In Search of Lost Books Page 3

  Self-censorship, erasures, pre-emptive redactions: the spectre of the stocks and of the gallows hung constantly above their heads.

  In England, the social climate regarding homosexuality was such that even in the middle of the twentieth century, John Murray (I can’t tell which one this time) allowed the Byron scholar Leslie Marchand to access his firm’s archive only on condition that he would make no reference to this aspect of the poet’s life. Only in his biography of Byron published in the 1970s was he able to make some vague reference to his sexual preferences – and only then because finally, in 1967 (not until then!), homosexual acts between consenting adults had been decriminalized in the United Kingdom.

  We have already touched on the fact that Byron was careful to conceal behind a licit – or at any rate heterosexual – relationship, the other kind that dare not speak its name. Even in Manfred, the work that perhaps deals most directly with the impossibility of living freely with one’s desires, Byron dramatizes that impossibility by resorting to the metaphor of incestuous love. The kind, that is, that he had for his half-sister Augusta, and would use to conceal the real reasons behind the break-up of his marriage.

  The writer and poet Franco Buffoni has devoted a novel to retelling the story of the author of Don Juan. Published a few years ago, Byron’s Servant is narrated from the point of view of a manservant who gives an account of his master’s life, filling in the gaps left by the Memoirs. Although as he says at one point:

  […] I have read my master’s Memoirs from start to finish, every word of them: my only regret is that I did not secretly copy them, thus saving them from disaster. Only my memory of them remains. I am able, undoubtedly, to relate the facts – but alas not to reconstruct the style of my Lord. And in literature, as is well known, style is everything.

  Buffoni helps me to understand, amongst other things, the various types of relationship Byron was capable of weaving. He tells me that today we have the vocabulary to do so, distinguishing between sexual orientation and sexual behaviour. His behaviour was bisexual and extremely promiscuous, full of Don Giovanni-esque adventures (no wonder he wrote Don Juan, the mock-epic poem devoted to the figure of the all-conquering seducer) with aristocratic women and wenches – from ‘La Fornarina’ in Venice (his housekeeper as well as his mistress) to countesses such as Teresa Gamba Guiccioli (despite being secretly infatuated with her brother) – with young men and prostitutes. And his behaviour was the same wherever he went. Whether it was in the Ottoman Empire, which he would fight against in Greece, or in Albania; whether in Italy or Malta: there was always an opportunity for his compulsive collecting of liaisons of every type. But his orientation, his true love, was always for very young men: from one of the first, John Edleston, to the last, Lukas Chalandritsanos, whom he met during his Greek adventure and who, when faced with the imminent death of the poet, fled with money intended to pay soldiers engaged in the rebellion.

  Now that we can read Byron’s letters, at least in part, it seems clear that his deepest emotions were always elicited by male figures. But it is also true, for reasons already alluded to, that as long as he was in England he was not only subject to censorship but to self-censorship, as seen in the changes made to the diaries. His circumspection when writing the letters extended to the use of coded allusions in Latin and Greek, and to elisions designed to confound all but their intended recipient.

  This is why, when he felt safe in Italy and his amorous exertions were at their peak, he was able to allow himself the freedom to write his Memoirs, almost as if he were bringing a phase of his life to a close, perhaps the one in which he had been happiest. Though it could hardly be said that he possessed there, like the longed-for woman in his poem She Walks in Beauty:

  A mind at peace with all below

  A heart whose love is innocent.

  The afflictions of the heart that he would subsequently experience in the wake of the Venetian period would not be the same; his physical deterioration would undermine his capacity to seduce, and his vital energies would be directed towards the destined-to-fail struggle for Greek independence.

  Let’s return to the office of his publisher, on that day in May 1824. A May that was unseasonably cold and wet.

  Thomas Moore still puts up a fight, seeking to prevent the work written by his colleague and friend from being fed into the fire: what amounts to condemnation to a second death, it seems to him. But by now he is alone in defending it.

  I would like to have been there by his side. To have invited the people gathered there to consider a quite different proposal: by all means put the text away somewhere under lock and key, on condition that it should not see daylight for a hundred or even two hundred years. But don’t destroy it. The right to protect individuals is sacrosanct, but so is the need to preserve works of literature: the imperatives can converge and be compatible, if you only want them to. Byron had made sure that these Memoirs would reach his publisher and I can hardly believe, as some have argued, that he did so primarily in order to get back at his ex-wife. He wanted them to be survive and to be published: his will should be respected!

  But I am not there, and the others only have Moore left to convince.

  In order to achieve this they offer to assign to him the first, authorized biography of his friend. He will even be allowed to paraphrase parts of the Memoirs, and to go so far as to cite extracts (though when he was to do so, certain terms deemed too risqué would be hidden by asterisks), just as long as he excluded even the vaguest reference to same-sex relationships. In the end Moore gives in and allows himself to be bought, though in his case not for money, as it had been for Byron’s publisher. The biography will come out in 1830.

