Thursday, August 24, 2006

Losing All




Gare de Lyon Station

In December of 1922, Ernest was in Lausanne for The Star covering the peace conference trying to settle a dispute between Greece and Turkey.

He was trying to get Hadley to come down. She didn't want to fly through the mountains in the winter so she took the train from the Gare de Lyon station.
She decided to take all of Ernest's manuscripts except for "Up in Michigan" which was in a drawer somewhere in the apartment, and "My Old Man" which was in the mail to a publisher. She thought this would be a wonderful surprise for Ermest - she wanted to break up the tedium that he usually felt at conferences.

She grabbed all of his fiction and poetry that she could find. She hoped to please him by bringing his manuscripts so he could have something to work on besides his journalism.
A porter carried her bags to the train from the taxi and the bag with the manuscripts was stolen in that brief space of time. All of Ernest's work - including the carbons; his only copies - were lost. He had to start all over again from memory. Scholars still hope that the suitcase will be found with the original manuscripts intact.
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4 comments:

Unknown said...

Interesting stuff. Thanks for the info.

Denise

Icarus said...

Reading that sent iced shivers down my spine.
It makews losing a Blogger post seem much more insignificant, doesn't it?

Carlos said...

This is great content. Where do you find all this info and pics? I hope you're able to visit those places soon.

Nikon said...

Hi,
Thank you Denise, I appreciate it.
Nowhere man, thank you, too for taking a look. Yes, it would be incredible to lose all of your work, and have to try and remember it - to start over.
Carlos, I left a message to you on your site, Lisbon Weekly Photo.
It's mostly just reading "A Moveable Feast" and then putting my abbreviated interpretation to it on the blog. The pic searches are harder, I use Google Image Search, mostly and just go blind trying to find something that is not copyrighted, and not too modern. Allposters.com is great for the art work, and they don't mind if you use it on your blog.
Thanks everyone for looking, and good luck with your sites.