A LONG-RUNNING feud in the family of Ernest Hemingway is to be laid to rest by a revised version of A Moveable Feast, his memoir of bohemian life in 1920s Paris.

This was the final nostalgic volume that “Papa” Hemingway was working on when he shot himself in the summer of 1961, depressed and frustrated at growing older.

He had written a note saying the memoir was unpublishable but three years later his widow Mary published it anyway – and opened up family wounds dating back half a century. The new edition seeks to soothe the troubled waters.

The initiative comes from Patrick Hemingway, 81, the writer’s only living child, who has retired to rural Montana after a lifetime of African adventures.

Last week he said the original edition of A Moveable Feast maligned his mother and he wanted the record set straight. “It was dishonest and I think the revised version is more true to the book my dad was working on when he died,” Hemingway said last week. In 1999 he completed his father’s last novel, True At First Light, a yarn based on Papa Hemingway’s final safari. He said he undertook that task only because of his own 25 years as a safari guide and wildlife manager.

This time he recruited his nephew Sean Hemingway, a curator of classical antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to go through his father’s notes and reconstruct a more “balanced” portrait of his early romances.

The memoir recreates the lives and loves of the so-called “lost generation” of American poets and writers, including Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald, who flocked to Paris after the first world war to join a thriving artistic community.

Emotionally and physically scarred after his experiences as a medic in the trenches, Hemingway was hungry for fresh experiences and in 1923 moved to Paris with Hadley Richardson, his first wife.

She was the mother of his first son Jack, who became the father of the actresses Margaux and Mariel Hemingway. But she dumped the writer when she discovered his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy Vogue reporter.

The second marriage to Pauline, which produced Patrick and his younger brother Gregory, did not survive. But it provided the drama of A Moveable Feast, both within and beyond the book cover.

The title comes from a “lost generation” friend who said: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris when young then wherever you go, for the rest of your life, it stays with you. It is a moveable feast.” The text has proven equally so.

In the original edition Hemingway opines in the final chapter that it was just “bad luck” that he met Pfeiffer. The bob-haired “flapper” is blamed for the end of his first marriage and is then dismissed as a “manipulator”.

This chapter has been downgraded to the appendices and the main part of the book has been expanded with extracts from notes in which the writer accepts responsibility for his betrayal of Hadley, who returned to Florida and died in 1979.

In the “restored” edition, Hemingway writes: “For the girl [Pfeiffer] to deceive her friend [Richardson] was a terrible thing. But it was my fault and blindness that this did not repel me.” He also says how happy he had been with both women.

Publishing sources say the new version includes an apology to Hadley. According to Gerry Brenner, who teaches modern literature at the University of Montana, Mary cut this out of the first edition because it made Hadley seem more significant to the writer than her.

The posthumous memoir by Hemingway, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1954, has never sat comfortably with Hemingway scholars.

He often accused Fitzgerald, his rival, of being a “whiner”. Yet in the memoir he complains of starving when he was in fact a foreign correspondent on The Toronto Star and was also enjoying the proceeds of his first book.

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