A young and hungry and happy writer forges his craft with thousands of hours in an unheated garret in Paris, creating a crisp new style that will be emulated by other Americans for essentially a century. He networks with other members of the Lost Generation until he becomes a celebrity, the most notable writer of his time and place. But the fame – and the booze – subsume the enormous talent, with shortening bits of brilliance as his hair whitens, as his beloved Cuba is closed off forever, as the clinical depression swallows him alive.
The triumph and tragedy of Ernest Hemingway is well-known lore. But little nuggets of Hemingwayana continue to be released to the mass market, packaged in different ways, over this half-century since he committed suicide by shotgun in 1961. The latest to make a splash is a previously unpublished short story which appears in the new issue of Strand Magazine. It’s entitled, unpromisingly, “A Room on the Garden Side,” and was written in 1956 – just a few years before his death.
Not one to leap at the unpublished works of great authors, I nevertheless bit on this one. (Example: an ex-girlfriend of mine, a huge To Kill a Mockingbird fan, who practically sobbed to me about the publication of that half-baked draft in 2015 they practically clawed from Harper Lee’s unwitting elderly hands – the version before Truman Capote retooled it as a kind of masterpiece. I callously told the ex-girlfriend I had warned her beforehand).
Hemingway has always been important to me. One of my first short stories to place in a contest was inspired by a visit I made to his grave as a teenager. I figured it would be nice to see something new, no matter the quality. My verdict: this story shows both the greatness and the decline in a really interesting way. Two and a half stars out of a possible four.
Primarily, I admired the little punchlines and some of the crisp dialogue, and was gratified to see it showed the master’s machinery was still in working order, like a tuned engine. Like in this back-and-forth on the legendarily-verbose Marcel Proust:
“Charley, where did Proust have the cork-lined room?”
“On the Rue Cambon side.”
“Cheap guy,” Red said.
“Who was Monsieur Proust?”
“Writer,” I said. “Very good.”
Some choice lines are saved for the end, like when he explains why he is part of the liberation force taking back France from the Nazis in 1944.
“I also loved France and Spain next to my own country. I loved other countries too but the debt was paid and I thought that the account was closed, not knowing the accounts are never closed.”
And another time, he takes great length to ridicule Andre Malraux, a pompous French writer who had the very-important rank of colonel in the story. But it’s that same pomposity which undermines Hemingway, too, in this story. He alludes to his importance commanding Allied troops, he makes a great show of his familiarity with some of the best 19th century French poetry, and he describes in great detail a night of rest between ostensible battles.
Even as it is well-crafted, there is a lack of the majestic that powered the early Hemingway stories – where even two young men sitting around a fire in Michigan talking about girls could seem to lasso an eternal truth and pin it down, like an entomologist’s presentation of butterflies.
Indeed, the problems lie entirely with where Hemingway points his powerful writing engine – and what he has it doing. Almost the entire story takes place in a hotel room, with soldiers drinking and talking, except for the narrator/Hemingway stand-in, who is reading Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and later walks the streets to allow a particularly poignant closing line about walking the Parisian streets. But to what effect? He had done all this before in his career, and done it better, all before the Great Depression.
To put this all in further historical context, Hemingway is waxing poetic about the liberation of the City of Light, but just as the Allies are peeling back the Nazi shroud across Europe, unearthing death camps and a story of barbarity and genocide which would change the way civilization needed to be understood. Indeed, the human story would never be the same, and Hemingway, writing more than ten years later, seems to be oblivious of the importance of events outside that hotel room. He sees only that Baudelaire book, and those bottles of champagne, and those adoring companions of his.
The choice of the title “A Room on the Garden Side” itself seems to imply that Hemingway is distancing himself from Proust and his room on the side nearest the street. He seems to identify instead with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. But it is clear from these final years that he had a lot more in common with the solipsistic navel-gazing of Proust than of the other two French writers.
Nevertheless, this interesting story is also the kind of writing which allowed the magic of the posthumous A Moveable Feast to be so clear-eyed about his youth and his craft, and the promise of what could be and would be.