Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

“It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood. . . . I wrote it and left it out.”

“Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.

David Wyatt, Hemingway, Style, and the Art of Emotion

These cuts indicate a will to have the text of the memeoir [A Moveable Feast] conform to the strictures of Hemingway’s early art of the omitted rather than to allow it to deploy the more expansive, meditative, and self-accusing quality of the later work.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway did at times maintain that he was still trying “to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged, by the man who writes it,by the excellence of the material he eliminates.” In such a formulation, cutting is embraced as part of the writing rather than the editorial process. It is an act committed by a writer as he writes, not by an editor after the fact.