February 15, 1981

The Private Hemingway

urs has not been a great period for literary correspondence. The telephone, the hurried pace of life and the languishing of the habit of informal written discourse, once manifest in memoirs and diaries, have contributed to an epistolary malaise. The gregarious, fluent letters of Byron or Henry James reflect less beleaguered epochs.

It is surprising, in this era of laconic correspondents, that such a hoarder of words as Ernest Hemingway should have been so garrulous in his letters. After a day that produced perhaps 500 words, he might turn out a 3,000-word letter the same evening. And where in his work he labored to be as tight-lipped as possible, to intimate rather than describe emotion, in his correspondence he was profligate, expansive, anecdotal.

Yet they are far more than mere effusions; Hemingway's celebrated literary discipline is everywhere in evidence. Whether he is describing the horse races at Auteuil, ''with everybody crowded around the big charcoal brazier and a November bright blue sky and the turf hard and the fields good,'' or riding on a train through Normandy in autumn, ''with villages with smoking manure piles and long fields and woods with the leaves on the ground and the trees trimmed bare of branches,'' Hemingway employs the same terse vocabulary that made for one of the most recognizable prose styles in the English language. The phrases linked by ''and''; the repetitive use of such simple words as ''fine'' and ''good''; the tough idiomatic voice: In his early letters especially, one suspects, the novelist was practicing his incipient style, trying it out on his correspondents, warming up for the serious labor of composition.

The nearly 600 letters to be published by Charles Scribner's Sons in April, edited by Hemingway's biographer Carlos Baker, compose a volume of some 900 pages; and they represent only a selection of the 3,500 or so letters extant. Together they provide a comprehensive record of Hemingway's life until his suicide, at the age of 61, in 1961: his Middle Western childhood; his experiences as a journalist in Toronto and an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, as an expatriate in Paris during the 1920's, as a European war correspondent during World War II and as a sportsman in Spain and Africa, Key West and Idaho; and they offer an intimate glimpse of Hemingway through four turbulent marriages and the composition of 12 books.

Legendary for his public vanity, he was vulnerable in his letters; it was as if writing to friends provided an occasion to suspend his natural vigilance. Not that he didn't indulge in tiresome bluster or a self-congratulatory pose: Hemingway the outdoorsman, the lover, the intrepid adventurer declares himself with a disconcertingly hollow zeal. But apart from these ostentatious displays of manliness, the predominant voice is unguarded, self-revealing.

This side of Hemingway, the self-doubting, even dependent nature seldom reflected in his public image, dominates the correspondence. To his parents, he tries to justify his marriages and his books - and there is a painful urgency to his plea for their forebearance. Even the familiar bravado in his letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, with their tough-minded speculations on the perils of the writer's life, and the brutal narrative of his fistfight with Wallace Stevens are so transparent they seem pathetic. And his notorious excess of masculinity is tempered in the letters to his various wives by a generous, insistent passion.

The letters are virtually guaranteed a wide readership - they are a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, unprecendented for a selection of letters - and they can only enhance a reputation that has had its vicissitudes in recent years. They display to great advantage the to the consequences of art; they constitute a great autobiography. ''I write letters because it is fun to get letters back,'' he wrote Fitzgerald's biographer Arthur Mizener; compelled by that innocent motive, he inadvertently left a notably candid self-portrait.

The letters published here appear with Hemingway's own spelling and grammar retained. The bracketed notes are Professor Baker's, drawn from the forthcoming Scribner's edition, with occasional supplements by the editor of this selection. - JAMES ATLAS.

TO HIS FAMILY, MILAN, 18 AUGUST

1918 Dear Folks: That includes grandma and grandpa and Aunt Grace. Thanks very much for the 40 lire! It was appreciated very much. Gee, Family, but there certainly has been a lot of burbles about my getting shot up! The Oak Leaves and the opposition (two hometown newspapers) came today and I have begun to think, Family, that maybe you didn't appreciate me when I used to reside in the bosom. It's the next best thing to getting killed and reading your own obituary.

You know they say there isn't anything funny about this war. And there isn't. I wouldn't say it was hell, because that's been a bit overworked since Gen. Sherman's time, but there have been about 8 times when I would have welcomed Hell. Just on a chance that it couldn't come up to the phase of war I was experiencing. F'r example. In the trenches during an attack when a shell makes a direct hit in a group where you're standing. Shells aren't bad except direct hits. You must take chances on the fragments of the bursts. But when there is a direct hit your pals get spattered all over you. Spattered is literal. During the six days I was up in the Front line trenches, only 50 yds from the Austrians, I got the rep. of having a charmed life. The rep of having one doesn't mean much but having one does! I hope I have one. That knocking sound is my knuckles striking the wooden bed tray.

