Ernest Hemingway was one of the great writers of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and his works, like Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, continue to be widely read today.
Before this success as an American novelist, though, he worked as a journalist for the Toronto Star and traveled abroad. It was during this time where almost all of his early writings were stolen and remain lost treasures to us now. Might they ever be found?
In December of 1922, Hemingway was working in Switzerland covering the Lausanne Peace Conference. His wife Hadley Richardson was in Paris where they lived together. Hemingway had told Hadley that Lincoln Steffens, fellow American and Editor, who he met at the conference, was impressed with his work and would be interested in seeing more. Hadley quickly packed all she could find of Hemingway’s writings and placed them in a suitcase. She was to travel to Switzerland to meet them.
She boarded a train at Gare de Lyon and left the suitcase filled with Hemingway’s unpublished manuscripts unattended while she went to grab a bottle of water for her trip. When she returned the suitcase was gone; stolen, and all of Hemingway’s writings vanished with it.
Hadley had alerted those in charge and searched high and low, but the suitcase was never seen again. She then had to travel to Switzerland and break the horrifying news to her husband. She was devastated, and so was Hemingway.
In his memoir, A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, Hemingway wrote about the unfortunate event of his stolen works:
“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 had 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 all right and not to worry. We could 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.”
It’s a mystery what Hemingway did that night. Same as what happened to the suitcase so many years before. What did the thief do with the suitcase after discovering it held nothing but papers, and of no value to them, at least at that time. Could the person have stowed it away in some back room of a house and it remains there today to be found? Of course, now if they are found, the papers would be an invaluable treasure. Might they be found? It’s not impossible. Other treasures like these have surfaced years of being thought gone.
Maybe it sits with the lost treasure of a Tamerlane?
Best of luck with all that you seek! Always Treasure the Adventure!
Seems he is saying there were carbon copies and he went in search of them. Maybe he made books from them later.
I also got that impression, so here is the rest of that paragraph:
“That was over now and Chink had taught me never to discuss casualties; so I told O’Brien not to feel so bad. 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 bad, I knew that it was true.”
Which implies that he did lose them but that perhaps he actually destroyed them?
But in destroying them he created a loss in O’Brien’s mind and fueled the interest in the new. This stuff is too easy, I’m just gonna play canasta or something.