In a Trunk at the Hôtel Ritz 1930

In 1956, Ernest Hemingway was having lunch at the Hôtel Ritz with his friend A.E. Hotchner. Charles Ritz, the chairman of the hotel, came to their table and mentioned that there was a trunk in the hotel storage room that the author had left there in 1930.

Hemingway didn’t remember leaving it there 26 years ago. He did recall a custom-made Louis Vuitton trunk that he had and misplaced. After lunch, Hemingway opened the trunk and found it filled with clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting, fishing and skiing equipment, and letters. But it was some notebooks at the bottom of the trunk that excited Hemingway.

Hemingway had been journaling regularly when he and his first wife, Hadley, had lived in Paris in the 1920s. These journals covered those years when he was a poor, struggling writer hanging out with other expatriate artists and writers. The crowd included Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein, who would call them collectively "The Lost Generation."

Hemingway didn't jump into using the journals right away. He had them typed in 1957, and then started working on what he referenced as the “Paris book” over the next years. It turned out to be his last book.

His physical and mental health was declining and he fell into depressions and tried suicide, finally succeeding in ending it all in 1961.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life,
it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

His widow, Mary, arranged to have the memoir published posthumously. The publisher was calling it "Paris Sketches," which sounded like less-than-serious writing. Hotchner, who had been there when the trunk was opened, recalled that Hemingway had once referred to Paris as “a moveable feast,” and suggested that as a title. Mary agreed and A Moveable Feast became the book’s official title.

There were other posthumous books from the Hemingway estate that had been incomplete at his death, but A Moveable Feast was the book that was closest t finished at his death.

A revised version of the memoir was published in 2009 edited by Seán Hemingway, the author’s grandson from his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer. Seán had issues with some of the changes Mary Hemingway had made to the manuscript.

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money,
nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing
of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

Hemingway's book had a resurgence in popularity in Paris, after the November 2015 terrorist attack. Paris est une fête was selling as many as 500 copies a day and mourners left copies of the memoir along with flowers at informal memorials all around the Bataclan concert hall.

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light.

But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.
When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring,
it was as though a young person died for no reason.”

The Hemingway Patrol

Hemingway on Pilar

Today is the anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's birth on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, IL

Hemingway's longtime publisher, Scribner, reissued all his novels a few years ago and books continue to be published about him. The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats Aboard the Pilar was one I read a few summer ago. It is about that time in his life when he was itching to play a part in World War II.

Using his his own ship, the Pilar, which was designated by the military as a Q-Ship, he and his crew set out to monitor German submarine activity off Cuba and the Florida coast.I don't know exactly what anyone would have expected them to do if they actually encountered a sub with this fishing boat. There's a section of Islands in the Stream (the novel and the movie version) that deals with this period in his life.

Hemingway did get to be a war a war correspondent for Collier's magazine, and observed the D-Day invasion from offshore on a landing craft. (Apparently, his wife of that time, Martha Gellhorn, upstaged him by making it on shore on June 7 disguised as a nurse. I read more recently about his meetup with J.D. Salinger during that time.

I also reread A Moveable Feast which was re-released in a Restored Edition. It's not a novel but it is one of my favorite Hemingway books. When Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, the manuscript of this memoir wasn't finished. (No title, introduction, or final chapter.) and it wasn't published until 1964 after his fourth wife, Mary, and an editor put together the pieces.

It's about when he was young and writing in the Paris of the 1920s. When I first read it in college, I loved the talk about writing and Paris and the food and the drinking, but hated his unkind treatment of his "friend" F. Scott Fitzgerald who was another literary hero of mine.

Actually, he's also pretty rough on Gertrude Stein and Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife. He had it in for rich people then and he seemed still attached to his first wife Hadley.

In reading about this new edition, I discovered that the new editors are Pauline's grandson, Sean Hemingway, and his uncle, Patrick Hemingway (Pauline's son). I'm guessing that Pauline gets better treatment this time out, though I don't know if that was Ernest's intent.

On the Amazon website, they link to two pdf files of the original handwritten manuscript. I like this section that contains his idea about writing "one true sentence."

see the full pages

I know a number of people who really dislike Hemingway as a man and as a writer. Most of them are women who have issues with his macho image and his female characters. I have liked his writing, especially the short stories, since I was about 14 and wanted to be a writer.

I actually feel bad for Hemingway. I think he was really misunderstood. I think he became a victim of his own celebrity and began to play the role of Hemingway in the same way as other celebrities, like Marilyn Monroe.

He was a heavy drinker, an alcoholic in his later years, suffered from manic depression. He was actually given electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic which he blamed for his memory loss. It saddens me to think that for someone like him who loved to write, who needed to write, could not go on if he could not write.



Hemingway is buried in Ketchum, Idaho, but on a memorial outside town overlooking Trail Creek is a eulogy he actually wrote for a friend (Gene Van Guilder) but that applies well to his own life.

Best of all he loved the fall

The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods

Leaves floating on the trout streams

And above the hills

The high blue windless skies

Now he will be a part of them forever