It's too hard to write on two sides of the paper so I'll skip. Well I can now hold up my hand and say I've been shelled by high explosive, shrapnel and gas. Shot at by trench mortars, snipers and machine guns, and as an added attraction an aeroplane machine gunning the lines. I've never had a hand grenade thrown at me, but a rifle grenade struck rather close. Maybe I'll get a hand grenade later. Now out of all that mess to only be struck by a trench mortar and a machine gun bullet while advancing toward the rear, as the Irish say, was fairly lucky. What, Family?

The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn't hurt a bit at the time, only my feet felt like I had rubber boots full of water on. Hot water. And my knee cap was acting queer. The machine gun bullet just felt like a sharp smack on my leg with an icy snow ball. However it spilled me. But I got up again and got my wounded into the dug out. I kind of collapsed at the dug out. The Italian I had with me had bled all over my coat and my pants looked like somebody had made current jelly in them and then punched holes to let the pulp out. Well the Captain who was a great pal of mine, It was his dug out said ''Poor Hemhe'll be R.I.P. soon.'' Rest In Peace, that is. You see they thought I was shot through the chest on account of my bloody coat. But I made them take my coat and shirt off. I wasn't wearing any undershirt, and the old torso was intact. Then they said I'd probably live. That cheered me up any amount. I told him in Italian that I wanted to see my legs, though I was afraid to look at them. So we took off my trousers and the old limbs were still there but gee they were a mess. They couldn't figure out how I had walked 150 yards with a load with both knees shot through and my right shoe punctured two big places. Also over 200 flesh wounds. ''Oh,'' says I, ''My Captain, it is of nothing. In America they all do it! It is thought well not to allow the enemy to perceive that they have captured our goats!''

The goat speech required some masterful lingual ability but I got it across and then went to sleep for a couple of minutes. After I came to they carried me on a stretcher three kilometers to a dressing station. The stretcher bearers had to go over lots because the road was having the ''entrails'' shelled out of it. Whenever a big one would come, Whee-whoosh-Boom - they'd lay me down and get flat. My wounds were now hurting like 227 little devils were driving nails into the raw. The dressing station had been evacuated during the attack so I lay for two hours in a stable, with the roof shot off, waiting for an ambulance. When it came I ordered it down the road to get the soldiers that had been wounded first. It came back with a load and then they lifted me in. The shelling was still pretty thick and our batteries were going off all the time way back of us and the big 250's and 350's going over head for Austria with a noise like a railway train. Then we'd hear the bursts back of the lines. Then there would come a big Austrian shell and then the crash of the burst. But we were giving them more and bigger stuff than they sent. Then a battery of field guns would go off, just back of the shed - boom, boom, boom, boom, and the Seventy-Fives or 149's would go whipping over to the Austrian lines, and the star shells going up all the time and the machines going like rivetters, tat-a-tat, tat-a-tat.

After a ride of a couple of kilometers in an Italian ambulance, they unloaded me at the dressing station where I had a lot of pals among the medical officers. They gave me a shot of morphine and an anti-tetanus injection and shaved my legs and took out about Twenty 8 shell fragments varying from (drawing of fragment) to about (drawing of fragment) in size out of my legs. They did a fine job of bandaging and all shook hands with me and would have kissed me but I then evacuated to the base Hospital here.

I sent you that cable so you wouldn't worry. I've been in the Hospital a month and 12 days and hope to be out in another month. The Italian Surgeon did a peach of a job on my right knee joint and right foot. Took 28 stitches and assures me that I will be able to walk as well as ever. The wounds all healed up clean and there was no infection. He has my right leg in a plaster splint now so that the joint will be all right. I have some snappy souvenirs that he took out at the last operation.

I wouldn't really be comfortable now unless I had some pain. The Surgeon is going to cut the plaster off in a week now and will allow me on crutches in 10 days.

I'll have to learn to walk again. You ask about Art Newburn. He was in our section but has been transferred to II. Brummy (Theodore Brumbaugh, a friend of Hemingway's) is in our section now. Don't weep if I tell you that back in my youth I learned to play poker. Art Newburn held some delusions that he was a poker player. I won't go into the sad details but I convinced him otherwise. Without holding anything I stood pat. Doubled his openers and bluffed him out of a 50 lire pot. He held three aces and was afraid to call. Tell that to somebody that knows the game Pop. I think Art said in a letter home to the Oak Parkers that he was going to take care of me. Now Pop as man to man was that taking care of Me? Nay not so. So you see that while war isn't funny a lot of funny things happen in war. But Art won the championship of Italy pitching horse shoes.

This is the longest letter I've ever written to anybody and it says the least. Give my love to everybody that asked about me and as Ma Pettingill says, ''Leave us keep the home fires burning!'' Good night and love to all. ERNIE

P.S. I got a letter today from the Helmles (friends of the Hemingway family) addressed Private Ernest H - what I am is S. Ten. or Soto Tenenente (sic) Ernest Hemingway. That is my rank in the Italian Army and it means 2nd Lieut. I hope to be a Tenenente or 1st Lieut. soon.

