Hemingway: letters of an angry idealist

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Volume 5, 1932-1934. Ed. Sandra Spanier and Miriam Mandel. Cambridge University Press, 2020. lxxxvii+699p. $34.95.

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Volume 6, 1934-1936. Ed. Spanier, Mandel and  Verna Kale. Cambridge UP, 2024. xc+704p. $34.95.

In the early 1930s Ernest Hemingway, author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, created his heroic public image.  With the publication of Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935), his most important books in the mid-1930s, he became a well-known aficionado of bullfights and big-game hunting, two violent, exotic and expensive pursuits.

Every minute of the six corridas described in Death in the Afternoon gave the spectators intense, unremitting and near-fatal action.  Hunting wild animals in East Africa provided the same danger and excitement as war.  In his bullfighting book Hemingway wrote that “killing cleanly . . . has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race.”  In his African book he allowed, “I did not mind killing any animal if I killed it cleanly”—though the animals certainly did mind.  Commenting on the hunting scenes of the French painter Gustave Courbet, Manuel Jover explained the attraction of the sport: “Conflict with nature and the bloody execution of its creatures are a form of self-testing.  Hunting gives expression to aggressiveness, without social constraints: with its unleashed impulses, penetration of the untamed natural setting, and wild pursuits, it energises the hunter’s existence anew as the spilling of blood exalts the life-force.”  Ivan Turgenev’s vivid portrayal of the virgin landscape, uncertain weather and expert hunter-narrator in A Sportsman’s Sketches influenced Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa.

Dostoyevsky’s remark, “We all come out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’,” influenced Hemingway’s inaccurate remark in his African book: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . There was nothing before.  There has been nothing as good since.” This strangely stilted praise of the vernacular style ignores Poe and the writers of the American Renaissance: Hawthorne and Melville, Emerson and Thoreau, and dismisses the genteel tradition and novel of manners that runs from James and Wharton, through Fitzgerald, to Marquand and O’Hara, Cheever and Updike.  It is time for critics to stop repeating this remark as if it were true.

It’s also worth noting that Cyril Connolly’s famous list of barriers to achievement in Enemies of Promise (1938): politics, sex, drink, journalism and domesticity (the “pram in the hall”) was largely lifted straight from Hemingway’s explanation in Green Hills of Africa of what harms a writer: “Politics, women, drink, money, ambition.  And the lack of politics, women, drink, money and ambition.”

Many Hemingway letters in these volumes—written hastily with missing words and spelling mistakes—concern troubled relations with his family.  He twice mentions his father’s suicide, a lifelong warning and wound, and even predicts his own: “my old man was a coward.  He never had any fun and was married to a bitch and he shot himself. . . . I am not a coward, have had a damned good time, plenty of fun, been married to two good women [with two more to come] and I think I will shoot myself.”  He remembered his mother saying she “would rather see me in my grave than smoking cigarettes,” and worrying that if her children knew about their inheritance they would always “be desiring her death.”  He half-seriously said he would shoot his own mother if she were an attractive flying target.  But he was a dutiful son, and after his father’s death he put all the royalties from A Farewell to Arms into a trust fund for his mother and three younger siblings.  He also sent “the bitch” a sentimental telegram: “LOVE TO YOU ON MOTHERS DAY.”

He called his troublesome young brother Leicester a damned fool and complete parasite.  A poor imitation of Ernest, he also committed suicide.  Hemingway was irrationally and violently opposed to the marriage of his youngest sister, Carol, and called her future husband a fool, a liar and a pitiful psychopathic case.  Carol bravely defied him and replied, “It doesn’t matter if you dislike him or call him a pimp or a fucking bastard.” She had a long and happy marriage.

He was astonished when his wife Pauline became pregnant with his youngest son Gregory, and told her doctor that he never relaxed vigilance and used both a condom and withdrawal.  He added that “a certain amount of semen gets splattered around and this of mine seems very virulent.”  He blamed Pauline’s Catholicism that prevented her from taking precautions, and she later regretted that this religious scruple had ruined her marriage.  To attract Hemingway she dyed her hair blond to look like the glamorous Jane Mason.  But after Hemingway became rich and no longer depended on Pauline’s wealthy and generous uncle, he bid A Farewell to Alms.