  And so the bundle of papers ends up in John Murray’s fireplace. It is hard to imagine which one of those present would have had the courage to feed them into the flames. Not Murray himself, who had returned the manuscript. It is unlikely to have been the pusillanimous Hobhouse. We can dismiss the idea that the task was given to a woman to perform. Thomas Moore would not have accepted such a role: we can imagine him leaving the room, unable to witness the destruction. It is possible that the task fell in the end to a subordinate office worker, an ordinary and unwitting employee of the publishing house. Or alternatively to the legal representative of the author’s widow, someone who was sure to have secretly rejoiced in the act.

  What is beyond doubt, unfortunately, is that in May 1824 Byron’s Memoirs were lost for ever.

  Paris, 1922:

  Memory Is the Best Critic

  SHOULD WE SIMPLY TRUST WRITERS when they claim that something of theirs has disappeared; that complete or nearly finished novels or short stories have been lost in outlandish circumstances, making it necessary for them to be started over again from scratch?

  There are so many stories of this type, so similar in their fundamentals, that we are inclined to question them. Like Doubting Thomases of literature, we find ourselves requiring some tangible proof, or at the very least eyewitness accounts dating back to the period in which the supposed event took place.

  And what should we think if the blame for the loss is attributed to a spouse? To a first wife, for instance, who was to be followed by another three wives and who therefore no longer seems worth defending? Especially since, in the circumstances of this case, she seems to be the perfect scapegoat?

  Yet what if the writer in question, if not exactly known to be a blagueur, is nevertheless renowned for projecting an image of himself as being beyond the pale, lost between wars and love affairs and travels? Would it not be advisable to take his account with a pinch of salt?

  But instead of asking so many questions beforehand, it is probably better just to tell the story, and see what comes of it.

  We are in Paris, towards the end of 1922, and we are dealing with a story about a suitcase. It will not be the only time that what is about to occur will do so in the course of this book. This particular suitcase is where it is meant to be just before departure: on an overh
ead rack in a train standing in the Gare du Lyon. But the woman who has put it there is suddenly overcome by such an irresistible thirst that she leaves her compartment and gets down to quickly grab a bottle of Evian. And when she gets back on board, the case has vanished.

  That suitcase contains all of the first attempts at fiction, including an entire novel, by one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway, and the woman from whom it was stolen was his first wife, Hadley Richardson.

  It is Hemingway himself who tells the tale writing that ‘My Old Man’ – the story that Edward O’Brien included in the annual Best American Short Stories, bending the rules to do so since it had not been previously published – was one of only two texts to have survived after everything he’d written had been stolen along with Hadley’s suitcase at the station. She had decided to bring his manuscripts with her, so that he could continue working on them while they were holidaying in the mountains. In that suitcase, according to Hemingway, she had placed everything: the manuscripts, the typewritten versions, and all the carbon copies as well. ‘My Old Man’ survived only because he had sent it to an editor who’d returned it together with a letter of rejection. This copy of the story was recovered from the pile of unopened mail Hadley had left in Paris. The only other text to have survived this theft was ‘Up in Michigan’, a story Hemingway had given to Gertrude Stein to read and, receiving from her such a negative response – she deemed it to be inaccrochable, as if it were a painting that should not be hung – filed away separately at the bottom of a drawer.

  After the incident on the train, he travelled down from Switzerland to Italy, and submitted ‘My Old Man’ to O’Brien in Rapallo, where he was living at the time. But let’s turn to Hemingway’s own account of the scene:

  It was a bad time and I did not think I could write any more then, and I showed the story to him as a curiosity, as you might show, stupidly, the binnacle of a ship you had lost in some incredible way, or as you might pick up your booted foot if it had been amputated after a crash and make some joke about it. Then, when he read the story, I saw he was hurt far more than I was. I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She cried and cried and could not tell me. I told her that no matter what the dreadful thing was that had happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was alright and not to worry. We would work it out. Then, finally, she told me. I was sure she could not have brought the carbons too and I hired someone to cover for me on my newspaper job, I was making good money then at journalism, and took the train for Paris. It was true alright and I remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true. That was over now and Chink had taught me never to discuss casualties so I told O’Brien not to feel so badly. It was probably good for me to lose early work and I told him all that stuff you feed the troops. I was going to start writing stories again I said and, as I said it, only trying to lie so that he would not feel so badly, I knew that it was true.

  This is how Hemingway tells it many years after the event, in A Moveable Feast, an incomplete memoir written towards the end of his life and published posthumously. And it almost seems in this version of events as if Hadley and O’Brien were the ones who had been most affected by the loss. Much more so than the writer himself. But that reference to the conviction that he would never be able to write again? It shows the extent to which it had been, in truth, a really traumatic event for Hemingway.