TO GRACE HALL HEMINGWAY, GSTAAD, SWITZERLAND,5 FEBRUARY 1927

Dear Mother: Thank you very much for sending me the catalogue of the Marshal Field exhibit with the reproduction of your painting of the Blacksmith Shop in it. It looks very lovely and I should have liked to see the original.

I did not answer when you wrote about the Sun etc. book (''The Sun Also Rises'') as I could not help being angry and it is very foolish to write angry letters; and more than foolish to do so to one's mother. It is quite natural for you not to like the book and I regret your reading any book that causes you pain or disgust.

On the other hand I am in no way ashamed of the book, except in as I may have failed in accurately portraying the people I wrote of, or in making them really come alive to the reader. I am sure the book is unpleasant. But it is not all unpleasant and I am sure is no more unpleasant than the real inner lives of some of our best Oak Park families. You must remember that in such a book all the worst of the people's lives is displayed while at home there is a very lovely side for the public and the sort of thing of which I have had some experience in observing behind closed doors. Besides you, as an artist, know that a writer should not be forced to defend his choice of a subject but should be criticized on how he has treated that subject. The people I wrote of were certainly burned out, hollow and smashed --and that is the way I have attempted to show them. I am only ashamed of the book in whatever way it fails to really give the people I wished to present. I have a long life to write other books and the subjects will not always be the same - except as they will all, I hope, be human beings.

And if the good ladies of the book study club under the guidance of Miss (Fanny) Butcher (a Chicago book columnist), who is not an intelligent reviewer - I would have felt very silly had she praised the book -agree unanimously that I am prostituting a great talent etc. for the lowest ends - why the good ladies are talking about something of which they know nothing and saying very foolish things.

As for Hadley, Bumby (Hemingway's first wife and his eldest son, John) and myself- altho Hadley and I have not been living in the same house for some time (we have lived apart since last Sept. and by now Hadley may have divorced me) we are the very best of friends. She and Bumby are both well, healthy and happy and all the profits and royalties of The Sun Also Rises, by my order, are being paid directly to Hadley, both from America and England. The book has gone into, by the last ads I saw in January, 5 printings (15,000) copies, and is still going strongly. It is published in England in the Spring under the title of Fiesta. Hadley is coming to America in the Spring so you can see Bumby on the profits of Sun Also Rises. I am not taking one cent of the royalties, which are already running into several thousand dollars, have been drinking nothing but my usual wine or beer with meals, have been leading a very monastic life and trying to write as well as I am able. We have different ideas about what constitutes good writing - that is simply a fundamental disagreement - but you really are deceiving yourself if you allow any Fanny Butchers to tell you that I am pandering to sensationalism etc. etc. I get letters from Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan etc. asking me for stories, articles, and serials, but am publishing nothing for six months or a year (a few stories sold to Scribner's the end of last year and one funny article out) because I know that now is a very crucial time and that it is much more important for me to write in tranquility, trying to write as well as I can, with no eye on any market, nor any thought of what the stuff will bring, or even if it can ever be published -than to fall into the money making trap which handles American writers like the cornhusking machine handled my noted relative's thumb (a reference to Hemingway's uncle).

I'm sending this letter to both of you because I know you have been worried about me and I am always sorry to cause you worry. But you must not do that - because, although my life may smash up in different ways I will always do all that I can for the people I love (I don't write home a lot because I haven't time and because, writing, I find it very hard to write letters and have to restrict correspondence to the letters I have to write - and my real friends know that I am just as fond of them whether I write or not) that I have never been a drunk nor even a steady drinker (You will hear legends that I am - they are tacked on everyone that ever wrote about people who drink) and that all I want is tranquility and a chance to write. You may never like any thing I write - and then suddenly you might like something very much. But you must believe that I am sincere in what I write. Dad has been very loyal and while you, mother, have not been loyal at all I absolutely understand that it is because you believed you owed it to yourself to correct me in a path which seemed to you disastrous.

So maybe we can drop that all. I am sure that, in the course of my life, you will find much cause to feel that I have disgraced you if you believe everything you hear. On the other hand with a little shot of loyalty as anaesthetic you may be able to get through all my obvious disreputability and find, in the end, that I have not disgraced you at all. Anyhow, best love to you both,

ERNIE

TO DR. C.E. HEMINGWAY,

HENDAYE, FRANCE, 14 SEPTEMBER 1927 Dear Dad: Thanks very much for your letter and for forwarding the letter to Uncle Tyley (Hancock, his mother's brother). I had a good letter from him yesterday. You cannot know how badly I feel about having caused you and Mother so much shame and suffering - but I could not write you about all of my and Hadley's troubles even if it were the thing to do. It takes two weeks for a letter to cross the Atlantic and I have tried not to transfer all the hell I have been through to anyone by letter. I love Hadley and I love Bumby - Hadley and I split up - I did not desert her nor was I committing adultery with anyone. I was living in the apartment with Bumby - looking after him while Hadley was away on a trip and it was when she came back from this trip that she decided she wanted the definite divorce. We arranged everything and there was no scandal and no disgrace. Our trouble had been going on for a long time. It was entirely my fault and it is no one's business. I have nothing but love admiration and respect for Hadley and while we are busted up I have not in any way lost Bumby. He lived with me in Switzerland after the divorce and he is coming back in November and will spend this winter with me in the mountains.

