Thursday, July 02, 2009
Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast"
The New York Times has a story about Hemingway's classic posthumous work detailing his early days in Paris. It's being recast and edited by Hemingway's grandson, Seán Hemingway.
From the story...
Early next month, Scribner, now an imprint of Simon & Schuster, 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.
“I think this edition is right to set the record straight,” said Seán Hemingway, 42, who said Mary cut out Hemingway’s “remorse and some of the happiness he felt and his very conflicted views he had about the end of his marriage.”
Scholars are clear that this new edition should not be regarded as definitive any more than the 1964 version. “This book can’t become a sacred text,” said Ann Douglas, a professor of literature at Columbia University, adding that “there can be no final text because there is not one.”
Indeed, scholars and aficionados have long known that Hemingway did not consider his Paris memoir complete at the time of his suicide in 1961. He wrote a letter — though it was not sent until after his death — to his publisher, Charles Scribner, that “it is not to be published the way it is and it has no end.”
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