Ernest Hemingway story from 1956 to be published for the first time
New York, Aug. 2: The themes and trappings are familiar for an Ernest Hemingway narrative: Paris, wartime, talk of books and wine and the scars of battle.
But the story itself has been little known beyond the scholarly community
for decades: A Room on the Garden Side, written in 1956, is being published for the first time. The brief, World War IIera fiction appears this week in the summer edition of The Strand Magazine, a literary quarterly which has released obscure works by Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck and others. “Hemingway’s deep love for his favourite city as it is just emerging from Nazi occupation is on full display, as are the hallmarks of his prose,” Strand managing editor Andrew F. Gulli wrote in an editorial note.
Kirk Curnutt, a board member of The Hemingway Society, contributed an afterword for the Strand, saying that “the story contains all the trademark elements readers love in Hemingway.”
“Steeped in talk of Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas, and featuring a long excerpt in French from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, the story implicitly wonders whether the heritage of Parisian culture can recover from the dark taint of fascism,” Curnutt wrote.
War was a longtime muse for Hemingway. He served as an ambulance driver during World War I, drawing upon his experiences for his classic novel A Farewell to Arms. — AP