You are fortunate enough to have only been in love with one woman in your life. For over a year I had been in love with two people and had been absolutely faithful to Hadley. When Hadley decided that we had better get a divorce the girl with whom I was in love was in America. I had not heard from her for almost two months. In her last letter she had said that we must not think of each other but of Hadley. You refer to ''Love Pirates,'' ''persons who break up your home etc.'' and you know that I am hot tempered but I know that it is easy to wish people in Hell when you know nothing of them. I have seen, suffered, and been through enough so that I do not wish anyone in Hell. It is because I do not want you to suffer with ideas of shame and disgrace that I now write all this. We have not seen much of each other for a long time and in the meantime our lives have been going on and there has been a year of tragedy in mine and I know you can appreciate how difficult and almost impossible it is for me to write about it.

After we were divorced if Hadley would have wanted me I would have gone back to her. She said that things were better as they were and that we were both better off. I will never stop loving Hadley nor Bumby nor will I cease to look after them. I will never stop loving Pauline Pfeiffer to whom I am married (the marriage took place in 1927). I have now responsibility toward three people instead of one. Please understand this and know that it doesn't make it easier to write about it. I do understand how hard it is for you to have to make explanations and answer questions and not hear from me. I am a rotten correspondent and it is almost impossible for me to write about my private affairs. Without seeking it - through the success of my books - all the profits of which I have turned over to Hadley - both in America, England, Germany and the Scandinavian countries - because of all this there is a great deal of talk. I pay no attention to any of it and neither must you. I have had come back to me stories people have told about me of every fantastic and scandalous sort - all without foundation. These sorts of stories spring up about all writers - ball players - popular evangelists or any public performers. But it is through the desire to keep my own private life to myself - to give no explanations to anybody - and not to be a public performer personally that I have unwittingly caused you great anxiety. The only way I could keep my private life to myself was to keep it to myself - and I did owe you and Mother a statement on it. But I can't write about it all the time.

I know you don't like the sort of thing I write but that is the difference in our taste and all the critics are not Fanny Butcher. I know that I am not disgracing you in my writing but rather doing something that some day you will be proud of. I can't do it all at once. I feel that eventually my life will not be a disgrace to you either. It also takes a long time to unfold.

You would be so much happier and I would too if you could have confidence in me. When people ask about me, say that Ernie never tells us anything about his private life or even where he is but only writes that he is working hard. Don't feel responsible for what I write or what I do. I take the responsibility, I make the mistakes and I take the punishment.

You could if you wanted be proud of me sometimes - not for what I do for I have not had much success in doing good - but for my work. My work is much more important to me than anything in the world except the happiness of three people and you cannot know how it makes me feel for Mother to be ashamed of what I know as sure as you know that there is a God in heaven is not to be ashamed of.

This seems to go on and on so I'd better stop. Naturally I felt badly about Sunny (Hemingway's sister) not coming. I was quite lonely for her and would have given her a fine instructive and pleasant trip and she would have seen many things she won't see with a party.

I'm awfully happy you liked Bumby. He is my very dear and I hope because of my own mistakes and errors to be ever a better and wiser father to him and to help him avoid things. But I doubt if anyone can teach anyone else much. Anyway he is a fine boy and I hope inside of eight years we can all three go fishing together and you'll see that we are not such tragic figures. Leicester (Hemingway's younger brother) sounds like a fine kid. I have sent off the proofs of my new book (''Men Without Women''). It has 14 stories and will be out this Fall. We are going to Paris next week and I am starting a novel and will work very hard until Christmas vacation.

I love you very much and love Mother too and I'm sorry this is such a long letter - it probably doesn't explain anything but you're the only person I've written six pages to since I learned to use a pen and ink. I remember Mother saying once that she would rather see me in my grave than something - I forget what - smoking cigarettes perhaps. If it's of any interest I don't smoke. Haven't for almost 3 years altho you probably will hear stories that I smoke like a furnace. Many times last winter I would have been very content with anything so simple as being in my grave but there were always enough people who would rather not see me in my grave to whom I owed certain responsibilities to make me keep on going. I just mention this so no one will mention seeing me in my grave. Glad to do anything else to oblige.