Pauline often left their two young sons with nursemaids to travel with him to Europe and Africa.  He was blindly deluded about the cruel and terrifying Ada Stern, who psychologically damaged Gregory and propelled him toward a tragic life.  The Germanic ogress was not “a very good, simple girl,” not “very cheerful,” not “wonderful with the children,” and things were not “going very very well.”  Gregory was certainly not “well taken care of” by Ada –except in the Mafia sense.

Though Hemingway had a luxurious house in Key West, and Cuba was then having a brutal revolution, with prisoners horribly tortured and burned, he spent a lot of time 90 miles across the Caribbean in the Ambos Mundos (Two Worlds) hotel in Havana.  A friend recalled he had “a very simple room.  It had a very plain bathroom where you pulled the chain, and a little bird cage.  It had two iron beds, and there were no [glassed-in] windows, just shutters that opened.”

Hemingway did not go to Havana to write, but to continue his love affair with the stunning and mentally unstable Jane Mason, married to the wealthy and complacent Caribbean manager of Pan American Airways.  When Hemingway was in Key West and separated from her, he wrote that “I missed you like hell  and consider you a damn fine girl.”  In May 1933 Jane had a serious accident when her car plunged over a cliff with Hemingway’s two oldest sons aboard.  The boys were unhurt, but Jane cracked a couple of vertebrae in her back.  In early June she became depressed and took a suicidal jump from the second-story balcony of her house outside Havana.  She broke her back, was hospitalised in New York and began a long-term psychoanalysis with Dr. Lawrence Kubie.  Hemingway prevented Kubie from publishing an essay about him based on Jane’s revelations on the couch.

Hemingway was sympathetic about her “bloody tough luck”, urged his New York friends to visit her and wrote: “you’ve had worse torture than the bloody martyrs.  It’s too damned awful.  I hope the pain is better.  Poor old poor old Jane.”  But he couldn’t resist calling Jane “the girl who fell for him literally”.  She was the model for Margot Macomber and for Helene Bradley in To Have and Have Not.  The editors of these volumes of letters give a misleading account of Jane.  They do not mention her love affair with Hemingway and repeat that she “fell” —not jumped— from the balcony.

Hemingway said what he “always wanted to do most was hunt in Africa and fish in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.”  He believed “a life of action is much easier to me than writing. . . . A man’s courage needs exercise just as much as his legs do. . . . Being on the sea; the work in catching a very big fish; fighting, fornication, the elation of drinking; a storm; and enjoyment of  danger can all make you feel so good physically.”  So he was always recklessly and violently testing himself.  As if racing in the millemiglia, en route to Pauline’s family in Arkansas, he drove 654 miles in one day on rainy roads crowded with holiday drivers.  Speeding Pauline from Montana to Wyoming to attend Mass and strengthen her religion, he did a daily round trip of 372 miles, broke the car’s crankcase on a rock and said if the devout Pauline “is ever canonized that feat should be mentioned.”

He found it exciting to kill a big bear in Montana, “trailing him alone, wounded, by the blood on the snow in the dark . . . couldn’t see the [gun] sights but there was plenty of bear to absorb the error.”  He described struggling with an adrenalin-pumping 60-mile-an-hour hurricane when boldly crossing from Cuba to Key West: “Real mountains.  One rolled us so far the water pump (close to the center of boats bottom) sucked air.  We took  hell of a  beating” and he loved every minute of it.

Hemingway challenged Black boxers in the Caribbean to go three rounds with him and (he said) knocked them all out.  His championship event was fighting the distinguished poet Wallace Stevens, who at six feet, two inches tall and 225 pounds was equal in height and weight but twenty years older.  Stevens disturbed the Idea of Order in Key West by insulting Hemingway, threatening to punch him and making his visiting sister cry.  Hemingway knocked Stevens down several times and gave him a beating.  Worried about his standing in a reputable insurance firm, Stevens hid out till his black eye and bruised face were healed.  In Hemingway’s story, Francis Macomber echoes Stevens’ plea for secrecy about his disgraceful behaviour and asks his white hunter, “It doesn’t have to go any further, does it?  I mean no one will hear about it, will they?”

Wallace Stevens, 1948.j

Always courting danger, Hemingway suffered many illnesses and accidents.  He had a recurrence of the amoebic dysentery that had almost turned him into a trophy in Africa.  In Key West he “passed a cup-full of blood at a time.”  He got blood poisoning in his right index finger that interfered with his writing.  Worst of all, while trying to gaff a shark, he shot himself in both legs with an automatic pistol.

