Literary quarterly to debut Hemingway story from 1956

NEW YORK — 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 II-era fiction appears this week in the summer edition of the Strand magazine, a literary quarterly that has released obscure works by Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck and others.

“Hemingway’s deep love for his favorite 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.

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.” The Spanish Civil War inspired his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” He was both soldier and correspondent during World War II and was on hand in Paris in August 1944 for the liberation from Nazi occupation.

“A Room on the Garden Side” takes place in the Ritz hotel (Hemingway liked to say that he liberated the Ritz bar) and is narrated by a Hemingway stand-in called Robert who shares the author’s own nickname: Papa. Robert and his entourage drink wine, quote from Baudelaire and debate “the dirty trade of war.”

Hemingway left numerous works unpublished at the time of his suicide, in 1961.

In August 1956, he told publisher Charles Scribner Jr. that he had completed five World War II stories: “A Room on the Garden Side,” “The Cross Roads,” ”Indian Country and the White Army,” “The Monument,” and “The Bubble Reputation.” Until now, only “The Cross Roads” had been widely seen.

“I suppose (the stories) are a little shocking since they deal with irregular troops and combat and with people who actually kill people,” Hemingway told Scribner. “Anyway, you can always publish them after I’m dead.”

The Associated Press file Novelist Ernest Hemingway appears in 1950 at his country home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. Strand magazine said Thursday that “A Room on the Garden Side,” a World War II story written by Hemingway in 1956, appears in the summer edition.