I wish you'd let Mother read this letter. She wrote me a fine letter last Spring and I'm afraid I never answered it. The reason I haven't made either of you a confidant was because I was so upset about Mother accusing me of pandering to the lowest tastes etc in my writing that I shut up like a hermit crab. I knew that if we couldn't see eye to eye on the writing which I knew was no pandering, what use was there of going into my life which looked much worse to an outsider.

But anyway I hope you have the dope you both want in this letterand I'll write often if we can lay off of literary criticism and personalities.

Yours lovingly, ERNIE

TO F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,

HENDAYE, FRANCE, 13 SEPTEMBER 1929 Dear Scott:

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward. I'll bet it's damned good (''Tender is the Night'') - and when you get these crying drunks and start to tell them you have no friends for Christ sake amend it - it'll be sad enough - if you say no friends but Ernest the stinking serial king. You're not burned out and you know plenty to use - if you think your running out of dope, count on old Hem - I'll tell you all I know - whom slept with who and whom before or after whom was married - Anything you need to know - Summer's a discouraging time to work - You don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.

Everybody loses all the bloom - we're not peaches - that doesnt mean you get rotten - a gun is better worn and with bloom off - So is a saddle - People too by God. You lose everything that is fresh and everything that is easy and it always seems as though you could never write -But you have more metier and you know more and when you get flashes of the old juice you get more results with them.

Look how it is at the start - all juice and kick to the writer and cant convey anything to the reader - you use up the juice and the kick goes but you learn how to do it and the stuff when you are no longer young is better than the young stuff -You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless -there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing. I wish there was some way that your economic existence would depend on this novel or on novels rather than the damned stories because that is one thing that drives you and gives you an outlet and an excuse too -the damned stories.

Oh Hell. You have more stuff than anyone and you care more about it and for Christ sake just keep on and go through with it now and dont please write anything else until it's finished. It will be damned good. ...

The stories arent whoreing, they're just bad judgement -you could have and can make enough to live on writing novels. You damned fool. Go on and write the novel.

We drove here from Madrid in a day - Hendaye-Plage -Saw our noted contemporary L. (Louis) Bromfield (the novelist and literary journalist). Going up to Paris - Have you heard from Max (Perkins, Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner's) if the Farewell (''A Farewell to Arms'') is out? Got a bunch of literary periodicals from Brommy all full of Great German War Books - It was funny how I couldn't get into (Erich Maria Remarque's) All Quiet etc. but once in it it was damned good - Not so great as they think - But awfully good - L. Bromfield is writing a war book. It's bad luck maybe that mine comes out now and after all these that (I) have not had opportunity to profit by them in writing it. In about 2-3 years a man should be able to write a pretty good war book.

Old Dos (the novelist John Dos Passos) married Kate Smith - She went to school (college) (not convent) with Pauline - He met her down at Key West last winter - She's a damned nice girl.

We've had letters from Gerald and Sara (Murphy, a wealthy American couple, depicted in Fitzgerald's novel ''Tender is the Night''). It's a damned shame about their Patrick (the Murphys' son) being sick - I think he'll be all right -Good day today - water nice to swim and the sun the last of summer -If this is a dull ... letter it is only because I felt so bad that you were feeling low - am so damned fond of you and whenever you try to tell anybody anything about working or ''life'' it is always bloody platitudes -Pauline sends her love to you, Zelda and Scotty

- Yours always - ERNEST

TO SARA MURPHY, KEY WEST, 27 FEBRUARY 1936

Dearest Sara:

Just got your letter today along with a giant hangover like all the tents of Ringling. So this is letter out of the hangover into the snow (of Saranac Lake, N.Y., where Patrick was recuperating from tuberculosis). Hangover came about through visit of my lawyer Mr. (Maurice) Speiser whom I cannot see without the aid and abettment of alcohol plus seeing off in southern farewell the Judge (Arthur Powell) of the Wallace Stevens evening (when Hemingway and the poet Wallace Stevens had a fistfight). Remember that Judge and Mr. Stevens? Nice Mr. Stevens. This year he came again sort of pleasant like the cholera and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura (Ursula) was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc. So I said, this was a week ago, ''All right, that's the third time we've had enough of Mr. Stevens.'' So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing just said, I learned later, ''By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I'd knock him out with a single punch.'' So who should show up but poor old Papa and Mr. Stevens swung that same fabled punch but fertunatly missed and I knocked all of him down several times and gave him a good beating. Only trouble was that first three times put him down I still had my glasses on. Then took them off at the insistence of the judge who wanted to see a good clean fight without glasses in it and after I took them off Mr. Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that. And this is very funny. Broke his hand in two places. Didn't harm my jaw at all and so put him down again and then fixed him good so he was in his room for five days with a nurse and Dr. working on him. But you mustn't tell this to anybody. Not even Ada (MacLeish, wife of the poet Archibald MacLeish). Because he is very worried about his respectable insurance standing and I have promised not to tell anybody and the official story is that Mr. Stevens fell down a stairs. I agreed to that and said it was o.k. with me if he fell down the lighthouse stairs. So please promise not to tell anybody. But Pauline who hates me to fight was delighted. Ura had never seen a fight before and couldn't sleep for fear Mr. Stevens was going to die. Anyway last night Mr. Stevens comes over to make up and we are made up. But on mature reflection I don't know anybody needed to be hit worse than Mr. S. Was very pleased last night to see how large Mr. Stevens was and am sure that if I had had a good look at him before it all started would not have felt up to hitting him. But can assure you that there is no one like Mr. Stevens to go down in a spectacular fashion especially into a large puddle of water in the street in front of your old waddel street home where all took place. So I shouldn't write you this but news being scarce your way and I know you really won't tell anybody will you really absolutely seriously. Because otherwise I am a bastard to write it. He apologised to Ura very handsomely and has gone up to Pirates Cove to rest his face for another week before going north. I think he is really one of those mirror fighters who swells his muscles and practices lethal punches in the bathroom while he hates his betters. But maybe I am wrong. Anyway I think Gertrude Stein ought to give all these people who pick fights with poor old papa at least their money back. I am getting damned tired of it but not nearly as tired of it as Mr. Stevens got. It was awfully funny to have a man just declaring how he was going to annihilate you and show up just at that moment. Then have him land his awful punch on your jaw and nothing happen except his hand break. You can tell Patrick. It might amuse him. But don't tell anybody else. Tell Patrick for statistics sake Mr. Stevens is 6 feet 2 weighs 225 lbs. and that when he hits the ground it is highly spectaculous. I told the Judge, the day after, to tell Mr. S. I thought he was a damned fine poet but to tell him he couldn't fight. The Judge said, ''Oh, but your wrong there. He is a very good fighter. Why, I saw him hit a man once and knock him the length of this room.'' And I said, ''Yes, Judge. But you didn't catch the man's name, did you?'' I think it was a waiter. Nice dear good Mr. Stevens. I hope he doesn't brood about this and take up archery or machine gunnery. But you promise you won't tell anybody.

Poor Sara. I'm sorry you had such a bad time. These are the bad times. It is sort of like the retreat from Moscow and Scott (Fitzgerald) is gone the first week of the retreat (an allusion to Fitzgerald's breakdown). But we might as well fight the best goddamned rear guard action in history and God knows you have been fighting it.

Weather has been lousy for fishing the last ten days or so. Put the boat on the ways and scraped and sanded her and repainted. Also copper-painted the bottom with a new paint called murcop that has murcury in it and is supposed to be very good. Have it looking swell. Now must write an Esquire piece, do my income tax, and then get back to my book. Hope to God the people will be gone.

Waldo (Peirce, a painter) is here with his kids like untrained hyenas and him as domesticated as a cow. Lives only for the children and with the time he puts on them they should have good manners and be well trained but instead they never obey, destroy everything, don't even answer when spoken to, and he is like an old hen with a litter of apehyenas. I doubt if he will go out in the boat while he is here. Can't leave the children. They have a nurse and a housekeeper too, but 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. That represents fatherhood. (Rest of letter missing.)

TO MRS. PAUL PFEIFFER, CAT CAY, (Bahama Islands) 2 AUGUST 1937

Dear Mother: Thank you and Pauline's father (Hemingway's in-laws) very much for the checks for our birthdays. After the flood it must have been pretty dismal sending out $50. pigeons to your wandering children with the only way you can know where the children are is when the checks are cashed. Hope this makes sense to you. The presents were lovely. Thank you both very very much.

We've been here since the end of May with three or four trips to N.Y., the coast and back, Washington thrown in, and this afternoon Ada, Pat and Gregory (the family nurse and Hemingway's sons) fly to Miami and tomorrow midnight, Pauline, Bumby and I run the boat to Miami. Then store the boat up the Miami river away from hurricanes. Go to Key West and in a couple of days less than two weeks I go back to Spain where, if you get your politics from direct or indirect, you know I am on the wrong side and should be destroyed along with all the other Reds. After which Hitler and Mussolini can come in and take the minerals they need to make a European war. Well let's wish them all luck because they will need it. I get sort of sick of hearing all this tripe and running against a solid wall of nobody wanting to hear anything true about this war so will be glad, in a way, to be back at it with no necessity for talking about it. I haven't talked about it much. Have my N.A.N.A. (North American Newspaper Alliance) newspaper job back, but if it folds up for any reason have some other jobs to do. We got money for twenty ambulances on the coast and the film (''The Spanish Earth,'' a documentary which Hemingway narrated) should bring in fifty to a hundred more. Which will handle that problem anyway.

