Ernest Hemingway: The Writer's Life

When I prepared for my Ph.D. tests, the university required students to choose four major areas on which they would be judged through written and oral exams. As a poet, I selected three topics covering various periods in poetry: Elizabethan Lyric Poetry, Nineteenth Century Poetry, and Twentieth Century Poetry. However, for my fourth section I chose Ernest Hemingway and Modern American Fiction. That final choice resulted from advice that one should include a second genre as a change of pace in readings and as a way to make oneself more eligible for possible teaching positions. (Indeed, for similar reasons I completed an independent program in Film Studies.)

As it turns out, over the years some of my favorite courses to conduct have been my seminars on Hemingway, as well as related classes concerning William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The different rhythms of prose and the array of approaches in the narratives of fiction frequently offer to me a fresh perspective that later informs my views on various styles of poetry as well. In fact, snippets of scenes in the condensed short stories or the vignettes one finds in Hemingway’s writing sometimes resemble contemporary free verse or prose poem pieces.

However, on this date (July 21) that marks Hemingway’s birth in 1899, I am again reminded of the author but not by such concerns. Instead, I note the current controversy surrounding the release of a new version of A Moveable Feast by Hemingway’s publisher, Scribner—a text chronicling the author’s life and early writings in Paris that is listed as a “restored edition.” The debate concerning this volume can easily be seen in a couple of contrasting notices about the book’s appearance. In yesterday’s New York Times commentary, A. E. Hotchner, a close friend of Hemingway and author of books about the novelist, takes Scribner to task for its involvement, declaring the publisher has a duty, as “guardian of the books that authors entrust to them,” to preserve A Moveable Feast in the manner it was originally released. Although the book was published posthumously, Hotchner believes Hemingway’s intended work was maintained in the first edition since it did not differ from the pages he’d read about the writer’s life. He reports: Hemingway “gave me the completed manuscript of the Paris book to give to Scribner’s president, Charles Scribner Jr.”

The new version of A Moveable Feast has been edited by Sean Hemingway, the grandson of Ernest’s second wife, Pauline, who does not receive the most favorable treatment in the initial version. Indeed, in today’s issue of The Writer’s Almanac, the 1964 edition is described as having been fashioned by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, who “edited extensively the memoir manuscript, patching stuff together from various sources. She included things he'd explicitly stated that he didn't want published, and excluded other parts of his unfinished memoir manuscript.” The Writer’s Almanac aligns itself with Sean Hemingway, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, who is described as correcting the record for his grandmother, “a woman who was much maligned in the edition of the memoir edited by Mary.”

In opposition, Hotchner claims: “Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book.” He also suggests Mary did not create anything extra that the novelist did not wish to be included in his memoir. Instead, Hotchner labels the new book “a frivolous incursion.”

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

Apparently, readers will have to make up their own minds about this matter. Nevertheless, this debate and the newly edited version of A Moveable Feast should serve to spark interest in Hemingway once again, for both his writing and his life, which so many times seemed as dramatic or adventurous as those lives of the characters in the fictions he composed.

On his birth date, I’d prefer readers view another statement Hemingway presented about life and writing. In 1954 when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he informed the selection committee he could not attend the banquet to receive the honor due to health issues, and he issued a statement to be read at the Stockholm ceremonies by John C. Cabot, the United States Ambassador to Sweden:

Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.



No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.



It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.


Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.


For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.



How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.



I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.

Ernest Hemingway later recorded his speech, the audio of which is available.