Rapallo

Rapallo enters the memoir through a brief but consequential visit: after leaving Lausanne for Italy, Ernest Hemingway went to see Edward O’Brien, who was living as a boarder in a monastery above the town. The place anchors an encounter in which the theft of Hemingway’s manuscripts is recalled not only as a personal loss but as a wound felt by someone who had read his work.

Setting and Appearance

The account locates O’Brien in a monastery above Rapallo, identifying the town through its position below his residence rather than through a description of its streets or landscape. Rapallo is a stopping place on the journey from Lausanne into Italy; the passage gives no further account of the town itself.

O’Brien and the Racing Story

Hemingway showed O’Brien a racing story that had survived the theft. He presented it almost as an object recovered from a wreck, a curiosity connected to work he had feared he could no longer do. O’Brien, described as gentle and shy, with pale blue eyes and lanky hair he cut himself, was hurt more deeply by the loss than Hemingway expected.

That response recalled the earlier moment when Hadley told Hemingway that the manuscripts were gone. She had cried and could hardly tell him; he tried to reassure her that they would manage. At Rapallo, the surviving story brought the loss back into view, but O’Brien’s grief shifted the encounter away from Hemingway’s own injury and toward the force the lost work had on another reader.

Place in the Memoir

Rapallo marks a transitional point between the manuscript loss and Hemingway’s return to writing. He told O’Brien that losing the early work might prove good for him and that he would begin writing stories again. As he said it chiefly to comfort O’Brien, he recognized that the promise was true.

The place’s narrative significance is therefore concentrated in the meeting it holds: Rapallo is where a story that survived by chance became evidence that Hemingway’s writing could begin again. The account then turns from Italy toward the work that followed, including the first story written after the loss and the development of his theory of omission.