Pauline and the children are fine. She looks lovely; is really much prettier than ever. The children are delightful which as you know is something pretty difficult for children to be in hot weather. Gregory will go with Ada to Syracuse when they leave Key West and Pauline is taking the other two boys to a ranch. This time a bull ranch in Mexico where Sidney Franklin (an American friend who became a bullfighter in Spain) is going to look after them all. He did a fine job of looking after me in Spain and now he goes into Reserve for a while. It should be a good variation on a dude ranch.

Virginia (Pauline's sister) was here for a while then went off with Mrs. (Jane) Mason to Havana from where they were both going to Acapulco in Mexico. They seemed to be haveing a very good time.

I like the house in Piggott (Ark., where the Pfeiffers lived) much better than the White House (to which Hemingway had been invited to show ''The Spanish Earth'' to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife). Mrs. Roosevelt is enormously tall, very charming, and almost stone deaf. She hears practically nothing that is said to her but is so charming that most people do not notice it. The President is very Harvard charming and sexless and womanly, seems like a great Woman Secretary of Labor, say, he is completely paralyzed from the waist down and there is much skillful manoevering of him into the chair and from room to room. The White House, when we were there, was very hot, no air conditioning except in the President's study, and the food was the worst I've ever eaten. (This between us. As a guest cannot criticize.) We had a rainwater soup followed by rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and a cake some admirer had sent in. An enthusiastic but unskilled admirer. I wished Karl (Pfeiffer) could have been there to eat the meal. They both were very moved by the Spanish Earth picture but both said we should put more propaganda in it.

Am glad to have met them and seen the place, as am glad to have seen Hollywood, but wouldn't care to live there. Harry Hopkins (a special assistant to President Roosevelt) was at the White House dinner. I was very impressed by him and liked him very much.

It was damned nice of the Roosevelts to have us there and to see the picture and I appreciate it. Write you this not as violator of hospitality but only to give inside impression. Not to be circulated. Martha Gellhorn (a novelist and journalist who became Hemingway's third wife), the girl who fixed it up for Joris Ivens (who had directed ''The Spanish Earth'') and I to go there, ate three sandwiches in the Newark airport before we flew to Washington. We thought she was crazy at the time but she said the food was always uneatable and everybody ate before they went there to dinner. She has stayed there a lot. Me, I won't be staying there any more.

Dear Mother I am sorry about going back to Spain and I think what you write about staying here and looking after the boys is very sound. But when I was there I promised them I would be back and while we cannot keep all our promises I do not see how not to keep that one. I would not be able to teach my boys much if I did. Maybe I cannot teach them much anyway but they have a good start, in their varying ways, and no one knows what the goal we aim for is any more. Certainly it is not security; the only thing I was trained to try to achieve.

You have always lead such a fine life, giveing such a just proportion to this world and to the next one, that the ones of our generation who have to make our own decisions and mistakes must seem, rightly very often silly. I've temporarily I hope, lost all confidence in the next one. It seems to have no importance at all. On the other hand this last spell of war completely eliminated all fear of death or anything else. It seemed as though the world were in such a bad way and certain things so necessary to do that to think about any personal future was simply very egoistic. After the first two weeks in Madrid had an impersonal feeling of haveing no wife, no children, no house, no boat, nothing. The only way to function. But now have been home just long enough to lose it all; to value all the things again; and now go back knowing I have to put them all away again. So don't point out how much harder it is on them because have a little imagination too. So enough of this lousy talk. But maybe when come back this next time will come up to Piggott to shoot quail and will get all talked out to you.

Good bye and good luck. I feel terribly about the flood. Good old Mother Nature that the boys talk about. If there was such a thing as Mother Nature I'll bet she was as crazy and wicked tempered as Mike Strater's wife (Strater was a painter friend of Hemingway's). I'd like to see you put in as Mother Nature for a while and let there be a little honest, realistic, gentle reasonableness to the weather. You could blow up once in a while and give us a good moderate cloudburst but none of these insane female tantrums we get from the present occupant.

Must stop this now from lack of paper; the plane leaving and must get out in the boat. Give my very best to all the family in Piggott. And thank you again for the birthday checks.

ERNEST

Finished my novel (''To Have and Have Not'') (re-writing etc.) out in Sept or early October.

TO MAXWELL PERKINS, LA FINCA VIGIA, (Cuba) 21 APRIL 1940

Dear Max: How about this for a title For Whom The Bell Tolls A Novel By Ernest Hemingway

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends, or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. JOHN DONNE.

I think it has the magic that a title has to have. Maybe it isn't too easy to say. But maybe the book will make it easy. Anyway I have had thirty some titles and they were all possible but this is the first one that has made the bell toll for me.

Or do you suppose that people think only of tolls as long distance charges and of Bell as the Bell telephone system? If so it is out. The Tolling of the Bell. No. That's not right. If there is no modern connotation of telephone to throw it off For Whom The Bell Tolls can be a good title I think.

