A Removeable Feast
by CarolineErnest Hemingway friend-cum-memoirist and allaround talented good guy A.E. Hotchner has an ethically shocking editorial today. Apparently the new edition of Hemingway’s final (posthumous) book A Moveable Feast contains extensive edits by a family member:
[Hemingway's] 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.”
Hotchner presents a narrative about his friend Hemingway working on the book over time, sending manuscripts to his publisher, and so forth. The San Francisco Chronicle tells the story flatly without mention of the editorial wherewithal of son Patrick or grandson Sean Hemingway. The Boston Globe criticizes the rearrangement of and additions to the text but in a less pointed way.
So who has the higher ground? The children and grandchildren of Hemingway’s second wife, who began as a mistress and, Hemingway wrote in the original Moveable Feast, homewrecker? Or Hemingway’s peer who seeks to do honorably by his friend’s memory and legacy?
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