  Hadley Richardson, a young woman from Saint Louis, was twenty-eight when she met a young Hemingway barely into his twenties. With her square face and reddish hair, she was not conventionally beautiful. Yet when he evokes her in these pages written towards the end of his life, she represents for Hemingway everything he had lost during the course of the years and had not been able to recover with any of his subsequent wives: something much more valuable than the stolen papers. The story he had decided to relate was not just about a suitcase full of manuscripts which had been stolen from a railway station. It was about the apprenticeship of a writer: pages and pages that had disappeared in the space of a few minutes, with no hope of ever finding them again. Even with your whole life still ahead of you, this is a hard blow to take, since until you are sure of your vocation any such incident might turn out to be enough to make you give up.

  I have already mentioned the degree of caution necessary when dealing with memoirs written years after the event – but A Moveable Feast actually derived from a series of notebooks that, together with a number of other things, Hemingway had put into two trunks and left at the Paris Ritz at the end of the thirties. They were returned to him in November 1956, when the trunks were discovered in storage by the hotel manager – and the fact that the published memoir was underwritten by these contemporary diaries allows us to give it more credence. It is surely also worth pointing out here that Hemingway did have a marked tendency to lose or to forget things…

  During the period when the suitcase was lost, Hemingway was living in Lausanne and working as the European correspondent for the Toronto Star. The texts Hadley had wanted to bring to him were part of an attempt to find out if he was capable of writing fiction in parallel with his work as a journalist, and to see if such writing might form part of his future career.

  Of all the stories I cover in this book, Hemingway’s is certainly the one I am inclined to take most lightly, since the lost pages do not represent the irreparable destruction of something that could never be rewritten – but simply a beginning that came to a bad end. And it is always possible that a lost beginning might be followed by another and better one.

  Nevertheless, for Hemingway it represented a real tragedy, ushering in the end of his youth and the beginning of a period of uncertainty as to what might follow. The illusory hope that Hadley might only have taken some of the material, and that in their home in Paris carbon copies might still be found reveals the panic he felt at the time, and the seriousness of the situation. Yet Hadley, in her haste before leaving, had indeed bundled together all of his papers, without making any kind of selection. Discriminating between them was something that could be done by her husband when she caught up with him.

  It appears that Hemingway advertised a reward for the return of his suitcase. It was obvious that whilst for him the contents of that case represented the fruits of more than three years’ labour, for a thief they would be just so much useless paper. But nothing came of it. Evidently the thief did not read notices in newspapers. The suitcase was never recovered.

  These first attempts at fiction were apparently marked by flaws, in particular by an excess of lyricism, according to certain allusions Hemingway made to them in retrospect, and if we are to set any store by Gertrude Stein’s reaction to ‘Up in Michigan’. If we consider how every sheet or scrap of paper of his has been deemed publishable since his death, it is possible to conclude that in some cases it can be fortuitous if certain unpublished apprentice writings are lost. But the fact remains that at the time they disappeared, when he was uncertain whether he would ever write anything other than journalism, the theft of the suitcase had the potential to be completely destabilizing.

  That the loss for Hemingway was indeed a real and even traumatic one is evidenced by a letter he wrote shortly afterwards, in January 1923, to Ezra Pound:

  I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenilia?… You, naturally, would say “Good” etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood. 3 years on the damn stuff.

  And in fact Pound in his reply, ignoring his friend’s plea not to put a positive spin on the loss, characterized it as an act of God and advised him to use his recollection of the work – to recover from it what was worth recovering, since ‘memory is the best critic’. But is memory really the best critic? Is it really possible to remember in its entirety something you have written but no longer have to hand? It is one thing to recall a sensation, an idea, a phrase – quite another t
o reproduce page after page of what was actually written, perhaps arduously enough in the first place. Correcting, rereading, finally managing to hit the mark: who is ever in a position to completely recover such a process simply by remembering it?

  Besides, if there was an entire novel amongst the lost work, as there was according to Hemingway in A Moveable Feast – ‘the first novel that I had written’ – how could resorting to memory possibly begin to suffice?

  Yet the fact is that this novel had not been going well. It was drenched with ‘facile adolescent lyricism’, and therefore it was ‘a good thing that it had been lost’. At least this is how Hemingway would remember it a decade later, eventually agreeing with Pound. It was quite a different novel that he would go on to write – Fiesta, published in 1926 – and it would take him a good while to complete.

  If you are strong enough and in robust health – albeit frequently hungry for want of funds to purchase even a good meal, as Hemingway was in these years – then anything is possible, everything can be recovered, even if it means starting over again and reinventing from scratch.

  It is likely therefore that the upset was indeed more significant for Hadley, since she could not have known for certain that her husband would start writing again, even if she was the one who in these years had believed unwaveringly in his talent, supporting him throughout the course of his apprenticeship. It was not Hadley who had the inner strength to resolve that everything could not only begin again but could actually do so for the better.

  Perhaps Hemingway reflected on this when he again came into possession of those old notebooks discovered by the manager of the Ritz in Paris, and on rereading them rediscovered the flavour of those years, of the youth that had gone forever, as well as the wife who had been abandoned decades ago and who now seemed to be the weak link, the guilty one – but also the primary victim of these events.