Naomi Wood
Falling for Pfife
Hemingway in Love: His Own Story
By A E Hotchner
Picador 192pp £14.99
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 3 – 1926–1929
By Rena Sanderson, Sandra Spanier & Robert W Trogdon (edd)
Cambridge University Press 750pp £30
Ernest Hemingway was sometimes a careless housekeeper of his own work. At the age of twenty-two, he famously lost his first novel on a train bound for Lausanne. In 1929, he left a cache of his notebooks at the Ritz; in the 1930s, he left drafts of old manuscripts at his favourite Key West bar. But for a writer as well known as Hemingway, nothing remains lost for long.
A E Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love is a memoir made from vanishing sources: it’s based on the author’s old ‘disintegrated’ tapes, as well as ‘excised portions’ of Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway, a biography part-bowdlerised by lawyers in 1966. Hemingway in Love juicily promises the stuff left out.
The problem is, [1pass]however, that in the half-century since Papa other biographers have not been so finicky about withholding details. Most of what is told in Hotchner’s book – Hemingway in love with two women in 1926 – has been told elsewhere. So the value of this work lies not so much in
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
literaryreview.co.uk
In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
literaryreview.co.uk
How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
literaryreview.co.uk