Popular Culture Review 30.2
Lausanne confirming none of his manuscripts had survived . He also added other false details like lunching with Stein and Toklas and writing a poem , “ They All Made Peace .” He did not go to Paris , Donaldson reports , until a month later . Most of the circumstantiality of Hemingway ’ s account is suspect , Donaldson continues , explaining that in fact Hemingway appointed three friends in a failed effort to retrieve the valise from the property office at the train station . Hemingway thought of advertising a reward but was not willing to offer enough , so Donaldson surmises , to make it likely that a thief would return the valise�not to mention the possibility that the papers were thrown away by whoever coveted the valise itself . Instead of a straightforward account , Hemingway enlarged on his devastating setback even though , Donaldson suggests , it was not as great “ as it seemed at the time , and it hardly represented three years ’ work .” Donaldson ’ s estimates that Hemingway lost maybe a year ’ s labor , including part of a Nick Adams novel , but by the 1950s “ Ernest expanded the inventory of what had been lost to include ‘ good stories about Kansas City ... two short stories set on the Italian front ,” and even at one point , in a discarded draft of A Moveable Feast , said he lost four years of his writing .
Donaldson deflates Hemingway ’ s histrionics over what he lost , although the biographer does not entertain the emotional truth of Hemingway ’ s own account . The loss of anything a writer is working on that seems crucial at a pivotal moment in his career is likely to devastate him , especially when he thinks he is just about to attain the fame that is the fruit of his ambition . Biographers do not deal in facts alone .
Rather than backtrack to see what earlier biographers have done as a measure of Donaldson ’ s own practice�something he says he has already done�I checked to see what Hemingway ’ s three most recent biographers do with the lost valise . In
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