Hemingway’s books full of print errors, says academic
Difficulty in deciphering handwriting of American war journalist and novelist led to spelling inaccuracies
ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S writings are littered with inaccuracies introduced by editors and typists, according to a study by a British academic.
Mistakes in the author’s books are “into the hundreds”, according to Professor Robert W Trogdon, of Kent State University, Ohio, who believes that Hemingway’s works require revisions.
Save for two works, no Hemingway book has been edited to preserve what the author actually intended, Prof Trogdon said.
A misspelling of “bat” for “hat” in Hemingway’s 1933 short story A Way You’ll Never Be is one such example of the seemingly trivial but numerous errors appearing in the Nobel Prize-winning author’s body of work.
The story, set in Italy during the First World War, features a scene of the protagonist Nick Adams explaining to Italian soldiers how to fish.
Hemingway originally wrote: “But I must insist that you will never gather a sufficient supply of these insects for a day’s fishing by pursuing them with your hands or trying to hit them with a hat.”
In an edition of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s 1926 modernist novel about disillusioned expatriates in postwar France and Spain, the name of the bullfighter “Marcial Lalanda” is misspelled as “Marcial Salanda”.
Editors and typesetters apparently had difficulty distinguishing between the author’s handwritten “L” and “S”, Prof Trogdon told The Guardian. The similarity in the author’s “q” and “g” also caused trouble for editors, with the Parisian restaurant Cigogne being mistakenly called “Ciqoque”.
Other errors made by typesetters with punctuations and verb tenses also appear.
One sentence from Hemingway’s
1933 short story The Light of the World reads: “She just keep on laughing and shaking” instead of: “She just kept on laughing and shaking.”
In his study Hemingway and Textual Studies, Prof Trogdon writes: “For a variety of reasons, his novels, short stories, and nonfiction are riddled with errors.”
Prof Kirk Curnutt, co-editor of The New Hemingway Studies, said: “Something as simple as the difference between
Save for two works, no Hemingway book has been edited to preserve what the author actually intended
a ‘b’ and an ‘h’ can change the entire meaning … It is amazing to understand how fragile texts are.”
Previously unpublished letters from Hemingway to his editors reveal how the author refused to allow changes to be made to his works after submitting them. Professor Sandra Spanier, the general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, told The Guardian: “[They] show that Hemingway was exacting about every detail of his writing.”
In a letter to the associate editor of Cosmopolitan, Hemingway warned against making any changes to his story After the Storm, which would appear in the May 1932 magazine: “It is understood if you publish it there are to be no changes in text or title – no additions – no cuts. Cannot submit it on any other basis.”