Hemingway's Suitcase

by MacDonald Harris

Nils-Frederik Glas, a talented eccentric, succeeds in publishing a collection of stories that may or may not actually be the lost "early works" of Ernest Hemingway

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Pseudonym of Donald Heiney

Donald Heiney was born in South Pasadena in 1921. Seastruck from the time he read Stevenson at the age of twelve, he went to sea in earnest as a merchant marine cadet in 1942, sat for his Third Mate's license in 1943, and spent the rest of the war as a naval officer on a fleet oiler. After the war he earned a B.A. at Redlands and a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Southern California. In 1964 he lived with his wife and son in Salt Lake City where he taught writing and comparative literature.

Taking the pseudonym MacDonald Harris for his fiction, his first story appeared in Esquire in 1947. Since then he has published stories in The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as a number of literary quarterlies. His story "Second Circle" was reprinted in the 1959 O. Henry Collection. Private Demons, his first novel, was published in 1961. Mortal Leap, his second, was finished in the summer of 1963 in Rome.

His novel The Balloonist was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977. He received a 1982 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his entire body of work.

Heiney died in 1993, at age 71, at his home in Newport Beach, California.

Reviews

[Sally · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this novel because I had recently done some work on Hemingway biographies. The premise is clever: in the early 1920s Ernest Hemingway’s first wife Hadley packed all the writing that her husband was doing into a suitcase and went to meet him for a trip that they were taking. The suitcase was either misplaced or stolen on the train and never found. This novel has five short stories, supposedly possibly by Hemingway, possibly by Nils-Frederik Glas, a pretentious narcissistic sort of author with enough money to indulge his writing “career” and his sexual fantasies with his mistress who dresses up as various classic movie stars. Although Glas’s son is taken in by the stories, and the parody is pretty good, it’s obvious to a reader familiar with Hemingway that they are indeed imitations. This part of the novel is interesting, but there is way too much about the larger-than-life Glas and his sexual fantasies and his conflicts with his son. The family dynamics of Glas, his mistress, his mother, his ex-wife, his son and his family takes over too much of the narrative arc and ruins the literary conceit.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating premise, five perfectly done Hemingway stories embedded in the novel, careful scene construction and precise writing. The plot is low-key and moves at a leisurely pace, with humor but without many thrills. In the end it's about people living quiet lives in Los Angeles, a look at their strangenesses, their ways of loving each other, and the blurry lines they draw between what's real and what's imagined.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll start with a quote from Hemingway himself: “There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”
This is true: In 1922 Hemingway was 23 and married to his first wife Hadley. Whilst Ernest was away in Lausanne covering the peace conference on assignment for the Toronto Star, Hadley packed a suitcase with all of Hemingway’s work to date. Some 20 odd short stories and about 27 pages of a new novel. Unfortunately she also packed the carbons, copies and all handwritten notes. Everything in fact in the one suitcase that disappeared on the train at Paris’s Gare de Lyon. This event changed Hemingway’s life.
So what’s true in Hemingway’s Suitcase?
“Sixty-five years later, Nils-Frederic Glas, a dilettante writer whose periodic European journeys have resulted in a Shih Tzu, a Peugeot and a Belgian lover/housemaid, has just returned from another foray in possession of some of the lost Nick Adam stories. Or are they? With the wary help of two others on the fringe of LA’s book world - his son Alan, an unsuccessful agent, and Wolf, an antiquarian book dealer - he proposes to publish them.”
“Let’s tell ourselves a story about it. Suppose that I heard about Hemingway’s Suitcase and while I was on a trip to Europe I had a reverie-just a reverie, you know, the kind we all have-about what a person might do if he were lucky enough to find that Suitcase. Suppose I didn’t find it-it was destroyed years ago, thrown away or burned up, or it would have turned up by this time. Suppose I had the reverie that I found it, but instead of coming true, this reverie turned into a story in my own mind.” He corrected himself. “It turned into stories in my own mind. Suppose I said to myself, The stories in the Suitcase are gone forever. Nobody will ever find them. But they existed once. Can we imagine what those lost stories were like? We’re free to imagine, because the real stories will never be found. No on can say to us, Those aren’t the right Suitcase stories. We’re just going to say, Here are some stories, and people can decide for themselves what they are.” This is Nils convincing the other two to become involved in a rather tricky literary endeavour.
Five of the stories are embedded in the novel highlighting and contrasting with the difficult father/son, father/daughter relationships in the main part of the novel.
In a simple narrative style not dissimilar to the style of the “Hemingway” stories we get to know all the characters in the three households - the Wolves: Wolf and Myra and their bookshop, The Lone Wolf, with a vault where some of the “mock” original stories are typed up; the Glas family of Nils-Frederic, his girlfriend/housekeeper Charmian and Nils’s very elderly mother Nana. And Alan’s family: Alan, his difficult wife Lily, their daughter Kilda and their babysitter Mrs Quon.
There are so many stories, layer upon layer in this novel. The Suitcase stories, the stories that Nils tells, the stories that Charmian acts out from the movies she has seen for the benefit of Nils, the story of bringing out this new book of stories and the stories that Nana tells. In a funny sort of way, for me, Nana’s stories of her old life in Sweden are the truest of them all. Of course the main mystery is are Nils’s stories the lost Hemingway stories? You’ll have to read the book to find out but I can’t help wondering how close the five stories (created by MacDonald Harris) are to the actual lost Suitcase stories. We’ll never know of course.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

So clever! I like the Hemingway-ish stories within this novel. Using California as the setting was a great way to include scenes from movies as played out by the characters. Many layers, lots to love.

[Laurie Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

As many reviewers have said, it's an interesting premise. Silly complaint, I was bogged down by the name "Nils-Frederik" and there are minor characters who really go nowhere. I forced myself to finish it in anticipation of something momentous, and I don't like to feel forced. Then disappointed.

[Rafarg22]

Curiosa historia sobre los papeles perdidos de Hemingway. Los relatos que se intercalan en la novela son de buena calidad, con un auténtico aire a Hemingway.

[Avary Doubleday · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting fiction -- as I've been reading "A Moveable Feast" and other Hemingway items.

[Douglass]

When I read this book I knew that it was a keeper. After buying a fresh copy guess what !? I found three more ex library editions at book sales.