'A Room on the Garden Side': Hemingway's unpublished liberation of Paris - Ernest Hemingway

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1994 by Susan F. Beegel

If celebrity had been a problem for Hemingway during his attempts to cover World War II, it had become a difficulty of monstrous proportions by 1956, when "A Room on the Garden Side" was written. In 1952, The Old Man and the Sea, published in Life magazine, sold nearly six million copies overnight. The novella's global popularity earned Hemingway the 1954 Nobel Prize, completing the destruction of his privacy. The author felt "overrun by journalists, photographers, and plain and fancy crazies" (843). In a September 1956 letter to Harvey Breit, Hemingway complains about autograph hunters and people naming their dogs Santiago, and remarks "Probably I would do better never to publish anything else. Simpler to leave stuff for when I am dead" (Letters 869).

Indeed, he published very little that he wrote after The Old Man and the Sea. In "The Art of the Short Story," written in 1959 and published posthumously, he boasts that he has 11 short stories written that he has not published (141, 143). Hemingway did not complete Islands in the Stream. Only fragments of The Dangerous Summer appeared during his lifetime, and with the exception of several segments printed posthumously in Sports Illustrated, the book-length account of his 1953-54 African safari remains largely unpublished today. He was, however, struggling to finish A Moveable Feast and making plans to publish it when he was overtaken by his final illness (Letters 916-17). Hemingway committed suicide on 2 July 1961.

Not publishing "A Room on the Garden Side" or the many other pages of manuscript written during the 1950s may have been his way of trying to abandon celebrity's comforts and distractions, of trying to leave the Paris of the Ritz when he should and have the Paris of Avenue des Gobelins the same again in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's final masterpiece. Finally, "A Room on the Garden Side" is "Dix his Avenue des Gobelins," a personal song, a charm sung by an aging writer lost in a hostile world, an artist's hope of finding again the warm-hearted old nurse that was Paris in the Twenties. American literature is fortunate that the charm worked, and that Hemingway was able to liberate Paris one last time in A Moveable Feast.

1 A penciled manuscript corrected in ink, and a carbon typescript of "A Room on the Garden Side" are housed respectively in Files 673a and 674 of the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library. With the exception of errors introduced by the typist, there is very little difference between them.

2 The Panzerfeust is an armor-piercing anti-tank weapon. In the short story, Charles Ritz asks how it works and receives a demonstration. There is humorous discussion about firing a round into the rival Georges V hotel.

3 Les Fleurs du Mal may well have been an important book for Hemingway in 1944. Certainly his second "Poem to Mary" shows traces of Baudelaire's influence in passages such as these:

They walked away from this we cannot state. And in them died this inner knowing that grows - fresher and lovelier than any rose. Manured by death and watered only with unshod tears until, this day, it flowers into this love and this compassion.