By 1956, Ernest Hemingway was in a free fall.
Once
transformative and captivating, his short, simple staccato style that
remade American writing decades before had gone stale. It was now
emulated by numerous authors. Lost in a literary rut, he became a
caricature of his super-macho characters. He dodged sniper’s bullets in
France, chased wild animals in Africa and tried to outrun fame.
That
summer, Hemingway found inspiration for his fiction in his adventures
years earlier as a correspondent in World War II. He wrote five short
stories about the war, he told his publisher, with a stipulation: “You
can always publish them after I’m dead.”
Six
decades later and long after his suicide in 1961, only one of those
stories had been published — until Thursday. The newly published work,
“A Room on the Garden Side,” is a roughly 2,100-word story told in the
first person by an American writer named Robert just after Allied
soldiers liberated Paris from the Nazis in August 1944.
There
is little doubt that Robert is based on the author himself. The scene
from the title is a garden-view room at the Ritz, the luxury hotel in
Paris on the Place Vendôme that Hemingway adored and claimed to have “liberated”
in the war. Soldiers in the story call Robert by the writer’s nickname,
“Papa.” There are other signs, too: exclusive magnums of champagne,
doting service from the hotelier and discussions about books and writers
and the trappings of celebrity.
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