Censored: Hemingway's attempt at humour

Ernest Hemingway, one of the literary giants of the 20th century, is still having trouble getting a bullfighting story into a US magazine 80 years after its "hero" rejected it. A simmering row over the modern publication of a long-lost short story by Hemingway, written in 1924 while on a drunken spree in Pamplona, Spain, has revealed the American writer as a champion luncher but a poor humorist.

Ernest Hemingway, one of the literary giants of the 20th century, is still having trouble getting a bullfighting story into a US magazine 80 years after its "hero" rejected it. A simmering row over the modern publication of a long-lost short story by Hemingway, written in 1924 while on a drunken spree in Pamplona, Spain, has revealed the American writer as a champion luncher but a poor humorist.

That was the verdict on My Life in the Bull Ring With Donald Ogden Stewart from his fellow writer, the subject of the piece rediscovered after it had disappeared for eight decades.

Stewart, a regular in the same 1920s and 1930s literary scene as F Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, wrote in his 1975 autobiography that he was unimpressed with the story and neglected to send it to Vanity Fair as Hemingway had asked him to. "When he had sent me a 'funny' piece about myself to submit to Vanity Fair, I had decided that written humour was not his dish and had done nothing about it," he wrote. Now the manuscript has arrived at the magazine. But, frustratingly for Hemingway fans, it still cannot make it on to the pages because publication was blocked by custodians of the Hemingway estate.

The five-page sketch - shortly to go up for auction - was offered to the magazine by Stewart's son, also named Donald, along with the accompanying two-page letter. The son also offered his own article outlining the story behind the affair.

Vanity Fair had agreed to print the ill-starred sketch pending permission from the estate. No one has disputed the authenticity of the documents, but estate lawyers have banned publication, without explanation. Mr Stewart Jnr, now 72 and living in Rome, said suppression of the manuscript he inherited was an act of "unacceptable censorship", adding: "It's almost a constitutional right to read the works of great writers such as Hemingway."

His father is perhaps best remembered for his Oscar-winning screenplay of The Philadelphia Story, but he was named on the McCarthy era blacklist and moved to London.

In 1924, Hemingway and Stewart were in a rowdy group partying between sending dispatches from the city soon to be made famous by The Sun Also Rises, two years later.

Patrick McGrath, an expert in books and manuscripts at Christie's in New York, expects the thinly fictionalised account of the 1924 bullfight and the letter to sell for up to £12,000 at auction on 16 December. The documents could be lost to Hemingway fans again if they go to a private collector.

"It's very exciting that an unpublished Hemingway story has surfaced," Mr McGrath told The Independent. He is among only a handful to have read the piece and said Hemingway readers would be in for a pleasant surprise if and when they do get to see it.

"I was amused," he said. "It certainly struck me how different it was in tone and substances from his signature works which were marked by heavy powerful themes." Penned, by Hemingway's admission, with "great difficulty", it being "still three hours after lunch", the disputed sketch was nearly lost for ever after being filed away by Donald Stewart Jnr.

The son said he had suffered from growing up in the shadow of a famous father and described his initial failure more closely to examine his inheritance as "an act of rejection". Mr Stewart sought out the story among his father's papers after noticing a mention of it in his autobiography. He said the shock of finding it initially prevented him from making a clear assessment of its literary worth.

"Because it was written by Hemingway it was almost like it had been written by God. But when I read it again a year later I thought my father may have been right about it not being very funny. It just goes to show, great writers don't have to be funny."

From Mr Stewart's 1975 autobiography, the story clearly parodies a bullfighting encounter from his days with Hemingway in Pamplona that he described as "excited, drunk, hot and hungover".

Mr McGrath added: "This is a light, slapstick piece about Mr Stewart. It describes him being tossed around the bull ring; it seems as if [Hemingway] wrote it for a change of pace."