Melville House Books

Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeffer

As one scholar has noted of one of Ernest Hemingway‘s most popular books, A Moveable Feast, “There can be no final text because there is not one.†That is, while Hemingway had begun to assemble his stray writings about his time in Paris into some order, he hadn’t come anywhere close to turning them into a book when he committed suicide in 1961. He even left behind a letter for his publisher, Charles Scribner, saying don’t publish it.

His widow, Mary Hemingway, disobeyed him three years later by editing his papers into the volume which is now one of the best-selling titles in the Hemingway library. 

But as a New York Times story by Motoko Rich reports, some family members were never happy with the editing of that book by the woman who was Hemingway’s fourth wife. Among them, the children of Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeffer. Says one of those children, Patrick Hemingway, “I thought the original edition was just terrible about my mother.” As Rich explains, the feeling is that Pfeffer comes off as “something of a wily predator, and it is Hemingway’s ‘bad luck’ that he falls for her.”

Now, yet another version of the book is about to be released, this one edited by a grandchild of Hemingway’s — and Pauline Pfeffer’s — named Seán Hemingway. Suffice it to say he has a different take on things. He tells Rich that Mary Hemingway edited out of the book her husband’s “very conflicted views” and especially “some of the happiness” he experienced with Pfeffer. “I think this edition is right to set the record straight,†he says.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.