HEMINGWAY WAR STORY SEES PRINT FOR FIRST TIME
ARoomOnTheGardenSide has everything Papa’s fans love
By 1956, Ernest Hemingway was in a free fall. Once transformative and captivating, his short, simple staccato style that remade US writing decades before had gone stale. It was now emulated by numerous authors. Lost in a literary rut, he became a caricature of his super-macho characters. He dodged sniper’s bullets in France, chased wild animals in Africa and tried to outrun fame.
That summer, Hemingway found inspiration for his fiction in his adventures years earlier as a correspondent in World War II. He wrote five short stories about the war, he told his publisher, with a stipulation: “You can always publish them after I’m dead.”
Six decades later and long after his suicide in 1961, only one of those stories had been published — until last week. The newly published work, A Room On The Garden Side, is a roughly 2,100-word story told in the first person by an American writer named Robert just after Allied soldiers liberated Paris from the Nazis in August 1944.
There is little doubt that Robert is based on the author himself. The scene from the title is a garden-view room at the Ritz, the luxury hotel in Paris on the Place Vendôme that Hemingway adored and claimed to have “liberated” in the war. Soldiers in the story call Robert by the writer’s nickname, Papa. There are other signs, too: exclusive magnums of Champagne, doting service from the hotelier and discussions about books and writers and the trappings of celebrity.
“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,” said Andrew F. Gulli, the managing editor of The Strand Magazine, the literary quarterly that published the story.
While the short story had never been released to the reading public, it was not entirely unknown. The manuscript — 15 pages written in pencil — has been stored for decades in the permanent Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Hemingway scholars have studied and written about A Room On The Garden Side and the four other works in the series, including Black Ass At The Crossroads, the only other story that had been published.
About a year ago, Gulli said, he asked the Hemingway estate for permission to print the story in Strand Magazine, which mostly publishes new mystery stories but also unpublished pieces by well-known writers. In November, it published an uncovered short story by Raymond Chandler, best known for his gritty detective tales.
“It would be easy to create a small collection of unpublished works and sell a ton of copies, but they’ve been so successful with the Hemingway brand by selectively knowing when and how to publish these little gems,” Gulli said, referring to the administrators of the estate.
Kirk Curnutt, a board member of the Hemingway Society, wrote an afterword in the magazine noting that the piece “contains all the trademark elements readers love in Hemingway” and captures “the importance of Paris”.
“The war is central, of course, but so are the ethics of writing and the worry that literary fame corrupts an author’s commitment to truth,” Curnutt wrote.
If you prefer to read the story yourself first, you might want to stop here.
The narrative takes place during an evening in the hotel room near the end of the war. Some French soldiers dismantle and clean their weapons. They talk about leaving Paris the next morning to continue fighting.
Robert sips on 1937 Perrier-Jouët Brut from fine glassware, reads books and watches the sunlight bounce off trees in the garden. Surrounded by war, he enjoys luxury and personal comfort in one of the hotel’s finer rooms. But he yearns to leave the room and walk out of the Ritz.
The autobiographical elements are clear. As the war ended, Hemingway was in the middle of a drought writing new fiction, after the success of For Whom The Bell Tolls, published in 1940. It had been nearly 20 years since he wrote his early novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms.
In 1950, he wrote the widely lampooned Across The River And Into The Trees. Then, in 1952, he published The Old Man And The Sea, a global success that destroyed the last remnants of his privacy. Shortly after he finished A Room On The Garden Side,
Hemingway told a friend that he hated the disruptive nature of fame.
“Probably I would do better never to publish anything else,” Hemingway wrote to his friend Harvey Breit, the editor of The New York Times Book Review. “Simpler to leave stuff for when I am dead.”
Hemingway’s deep love for his favourite city is on full display, as are the hallmarks of his prose