'A Room on the Garden Side': Hemingway's Unpublished Liberation of Paris
1994; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0039-3789
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoParis change! mais rien dans ma melancholie N'a bouge! palais neufs, echafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allegorie, Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. - Le Cygne, Charles Baudelaire Paris changes . . . But in sadness like mine Nothing stirs - new buildings, old Neighborhoods turn to allegory, And memories weigh than stone. - Swan, trans. Richard Howard On 23 July 1956, Ernest Hemingway wrote to Harvey Breit that he had written two short stories . . . about old days with [Free French] irregulars and was planning to write maybe 3 or 4 more (Letters 866). On 14 August of same year, he reported to Charles Scribner, Jr. that he had finished five stories about World War II: Room on Garden Side, Cross Roads, Indian Country and White Army, Monument, and Bubble Reputation (Letters 868). Hemingway defended stories' realistic treatment of irregular troops and combat, of people who actually kill other people, and their soldierly language (when one man calls another a cocksucker he calls him a cocksucker). suppose they are a little shocking, he told always cautious Scribner; Anyway you can always publish them after I'm dead (Letters 868). Yet today, than 30 years after Hemingway's death, only one of these five stories has appeared in print (The Cross Roads, retitled Black Ass at Crossroads and posthumously published in so-called Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway). Although World War II stories were written as a group and can be read together as they involve continuing adventures of same characters, each has considerable individual merit. I would like to single out one story, still unpublished Room on Garden Side, for consideration here.(1) Room on Garden Side is set at Ritz Hotel in just-liberated Paris of August 1944. The story is told in first person by an American writer commanding a small cadre of irregular French troops. The narrator is named Robert, but his men call him Papa, and there is little doubt that he is a thinly disguised version of Hemingway himself (Baker 408-18). The characters Onie and Marcel bear names of French partisans who accompanied Hemingway on road from Rambouillet, and his American driver, Red Pelkey, also appears. Hotelier Charles Ritz and Colonel Andre Malraux play themselves. The tormented Claude probably has his origins in Jean Decan, a French resistance fighter twice arrested and tortured by Gestapo before joining Hemingway's men. Decan was probably singled out for a name change because French imprisoned him after war for collaboration with Nazis (Baker 419, 453, 459). Hemingway's liberation of Ritz, of course, is now legendary, and incident with Malraux recounted in story also took place, as evidenced by a June 1946 letter from Hemingway to Konstantin Simonov (Letters 607). Room on Garden Side is not simple autobiography, however, for actual events treated in story are carefully sculpted by rules of fiction. The Hemingway who had written Green Hills of Africa to see whether the shape of a country and pattern of a month's action could if truly presented, compete with a work of imagination was no stranger to this practice (Green Hills, Foreword). In fact, he was very much involved with it in late 1950s. In summer of 1956, he had just set aside an 800-page typescript of a still unpublished book about his 1954 safari. Still ahead of him was The Dangerous Summer, a near book-length account of Ordonez-Dominguin rivalry in Spain's bullrings. But despite its wartime setting, Room on Garden Side, a story about love and death, writing and not writing, a story about Paris and la recherche du temps perdu, has most in common with Hemingway's most masterful nonfiction novel - A Moveable Feast. In fact, Room on Garden Side can be viewed as a kind of five-finger exercise for A Moveable Feast. …
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