A MOVEABLE FEAST: The Restored Edition, by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner; 236 pages; $25.

Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast always seemed like something of a miracle — a clean, concise series of Paris sketches written in the last few years of his life, a notable exception to his endstage floundering.

Those final failures have been over-emphasized in the last 40 years by the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden and True at First Light — terrible, incoherent manuscripts no amount of editing could turn into viable books, and projects that the author must have known could never be published.

But issuing the complete text of A Moveable Feast as Hemingway wrote it — it was published three years after his 1961 suicide — is a different issue entirely.

What the book reveals is that the impression of a smooth composition is not misplaced. The new edition reproduces several very clean manuscript pages, with only a few words crossed out per page. Overall, returning to his youth gave Hemingway a clarity that straight fiction no longer could provide.

That said, the new book also reveals that Mary Hemingway, the widow, and Harry Brague, the book’s original editor, did a solid job. The manuscript doesn’t quite hang together as a book, and Hemingway knew it; the new edition prints more than a dozen of his flailing attempts at an introduction that never manage to tie the sketches together. The manuscript also lacks an ending, which the original editors came up with by re-inserting material that he had cut to use for a later book.

Broadly speaking, the editors cut a few things from the manuscript, and re-inserted a lot more that Hemingway had cut. Among the latter is an episode of an unwilling Hemingway accompanying Scott Fitzgerald on a bender that plays as an eerily similar prologue to Fitzgerald’s behavior with Budd Schulberg years later.

There also are some echoes of the gender-bending intimations in Garden of Eden in one section not used in 1964, when Hemingway writes about his relationship with his first wife.

“When we lived in Austria in the winter, we would cut each other’s hair and let it grow to the same length. One was dark and the other dark red gold, and in the dark in the night, one would wake the other swinging the heavy dark or the heavy silken red gold across the others lips in the cold dark in the warmth of the bed. You could see your breath if there was moonlight.”

In addition, the last section of the 1964 edition, about the triangle formed by Hemingway, his wife, Hadley, and his future wife, Pauline, is considerably different in effect in Hemingway’s original. The 1964 edition gives the distinct impression that Hemingway was a helpless victim of his own adultery, which made a certain psychological sense; Hemingway was always the hero of his own life, as well as of his fiction, and there was no way to spin his behavior in a heroic light. Passivity was a more viable, if deeply unlikely, option.

But the uncut manuscript is much more honest about his own part in the affair, and much less sparing of himself.

“For the girl (Pauline) to deceive her friend (Hadley) was a terrible thing, but it was my fault and blindness that this did not repel me. Having become involved in it and being in love, I accepted all the blame for it myself and lived with the remorse.

“The remorse was never away day or night until my wife had married a much finer man than I ever was or ever could be, and I knew that she was happy.”

The overall effect of the manuscript’s depiction of Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley is that driving her away was the major blunder of his life, which undoubtedly impelled Mary Hemingway to make some of the alterations.

Other editorial changes are less understandable. Hemingway’s wayward cruelty to Ford Madox Ford is even more intense in the manuscript, but some of the material that was so nasty about Scott Fitzgerald had been cut by Hemingway and replaced by a more benign treatment. But Mary Hemingway and the editor reinserted the material Hemingway had cut.

Still, I wouldn’t come down too hard on the editors. Given Hemingway’s psychological and physical deterioration in the last years of his life, any decisions he made would have to be regarded as provisional. Of the manuscripts Hemingway left, A Moveable Feast — which, by the way, was not his title — is about 90 percent of a book, and the easiest to move toward publication.

Reading the manuscript without anybody else’s interpolations is an invaluable experience. It shows that Hemingway’s gift had not vanished (“You could see your breath if there was moonlight”), but his self-confidence and sense of form had. He still was slogging away at it in April of 1961, just a few months before he killed himself — a level of emotional commitment as brave as anything in his fiction.