He paid tribute to the writers he admired and had influenced him.  Joyce and Thomas Mann were supreme.  (Hemingway mentioned the French Chauchat machine gun; Mann adopted the “Hotcat” name for the heroine of The Magic Mountain.)  He rated Turgenev and Kipling plenty high.  He avowed, “I like Joyce very much as a friend and think no one can write better, technically.  I learned much [what?] from him, from Ezra, in conversation principally. . . .  Learned from D. H. Lawrence about how to say what you felt about country,” the spirit of place.  He praised Isaac Babel’s stories in Red Cavalry: “He has marvelous stuff and he writes very well.”  He also commended Man’s Fate, which André Malraux sent with an inscription, as “the best book I have read in ten years.”

Hemingway had his most volatile literary friendship with Scott Fitzgerald.  When Fitzgerald made the strategic mistake of calling Green Hills of Africa a bad book, Hemingway recalled the bad advice Fitzgerald had given him about revising The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.  His first impression of Tender is the Night was negative; but on rereading he thought the novel “gets better and better.”

Fitzgerald in 1929

He felt there was a sad contrast between Fitzgerald’s fictional achievement and his drunken, self-humiliating behavior.  Emphasising his friend’s personal weaknesses, Hemingway told their mutual editor Max Perkins that “if Scott had gone to that war that he always felt so bad about missing, he would have been shot for cowardice. . . . It was a terrible thing for him to love youth so much that he jumped straight from youth to senility without going through manhood.”  He hated Fitzgerald’s shameless public exposure of his alcoholism and mental breakdown in “The Crack-Up,” and told him, “you put so much damned value on youth it seemed to me that you confused growing up with growing old.”  Alluding to Fitzgerald’s college, site of a scene in The Great Gatsby, and editors at Scribner’s and the Saturday Evening Post, he offered to perform a symbolic autopsy if his friend died and “give your liver to the Princeton Museum, your heart to the Plaza Hotel, one lung to Max Perkins and the other to George Horace Lorimer.”  He blamed Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda for his faults and failures, and declared, “Poor old Scott—He should have swapped Zelda when she was at her craziest but still saleable back 5 or 6 years ago—before she was diagnosed as nutty—He is the great tragedy of talent in our bloody generation.”

Echoing “A time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:2), Hemingway sent his best letter, a fine mixture of stoicism, sympathy and love, to Sara and Gerald Murphy when their son Baoth died, aged fifteen, of tuberculosis:

It is not as bad for Baoth because he had a fine time, always, and he has only done something now that we all must do.  He has just gotten it over with.  It was terrible that it had to go on for such a long time but if they could keep him from suffering sometimes it is merciful to get very tired before you die when you want to live very much.

About him having to die so young, he is spared from learning what sort of place the world is. . . .

We all have to look forward to death by defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed; but it is the same dying we must do; while he has gotten it all over with his world all intact and the death only by accident.

Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone.  No one you love is ever dead.

In Africa Hemingway was peeved when his rival’s Lesser Kudu was greater than his Greater Kudu.  Though he was extremely sensitive to personal and literary criticism, in Green Hills of Africa he deliberately provoked the critics by calling them “the lice who crawl on literature.”   He felt that envious and destructive critics resented successful authors, and when they called their work rotten, the writers lost confidence and became impotent.  He confessed, “without even thinking about it I had offended the daily critics deadily and they ganged up on it. . . . I’ve insulted all the bastards who make and keep your reputation.”  When his African book appeared the vengeful critics took aim at their prime target.  He felt discouraged “knowing that I’ve written a good book and haveing to read that it is shit.”  Even Edmund Wilson, the first critic to praise his early work, said Green Hills of Africa was “far and away his weakest book” and (Hemingway felt) “tried to put me out of business.”  But, he added, “there is more solid satisfaction in being lied about by shits than being praised by them.”

Though “Khemingueia” was popular in Russia, he was also attacked during the Depression for not following the Party line and refusing to join the Communists.  In reply he said that he valued independence and freedom: “I hate the whole conception of the state. . . . I cant be a Communist because I hate tyranny and, I suppose, government. . . . Everyone tries to frighten you now by saying or writing that if one does not become a communist or have a Marxian viewpoint one will have no friends and will be alone. . . . I believe in only one thing: liberty.”

