Hemingway's Lost Stories - for the Better?

I have a fascination with the “lost Hemingway stories” — all the things he wrote prior to 1923 that were lost or stolen in a French train station, stories Hemingway called his juvenalia (sic), the stories he wrote as a young man. Lost to the ages. But were they any good? These would be stories he knocked out well before his style was set, before The Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms, before the short stories collected in A Moveable Feast.

There are those who wish that, one day, the lost suitcase will be found and we will finally get to read the Lost Hemingway Stories!

But think about it. Would you want to publish today the things you wrote as a teenager? (It’s not fair to say that. If you’re a teenager, the answer is probably ‘yes.’) Or let’s say, then, not a ‘teenager,’ but what you’d call your first attempts at writing a complete story? Most often, these are the things that are exciting at the time, but get stuck into a desk drawer or a hard drive and remain there. With good cause? Depends. Have you kept writing and gotten better? Are there any good ideas in those old stories that can be salvaged, plundered, or rewritten?

For the uninitiated: back in December, 1922, young Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley were living in Paris, France. He had gone to Switzerland on assignment for the Toronto Daily Star to cover a peace conference and met journalist/editor Lincoln Steffens, who liked his work and wanted to see more. Hem cabled his wife to bring his stories, everything he’d worked on for the past few years, to Lausanne for this opportunity. In quick work, Hadley gathered everything she could find, stories, carbons, everything in the pile, and got on the train for Switzerland. At the Paris station, but before departure, she stepped off to get a bottle of water, and when she returned, the case with the stories was gone. Stolen? Mistakenly taken by another passenger in a hurry? Taken by a porter who thought it was left behind and given to the station master? We’ll never know. Ernest was distraught by the news, to say the least. Hadley felt terrible about it for the rest of her life.

What was in there? All the stories he’d been working on since returning from the Great War, through his Kansas City and Chicago and Toronto newspaper days. Not the stories Hemingway wrote for high school — the ones we have were saved by the teachers and the school’s literary journal, not by him. But, then again, maybe? We don’t have a detailed list of the stories Hemingway took with him to Paris or those he wrote there prior to 1923.

The only real clue we have of what was lost is from the one story that his wife Hadley missed that day — “Up in Michigan” (another — “My Old Man” — was out being considered by a publisher, so that still exists, too). Gertrude Stein said “Up in Michigan” was unpublishable; many reviewers, at the time, hated it when it was eventually published. A scandalous story with sex (!) in it! Oh, my! Personally, I like it. It is what we would call today a New Adult story. It’s not his best, but I like his young Nick Adams stories set in Michigan. I think it likely the missing pieces were more coming-of-age stories, more hunting pieces, and Kansas City crime pieces. I think there might have been early versions of what became “Three Day Blow” and a couple of others.

For Hemingway’s career, it might have been a good thing that his early stories were lost. They made him start over, so to speak (he’d never stopped writing, though). He’d have to think over what was lost, if there was anything worth trying to reconstruct, or he’d just write them off and continue with his new stuff, which was likely written ‘better.’

Elsewhere on this blog, I talk about SE Hinton. She has two very early novels (likely novellas) about horses locked away which will never be published, unless her grandkids want some money after she passes. Probably need an editor and/or a ghostwriter to clean them up, if so. Those were stories written before she wrote The Outsiders and really started to learn The Process.

I still have my high school and college writing. Creative Writing class, Writing Workshop, AP English classes, a composition class. A story I wrote for a conference contest my freshman year. Creative pieces I wrote with friends. Scripts. Early going-to-be-a-novel roman à clef. They are all in manila envelopes in my bookcase. I was proud enough of my efforts back then to save them, and there they still are.

I don’t think I would publish any of them as they are. Some are short pieces — things you would find in an author’s sketchbook, incomplete. Ideas. Finished items are still kind of good? I’d saved them as, I guess, I hoped I would finish the projects some day and publish them as a novel or something. One of the stories I feel so good about I actually did lift from the envelope and included it in the narrative I am currently writing, although with a big rewrite to fit inside the new circumstances.

If you did rewrite one or some of your old stories, will they be harmed? Will writing them from an adult point of view inherently change the views that a young person had when writing them? Like falling in love, would you say “Oh, I couldn’t have been in love before, because now I’m really in love.” Bullshit. But if you had written a story about a teenager when you were a teen, in rewriting it as an adult, your prose might be better, but would it wind up changing the character, giving him or her more maturity than they originally had?

So that’s your challenge: can you rewrite an old manilla envelope story in such a way that you improve the narrative, add dialogue and character, yet remain faithful to the youthful point of view that wrote it? (or are they just better off left in a bottom drawer or lost in a train station?)

(Note: at least four novels that have been written about discovering the lost suitcase of stories. Find details about those here: https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/lost-suitcase

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