What’s up with publishing? It’s just been a few weeks ago that Kindle owners awoke to find out that the George Orwell books they’d purchased had been repossessed in the dead of night. They received refunds, of course, but still– if they wanted Orwell, and they bought Orwell, they probably expected they’d be able to keep the books! However, that’s not the subject du jour.
I just learned that Scribner has published a new, cut-and-paste version of A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I’m not a huge Papa fan, but this is one book that I love. I first met it nearly 30 years ago in Freshman Comp at Cal State L.A. (thank you, Prof. Clarence Sandelin!), and have re-read it and assigned it to students many times since. It evokes the expatriate scene in early 20th-century Paris like few other books can, and the Fitzgerald episode is wickedly funny.
However it turns out that one of Hemingway’s grandsons thought he could do it better.
According to an op-ed piece by A. E. Hotchner in the New York Times, the grandson “doesn’t like what the original said about his grandmother, Hemingway’s second wife.” Well, really– as if his opinion should trump Heminway’s! He claims that that the original version was “cobbled…together from shards of an unfinished work” and has removed sections and replaced them with writings he preferred. He also relegated ten chapters to an appendix (perhaps Scribner balked at their wholesale removal). Hotchner, who knew Hemingway well and played a significant part in the publication of A Moveable Feast, refutes the notion of a “cobbled-together” work, with time and event citations supporting the notion that Hemingway had written what he wanted to write.
In a June 28, 2009 article, Motoko Rich presents the grandson’s point of view, and describes more fully what was added and subtracted. Although it’s nice to have access to hitherto unpublished material, the fact remains that allowing classics to be posthumously sliced and diced seems to set a bad precedent. Hotchner accurately states, “All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them.” Hemingway was noted for “editing the past” (Jacqueline Tournier-Courbin, author of “Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast’: The Making of Myth,” quoted in Rich), but I’m not so sure that I like the idea of having his heirs edit it for him.
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