Having just celebrated the 74th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris, another celebration of Paris took place earlier this month when The Strand Magazine ran a previously unpublished story by Ernest Hemingway with post-war Paris as the focal point.
A Room on the Garden Side is “an earthy, poignant sketch that takes place in Hemingway’s favorite hotel in Paris, the Ritz, at the end of World War II,” writes Strand Managing Editor Andrew F. Gulli. “The narrator, Robert (also nicknamed Papa) and a group of irregular soldiers who fought their way into the city, newly liberated from the Nazis, are due to leave Paris the next day.”
The narrator, explains Gulli, is in a room chatting books, life, love, death, and drinking with a bunch of soldiers. There is laughter and some jocularity, but beneath that, he says, “there is some pathos for the soldiers who didn’t make it to the Ritz.”
Gulli writes, “Hemingway’s deep love for his favorite city as it is emerging from Nazi occupation is on full display, as are the hallmarks of his prose.”
Gulli says scholars have known of this work’s existence for years, with it having been catalogued in the Library of Congress and the John F. Kennedy Library. Gulli sought permission from the Hemingway estate to publish the story.
Hemingway apparently had mentioned the story (and others) in a letter to Charles Scribner in 1956: “I suppose they are a little shocking since they deal with irregular troops and combat and with people who actually kill people…Anyway, you can always publish them after I’m dead.”
In an Afterward to the published short story, Kirk Curnutt, a board member of The Ernest Hemingway Society, writes, “Fans of Ernest Hemingway well know the importance of Paris to his work. Arriving in the City of Light in late 1921 along with his new bride, Hadley Richardson, the aspiring writer immersed himself in the Left Bank’s expatriate community of artists and wordsmiths intent on reinventing literature.
Under the tutelage of two very different teachers who couldn’t stand each other—Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein—Hemingway learned the importance of le mot juste (“the one and only correct word to use”) and rhetorical effects such as rhythm and repetition.”
The Strand has a solid track record of publishing unpublished works by literary legends, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, H.G. Wells, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Joseph Heller.
The Hemingway story, said Gulli, “has turned into a publishing phenomenon with worldwide appeal. We’ve had orders from Morocco to Iceland, from Argentina to the Ukraine.”
Curnutt adds, “In many ways, the posthumously published nonfiction work provided a tonic for the shock of the shotgun blast that ended his life while cementing his myth.”
A Room on the Garden Side is available now from The Strand.