He thought it best not to answer attacks and reserved his venom for his “own fuckin’ memoirs,” the posthumously published A Moveable Feast.  But he released his aggressive fury in his letters.  He told friends that he’d like to empty his tommy gun in editorial offices and “give shitdom a few martyrs. . . .  I would rather kill my enemies than make friends with them because later you are always stabbed, poisoned or betrayed in different ways.”  Enemies always remained dangerous.

Max Eastman’s “Bull in the Afternoon,” his notorious review of Death in the Afternoon, claimed that Hemingway “lacked the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man” and was obliged to provide “evidences of red-blooded masculinity” and wear false hair on his chest.  Hemingway was mad enough to kill Eastman, but had to settle for a wrestling match with him in Max Perkins’ office.  Hemingway’s next book contained a photo of him typing with a bare and bear-like hairy arm.

His most formidable enemy was Gertrude (“Trudy”) Stein, who had an unnerving resemblance to his oppressive mother.  After he’d rejected the role of humble disciple and made a few mild cracks about Stein, she responded with the most massive assault on Hemingway since the Austrian trench mortars had wounded him in July 1918.  She’d studied his weaknesses, knew how to hurt him and attacked him where he was most vulnerable.  He was justly proud of his well-tested toughness and courage.  But in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) she maliciously claimed that he was easily tired, very fragile and a coward with a yellow streak.  With surprising restraint, he took aim at his victim but held fire.  Alluding to Toklas’ degrading sexual dominance, he wrote, “I’ve got the gun and it’s loaded and I know where the vital spots are and friendship aside there’s a certain damned fine feeling of superiority in knowing you can finish anybody off whenever you want to and still not doing it. . . . I don’t like to slam the old bitch around” right now.

He could also be witty as well as angry.  Surprised by hearing the word “holograph” from his typist, he remarked, “think of old Hem having written Holographs all these years and not knowing it.”  When a cautious editor objected to “fornicate”, he obligingly suggested copulate, co-habit or consummate.  He confessed paternity to “half the little Indians in upper Michigan,” and was appalled by the savage behavior of Waldo Peirce’s children, his “little hyenas”: “he is only really happy when trying to paint with one setting fire to his beard and the other rubbing mashed potato into his canvasses.”

In May 1934 Hemingway bought his beloved boat, the Pilar, named for the pillar in the cathedral in Santiago de Campostela.  It was, he boasted, “ideal for fishing.  It is very comfortable, sea-worthy and has speed when it is needed. . . . Comfortable as a damned yacht and a better sea boat than any that ever came out of Key West.”  Deep-sea fishing in the Caribbean, including  the Dry Tortugas (and Wet Tortugas when it rained), was his main form of recreation and relief after writing.  But these two volumes contain a tsunami of more than 100 boring, stupefying, must-skip letters about chasing and catching the finny prey.

Ernest Hemingway and Mary Welsh Hemingway aboard Pilar. Credit George Leavens. George Leavens Photograph Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

These volumes also contain an over-abundance of 12 dead-fish photos, with others embalmed in the text, hanging upside-down like bats.  One portrays the dutiful Max Perkins clearly out of place in a formal suit and tie.  Another shows Hemingway and the artist Mike Strater standing next to a huge skeletal marlin, half-eaten by sharks. Hemingway had shot one of them with a tommy gun and the blood attracted more ravenous sharks.

Hemingway had no one in Key West to talk to about books.  He constantly urged friends to join him on fishing expeditions, though his competitive streak and obsession with marine slaughter when they were trapped on his boat discouraged many potential candidates.  He tried to lure Archibald MacLeish by promising an ideal life: “You will be surrounded by beautiful women, fed on exotic but nourishing foods, given alcoholic stimulants and hooked into big fish.”  But Archie didn’t take the bait.  He hooked one boring visitor, but couldn’t endure the presence of his lawyer Maurice Speiser without getting completely drunk.  Yet he also complained that he was “swamped with visiting firemen and firewomen” who made any decent work impossible.

His most interesting letters describe his writing techniques.  He was “always trying to concentrate rather than elaborate.”  He thought a book should be judged by the quality of material the author has cut.  No one should say his story is very short: “I know it is and if it could be any shorter I would make it shorter.”  He always stopped when he reached a dramatic place and his writing was going good, which made it possible to continue the next day.  His work had to be honest, and he was incorruptible about anything to do with it.  Most significantly, he wanted “to write a prose which would make the reader feel that he had actually been to the places and experienced the events set down; to make the country come true.”

