Posthumous changes

The Clarion Content's Pop Culture editor has not yet read Ernest Hemingway's, A Moveable Feast, though ironically a painter we know had just been encouraging us to do so. The book was first published in 1964. It is a memoir of the times Hemingway spent in Paris in the 1920s, eating, drinking and living. He was part of a group of well known American expatriate writers. Among the prominent people who make an appearance in the book are Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, Pascin, John Dos Passos, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

Now, according to Hemingway's good friend A.E. Hotchner writing in the New York Times, Scribner's publishing has conspired with Hemingway's grandson to create a sanitized, bastardized, disnified version of the book. Hotchner says in a Times opinion piece,

"The grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix...[apparently] he doesn’t like what the original said about his grandmother, Hemingway’s second wife."

Hotchner, an author and playwright himself, strenuously objects to the new truncated version and Scribner's willingness to conspire in such deceptive editing. As he so eloquently puts it,

"I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this “restored edition.” With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in A Moveable Feast about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor.

All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work."

The Clarion Content heartily agrees. It was bad enough to authorize a sequel to Gone with the Wind long after Margaret Mitchell and worse yet to speculate on how Dune would have ended when Frank Herbert died in the middle of the series, but to change something that was patently published as non-fiction is far worse. Scribner should be ashamed!