A Portmanteau Entertainment : HEMINGWAY’S SUITCASE <i> by MacDonald Harris (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 264 pp.; 0-671-70082-0)</i>

Writing that I do not wish to publish, you have no right to publish. I would no more do a thing like that to you than I would cheat a man at cards or rifle his desk or wastebasket or read his personal letters.

--Ernest Hemingway in a letter to Charles A. Fenton, Oct. 9, 1952.

Novelist MacDonald Harris’ “The Hemingway Suitcase” devilishly takes this notion further, cagily playing with the idea of whether Papa knows best.

“Suitcase” is a savvy, kicky read guaranteed to delight not only Hemingway die-hards but those eager to get at the nature of “art”--what, indeed, makes an original unique, or can genius be faked?

The premise, the “device,” on which “Suitcase” sprightly springs, concerns a true incident in Hemingway’s life: Several years ago a superb action/adventure novel, “The Hemingway Papers” by Vincent Cosgrove, was the first to take this episode and embellish it winningly with fiction. And for Hemingway cognoscenti, this event has become rife with significance, as crucial as invention of the printing press, as meaningfully mysterious as a visitation by the Virgin Mary.

The incident, which occurred in late December, 1922, is noted by Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast” and receives half a paragraph in Carlos Baker’s biography, “Ernest Hemingway.” As Baker reports, Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, before catching a train from Paris to Switzerland to meet her husband, had packed all his manuscripts (except for “Up in Michigan” and “My Old Man”) “ . . . in a separate small valise so that he (Hemingway) could get on with his writing during the Christmas season.” However, at the Gare de Lyon someone swiped the bag holding Hemingway’s pages--poems and short stories and the beginning of a novel never again seen.

That is, not until publication of “Hemingway’s Suitcase.” Anyway, that’s part of the appealing invention of this novel. For within the context of “Suitcase’s” fiction are presented five short stories that might or might not be authentic E. H. pieces.

I use the conditional since Nils-Frederik Glas--the fellow in “Hemingway’s Suitcase” who supposedly has taken possession of the long-lost Hemingway manuscripts--is, himself, a writer (whose own flawed novel borrows much from Henry James) and someone who delights in paradox and games. Thus the issue on which “Hemingway’s Suitcase” pivots is whether Nils-Frederik did, in fact, somehow get hold of Hadley’s legendary purloined luggage or cleverly faked the stories that we have been given to read.

As one character delineates the conflict: “He (Nils-Frederik) has stolen something from someone else. He has stolen from a dead man. And he wishes to offer what he has stolen as something that belongs to him. . . . Or he has made a very clever counterfeit of something, and he wishes us to believe it is real. I don’t know which.

Among those in “Suitcase” to whom this riddle is of more than passing concern are a friend of Nils-Frederik, a dealer of rare manuscripts named Wolf Ober who plays a hand in determining the final fate of the perhaps-Hemingway stories, and Nils-Frederik’s son Alan, a literary agent in Los Angeles who is trying to sell the “found” stories to New York publishers for a sizeable sum--a book that will identify Nils-Frederik as editor but never directly state that these stories are truly Hemingway’s because of possible problems with the Hemingway estate. (Remember, if the stories are genuine they’re hot property in more ways than one, having been filched from Hadley at the Gare de Lyon on that long-ago December day.)

Without hemming on whether Hemingway’s “lost writing” found in “Suitcase” turns out to be true or false (obviously, in a larger sense, the rediscovered literature folded into “Suitcase” is the product of Harris, unless “Suitcase” is an even wilier packing job than it appears), suffice it to say that this novel explores more than merely the question of whether the stories are cunning copies or “the true gen,” as Hemingway would put it.

Rather, the book is an absorbing inquiry into the nature of fact and fiction, art and artifice, done up as a novel. The literary hoax, the creaking bough on which our notions of artistic merit lie: Such are the issues that “Hemingway’s Suitcase” confidently encompasses. Harris even gives us snippets of reviews weighing in on Nils-Frederik’s book of maybe-yes/maybe-no Hemingway.

As to the quality of Harris’ Hemingway, it is top-notch. Though he does flirt with parody--e.g. “There’s the good Swiss wine and the schnapps, and we could ski in daytime” goes the dialogue in one of his Papa pieces titled “The Trouble With People” (then again, even Hemingway sometimes sounds like parody Hemingway)--in the main, Harris’ Hemingway comes across as good and fine and not something made-up, but things as they would truly be.

Most of the stories are modeled after Hemingway’s early Paris writing but feature “In Our Times’ ” Nick Adams as protagonist, and have the blunt, vigorous language and telegraphic “cablese” that Hemingway championed, the sort of rat-a-tat-tat talk that distinguishes his formative work in Paris. In fact, one of the pieces placed in “Suitcase,” “The Lady With the Dog,” contains a negative reference to W. H. Hudson’s “The Purple Land,” a novel that Hemingway’s Jake Barnes tells us in “The Sun Also Rises” is “a very sinister” book, yet one favored by “Sun’s” confused central character, Robert Cohen.

Quite so, after reading Harris’ Hemingway, one does think of “The Sun Also Rises” and how good the writing is and how playwright Tom Stoppard said it contains “ . . . one of the greatest paragraphs ever written in English . . . “ the section in which Hemingway has Jake talk of a bull that earlier had killed one matador but then was killed by Pedro Romero, and how the ear of the bull was given to Romero “who, in turn, gave it to Brett, who wrapped it in a handkerchief belonging to myself, and left both ear and handkerchief, along with a number of Muratti cigarette stubs, shoved far back in the drawer of the bed table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya in Pamplona.” As Stoppard says: “When I read this paragraph I always think of some heavy objects bumping slowly down a flight of stairs, and in some way picking up not moss as it rolls but bits and pieces, objects, debris, fragments of the whole novel. . . .”

Hell, I’ve done it . . . gone from Harris to Hemingway. Yet this can’t be helped after reading Harris’ version of young Papa’s prose.

So is it real or ingenious mimicry? Can a counterfeit surpass the original?

In an Andy Warhol world shelved with imitation margarine and genuine artificial sweeteners, distinctions blur, turn fuzzy. Only ambiguity pops into focus; only uncertainty endures.