A Moveable Feast
Latest News Updated, A Moveable Feast: A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s. In addition to painting a picture of Hemingway’s time as a struggling young writer, the book also sketches the story of Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley.
A Moveable Feast is considered by many to contain some of his best writing. Some of the prominent people to make an appearance in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, Pascin, John Dos Passos, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. The book was edited by Ernest’s fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, and published in 1964, four years after Hemingway’s death.
The book contains Hemingway’s personal accounts, observations, and stories of his experience in 1920s Paris. He provides the detail of specific addresses of cafes, bars, hotels, and apartments that still can be found in modern day Paris. The title was suggested by Hemingway’s friend A.E. Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway, and comes from a conversation the two once had about the city during Hotchner’s first visits there:
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
Editing by Mary Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway worked on the manuscript of A Moveable Feast during his later years, painstakingly rewriting several key passages, and had prepared a final draft before he died. After his death, however, his fourth wife, Mary, in her capacity as Hemingway’s literary executor, engaged in extensive editing. Literary scholar Gerry Brenner from the University of Montana documents her edits and questions their validity in many cases in his paper, “Are We Going to Hemingway’s Feast?”, concluding that some of them were misguided, and others derived from questionable motives. This would contradict with Mary’s stated policy for her role as executor, which had been an avowed hands-off approach.
After examining the vast collection of Ernest Hemingway’s personal papers, which were opened to the public in 1979 with the opening of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and included notes and initial drafts of A Moveable Feast, Brenner indicates that Mary changed the order of the chapters in Hemingway’s final draft, to “preserve chronology”. Brenner notes how this seems to disrupt the intent of the book, interrupting the series of juxtaposed character sketches between such individuals as Sylvia Beach (owner of the bookstore “Shakespeare and Company”) and Gertrude Stein. Additionally, Brenner points out that one whole chapter, titled “Birth of a New School”, which had been dropped by Hemingway altogether, was inserted back in by Mary without sufficient justification in its contents or execution.
By far the most serious edit, Brenner alleges, is that Mary deleted a lengthy apology to Hadley, Hemingway’s first wife and perhaps intended heroine. This apology appeared in various forms in every draft of the book, and Brenner suggests that Mary deleted it because it impugned her own role as wife with its implications that Hadley was the most important spouse.
Source: wikipedia.org
Warren Commission
The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established on November 29, 1963, by Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy on November 22. Its 888-page final report was presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public three days later. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of Kennedy and the wounding of Texas Governor John Connally. The Commission’s findings have since proven controversial and been both challenged and supported by later studies.
The Commission took its unofficial name—the Warren Commission—from its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren. According to published transcripts of Johnson’s presidential phone conversations, some major officials were opposed to forming such a commission, and several commission members took part only with extreme reluctance. One of their chief reservations was that a commission would ultimately create more controversy than consensus, and those fears proved valid.
Members
* Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States
* Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA), U.S. Senator
* John Sherman Cooper (R-KY), U.S. Senator
* Hale Boggs (D-LA), U.S. Representative
* Gerald Ford (R-MI), U.S. Representative
* Allen Welsh Dulles, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
* John J. McCloy, former President of the World Bank
Among the advisors was attorney Arlen Specter, now a Senator.
Method
The Commission conducted its business primarily in closed sessions, but these were not secret sessions.
“Two misconceptions about the Warren Commission hearing need to be clarified…hearings were closed to the public unless the witness appearing before the Commission requested an open hearing. No witness except one…requested an open hearing…Second, although the hearings (except one) were conducted in private, they were not secret. In a secret hearing, the witness is instructed not to disclose his testimony to any third party, and the hearing testimony is not published for public consumption.
The witnesses who appeared before the Commission were free to repeat what they said to anyone they pleased, and all of their testimony was subsequently published in the first fifteen volumes put out by the Warren Commission.”
Aftermath
Secret Service
The specific findings prompted the Secret Service to make numerous modifications to their security procedures.
Commission records
In November 1964, two months after the publication of its 888-page report, the Commission published twenty-six volumes of supporting documents, including the testimony or depositions of 552 witnesses and more than 3,100 exhibits. All of the Commission’s records were then transferred on November 23 to the National Archives.
The unpublished portion of those records was initially sealed for 75 years (to 2039) under a general National Archives policy that applied to all federal investigations by the executive branch of government, a period “intended to serve as protection for innocent persons who could otherwise be damaged because of their relationship with participants in the case.”
The 75-year rule no longer exists, supplanted by the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and the JFK Records Act of 1992. By 1992, 98 percent of the Warren Commission records had been released to the public.
Six years later, at the conclusion of the Assassination Records Review Board’s work, all Warren Commission records, except those records that contained tax return information, were available to the public with redactions. The remaining Kennedy assassination related documents are scheduled to be released to the public by 2017, twenty-five years after the passage of the JFK Records Act.
In 1992, the Assassination Records Review Board was created by the JFK Records Act to collect and preserve the documents relating to the assassination. It pointed out in its final report:
Doubts about the Warren Commission’s findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978, President Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and four of the seven members of the Warren Commission all articulated, if sometimes off the record, some level of skepticism about the Commission’s basic findings.
Source: wikipedia.org
