Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

In December 1922, Ernest Hemingway worked for the Toronto Daily Star and was on assignment covering the Lausanne Peace Conference in Switzerland. He was an aspiring novelist but had yet to be published — he worked as a journalist by day and wrote fiction at night.

A Swiss editor named Lincoln Steffans was impressed with Hemingway’s writing and asked if he could see more. Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, was due to visit him from Paris where where they lived, so he asked her to bring his manuscripts, which she loaded into a suitcase and brought with her. Unfortunately, she left the suitcase unattended on the train platform while she bought a bottle of Evian water from a bodega, and when she came back, the suitcase was gone.

In a letter to Ezra Pound, in January 1923, Hemingway wrote:

“I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenalia? I went up to Paris last week to see what was left and found that Hadley had made the job complete by including all carbons, duplicates, etc. All that remains of my complete works are three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence between John McClure and me, and some journalistic carbons. You, naturally, would say, ‘Good’ etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood.”

Bummer.

But the loss of his work turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Pressed for time to recreate his lost work he modified his writing style to be more simple and straightforward — a shift in writing style that improved his prose and for which he became famous.  “The first and most important thing of all, for writers today,” Hemingway later said, “is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.” 

If his original work had not been lost it is possible (probable?) that he would not have achieved the success that he did, which included winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

There are multiple lessons we can learn from Hemingway and his lost suitcase.

The first is that without the benefit of time, we can’t know whether an event is truly good or bad. This reminds me of the parable of the Chinese farmer which you can check out here. A related finding is that often the most meaningful events in our lives are those that we perceived as negative when they happened. Prof. Raj Raghunathan of the University of Texas conducted a fascinating study which found that “people find past negative events to be significantly more meaningful than they do past positive events.” You can read more about this concept in this IFOD: Nothing is as Bad or as Good as it Seems.

Second, we are in control of our attitudes. We get to decide how we respond to challenging events. Instead of wilting, Hemingway rebounded. We can all learn from his example.

Third is the power of persistence, which is perfectly captured by this quote:

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

-Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States and also was a member of the fraternity Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji). I am also a Fiji and as a pledge was required to memorize the above quote. I can still recite it word-for-word and think about it often. Most things worthwhile take effort and Coolidge’s quote reminds me to put in the work. A related quote that my grandfather, John R. Kidd, used to say all the time is “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” True.