was formerly on the foundation board and Gates said he recused himself from a vote on the grant. A grant of $500 went to Evelyn Higginbotham, chair of the foundation's board and chair of Harvard University's Department of African and African-American studies. Gates said she didn't vote on the grant. ProPublica is an organization that conducts investigative journalism. The article noted that Gates -- the Harvard scholar who is a leading figure in African-American studies whose arrest at his home has set off a national debate about the way black men are treated by law enforcement -- also serves on ProPublica's board.

I'd seen something about this before and it may not really be a scandal. I agree the grants were mis-reported - probably deliberately so though for what reason I can't fathom - and amending the returns now is the correct thing to do. I don't see this yet as some kind of personal benefit to Gates - his friends got small sums with the remainder of funds staying in bank accounts, though that was in 2007 so we don't know if the money is still there or what it was used for. There's no reason to suspect wrong-doing on the face of this but the mis-statement coming to light during the scandal about Gates' arrest only adds to fuel to the fire.

Via TaxProf Blog.

Man in a Bubble

What makes this picture awesome?


It's Oklahoma's Wayne Coyne, lead singer of The Flaming Lips, in his trademark giant bubble during the Splendour in the Grass festival at Belongil Fields on Sunday, July 26, in Byron Bay, Australia, that's what makes it awesome.

Hemingway and Hitchens

Here's Christopher Hitchens' take on Hemingway's restored "A Moveable Feast:"

What is it exactly that explains the continued fascination of this rather slight book? Obviously, it is an ur-text of the American enthrallment with Paris. To be more precise, it is also a skeleton key to the American literary fascination with Paris (and contains some excellent tips for start-up writers, such as the advice to stop working while you still have something left to write the next day). There are the “wouldn’t be without, even if you don’t quite trust” glimpses of the magnetic Joyce and the personable Pound and the apparently wickedly malodorous Ford Madox Ford. Then there are the moments of amusingly uncynical honesty, as when Stein and Toklas met Ernest and Hadley and “forgave us for being in love and being married—time would fix that.” The continued currency of that useless expression the lost generation becomes even more inexplicable when it is traced to a stupid remark made by Gertrude Stein’s garage manager, and such quotable fatuity, however often consecrated by repeated usage, is always worth following to its source. Most of all, though, I believe that A Moveable Feast serves the purpose of a double nostalgia: our own as we contemplate a Left Bank that has since become a banal tourist enclave in a Paris where the tough and plebeian districts are gone, to be replaced by seething Muslim banlieues all around the periphery; and Hemingway’s at the end of his distraught days, as he saw again the “City of Light” with his remaining life still ahead of him rather than so far behind.

Moon - Movie Review

Nothing opened this weekend worth seeing so we scoured the listings for something obscure we could see and found Moon., a nifty little piece of sci-fi that's easy to overlook in all of the hullabaloo that's the summer movie season. Nothing spectacular in the sense of fx but a think-piece that moves deliberately along as it explores the loneliness of a the sole worker at a moon-based mining facility. The reason for his hallucinations becomes clear pretty quickly so even though it's a twist, it's not the point of the movie. Sam Rockwell gives a good performance where it's pretty much just him on the screen for the entire movie. An extended Twilight Zone episode? Could be. But at 97 minutes, it's not too bloated. This is what sci-fi used to be like before Star Wars came along and changed everything. I'm glad we saw it in the theatre but it'd make a good DVD rental when it comes out this Fall. A good one.

Changing "A Moveable Feast"

Not everyone is excited as I am about the new edition of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast." A. E. Hotchner weighs in:

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.”

Scribner’s involvement with this bowdlerized version should be examined as it relates to the book’s actual genesis, and to the ethics of publishing.

I'll have more to say about this later but to be clear, I'm excited about this new edition not because I think it restores Hemingway's true vision but because it gives me a chance to re-visit the book and read some new Hemingway prose. I'll save my conclusions about whether it's a better book than the original for later.

Hemingway's 2nd Paris Apartment

113 rue Notre Dames de Champs. Or thereabouts.



I couldn't find the actual number - I found 117 and 115 but I didn't find a 113 or any kind of commemoration that the place had once Hemingway and his wife. It was supposed to be across from a saw mill, of all places, and he describes having to leave through a bakery. Another poor neighborhood they lived in then but it looks like a charming place today.