He also gives specific insights about his books.  In the World War I hospital he saw men “shot through the scrotum with balls on a pillow . . . guys worse wounded—some mutilated.”  They reminded him of how close he’d come to castration, with no balls on the pillow, and gave him the idea for Jake Barnes’ wound in The Sun Also Rises.  He believed, when writing A Farewell to Arms, that one “shouldn’t desert until after the battle.”

His great but little-known work in the mid-1930s was his eye-witness account, “Who Murdered the Vets?,” in the communist journal New Masses (September 17, 1935).  On September 2 a tremendous hurricane with 200 miles-per-hour winds and 17-foot tidal waves struck the war veterans of the Civilian Conservation Corps.  They were living on the Matecumbe Keys, 50 miles northeast of Key West, and building the highway that linked the islands to the Florida mainland.  Hemingway rushed to the disaster and saw more dead bodies than in the battles on the Piave and the explosion of the Milan munitions factory he’d described in  his story “The Natural History of the Dead.”  As in Goya’s Disasters of War, “two women, naked, tossed up into trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs. . . . [It meant] trying to carry stuff that came apart, blown so tight that they burst when you lifted them, rotten, running, putrid, decomposed.”  He was enraged by the slaughter of the innocents and declared, “It was an absolute crime to leave those vets there in hurricane months with no protection except evacuation and then not get them out.  The storm had hit before they made an effort” to rescue them.

A few errors have crept into the text.  Seven Pillars of Wisdom has no definite article; Matisse’s The Piano Lesson is not a Cubist painting; Martha Speiser did not marry at age 15.  The editor’s acknowledgement of help from Beethoven is pretentious and absurd.  Despite the excessive annotations, often longer than the letters, the editors have missed many of Hemingway’s literary allusions that show the range of his reading: Shakespeare, Henry V (1600): “We happy few,” Isaak Walton’s fishing book The Compleat Angler (1623), Byron’s poem “Mazeppa” (1819), Edgar Poe’s story ”Manuscript Found in a Bottle” (1823), J. M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton (1902), Yeats’ poem “To a Young Beauty” (1919): “And I may live at journey’s end / With Landor and with Donne,” Leonid Andreyev’s play He Who Gets Slapped (1919), Joseph Conrad’s essays Notes on Life and Letters (1921), and Marie Harriman, the rich fashionable wife of the New York Governor Averell Harriman.  “Ardua? Arana?,” held up by Immigration in Key West, was the Basque jai alai player Felix Ermua.

Hemingway emerges from these angry, idealistic letters with a strange mixture of contradictory qualities: “I seem, at this late age, to be made up of two people.  One can stay out all night, drink like a fish, and sleep anywhere provided not alone, and keep a moderately even disposition.  Other has to work like a sonofabitch, has a puritan conscience about work and everything that interferes and has to get to bed by at least ten o’clock.  Only place these rival skyzophreniacs agree is do not like to sleep alone.”  Severely self-critical, he condemned his touchiness and aggression, and confessed, “I like to kill and [thinking of his first wife] have been very cruel to different people—have had to lie and have been drunk and am plenty lazy. . . . I know I am bossy and irritating son of a bitch in action when I get crabby.  No one takes offense quicker nor as I say more unjustly.” In short, he calls himself a “bloody shit.”

But these faults were balanced by his extraordinary generosity.  He sent Guggenheim recommendations for unpromising acquaintances and gave literary advice to complete strangers.  In 1933 he wrote, “I have given away over half of what I’ve made this year to hard working people in bad shape from the Depression. . . . At present support 12 dependents, loan on average of 35% of my income to writers, painters and fishermen that I believe in.”  He characteristically told his old friend Guy Hickok, “when you get in a money jam why in hell don’t you let me know. . . . You are the soundest place I know to stash any dough.”  He was honest and incorruptible, a dutiful son, tender and kind when Baoth Murphy died, enraged when the vets were murdered.  Finally, like the old waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” he sympathised “with those who like to stay late at the café. . . . With all those who need a light for the night.”

Jeffrey Meyers has explored Hemingway’s ambience by working on a yacht in the Caribbean, spending two summers in East Africa, living in the Rocky Mountains and writing in Spain for four years while seeing dozens of bullfights.  He’s published Hemingway: A Biography, and his book 45 Ways to Look at Hemingway will appear with Louisiana State University Press in the summer of 2025.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.