Hemingway's Feast Re-Edited

On NPR yesterday, Maureen Corrigan announced the publication of a new version of Hemingway's memoir, this one titled A Moveable Feast: The Restored Version. She says "remixed" would be a more accurate word than "restored."

I haven't seen the new version yet, but apparently Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway's second wife, gets an easier treatment this time.

"Understandably," says Corrigan, "Pauline's descendants never liked how she lives on in literary posterity and so her grandson, Sean Hemingway, encouraged by his uncle, Patrick Hemingway (Pauline's son) edited this so-called 'restored' edition of A Moveable Feast in which the anti-Pauline sections are muffled and shuffled and some new minor chapters have been added."

It is very understandable that Pauline's family would want to retrieve her memory from Ernest's poison pen. So now I'm wondering if Sean Hemingway considered Scott Fitzgerald's portrait as well. When Ernest was aiming to publish The Torrents of Spring, a satirical kick in the nuts to Sherwood Anderson, Pauline and Scott cheered him on, even though (as first wife Hadley said at the time) it might be a kind of rotten thing to do to a good friend. According to biographies, they thought it was hilarious and should be published. Later on, Pauline was appalled to find that she'd been dumped. And when Scott got kicked, he wrote to Ernest and asked, "Please lay off me in print." So, it seems to me, if one of them got a re-filtered portrait in the book, maybe the other one would also be considered.

Gertrude Stein was treated "downright viciously," as Corrigan says. But she was well able to land a steel-toed sandal squarely in Hemingway's groin, in their own time. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she called him "yellow." She got him good.