Anyway it is what I want to say. And so if it isn't right we will get it right. Meantime you have your provisional title for April 22. Let me hear from you. Best to Charley (Charles Scribner, Hemingway's publisher). Going now to the Jai-Alai to try to make it 21 straight.

Best always ERNEST

TO MARY WELSH, VILLEBAUDON AND HAMBYE, FRANCE, 31 JULY AND 1 AUGUST 1944

Small Friend: =Lovely Friend: Got letter and it made me ... very happy, and thank you very much for putting the story through (through the Time-Life London bureau, where Mary Welsh was a correspondent). You were very good for and to me and I miss you very much. Am ashamed I know so few adjectives and over-use very. Hell, Small Friend, I wish I could talk to you: preferably in bed. More than preferably as you well know. It will be lovely to be back. - Just then people came into the field where we've just set up and they are shelling away up the hill - Quite a lot.

Very hard to write. Since saw you went and stayed with some air pals and got up a little (Not much. But saw well). Then went where I was supposed to and it was dull as hell and nothing to do. So was much too lonely for that so got permission to detach and attach to a division where have been ever since this last business started. We have had a tough, fine time. This is the 8th day we have been attacking all the time. Have been with very good guys. They have so much worse time than flyers do that I know my passion for flying probably just another form of laziness or some damn thing. Anyway been very happy here and had good time with infantry again. I don't like it with armoured on acct. of the dust. But there is plenty of dust everywhere although some of the time we have been in lovely country. Some very beautiful and we higher than the others even. Rare.

We captured a motorcycle with side car and now use it for transport and yest. we captured a big Mercedes Benz staff car. I have just driven it to the motor pool to get painted. Have gotten you some funny, smaller souvenirs too. But sometime we will drive around in the Mercedes. It is a convertible and had a bullet through the steering column and wiring shot up but we got it going OK and are repairing the steering column. The Division has killed a great many Germans and we have gotten excellent cognac from the armoured vehicles. The general (R.O. Barton) is an educated, talented and charming man and a fine soldier. He was very gay and pleasant just now when he saw me driving in the Mercedes.

Christ what a dull writer I am. Small friend, think it is probably because am tired. Sometimes we go all day and all night, too. This is a very good Division really and I try to be useful and not a nuisance. Have a fine story when I can write it and I will write it. But should take a rest first. Will write it and then another on next phase and then back to (Room) 612 in the Hotel (Ritz). I hate to think of those people fouling up our fine room.

Mary I cannot write you well because of how many people read it or can read it in transit makeing me shy and so difficult to write. I wish to hell I could talk to you and pretty soon we will be able to. I was very proud about your grasp of the picture and the fine letter they wrote. Over here I heard fine things said of you too and will remember them all and tell you. I miss you so I am hollow and to fill the hollow I put war in day and night. But it is a lousy substitute; like drinking worcester sauce instead of what? Instead of being happy I guess. Am very happy when I see you. I make as good a war as I can and I understand infantry but am hearing much new stuff. Am very happy at Front but that is not loveing.

But you are so busy, and impermanent, and always moveing and tired and makeing decisions and sleep dead-tired sleep when you can get it with a division that is fighting that you really have no other life. I have to do this now and for certain reasons can't leave area or I would be there. I mean I would be with you in London Town.

What a dull letter. Am really not dull and would tell you damndest funny things if - not if, when, see you. We are terribly dirty and we get up before daylight and scrub good all over and all over face hard and sound with soap and washcloth and then with daylight look in pocket mirror and the dust still makes your eyes like a beery whore or ginned debutante who has cried into her mascara.

Small friend I love you very much. After I wrote you up to the cross line under stuff on this page I went up for another infantry attack with platoon. You could write it so well and I write nothing. Just put it in the old sausage machine from which we extract Dr. Swineless's New Pearls.

Mary, there is no being careful in this world we received as our inheritance, our gleaming aluminum, black and white striped, 700 MPH inheritance, but still the same dust, an equal amount of dirt on your face, and - etc. What I mean is You use your head and be unfearing but careful. You means Toi. This would have made sense with daylight to write it.

Mary at this point it got too dark to write so will write tomorrow - we get up at day light for the attack and then have a day ahead and I will write when get back.

Small Friend I will sleep good with you tonight and feel happy as one can be being away from someone as lovely as you. Please write to the address on this and I will get it they say. Am now writing in the complete dark but do that quite well - (Braggart) - you would love much of this. Much of it - or some - I simply turn my heart to nonreceptivity. ...

Please write because I miss you totally - Headaches much better. Next day - Aug. 1 - Now it is only 5:15 (1715) in the afternoon and so have much light to write and an address from Jack Belden of where to write Time and Life (Mary Welsh was a correspondent in their London bureau). I went over to the big lot I was supposed to be with and asked permission to stay with the Division as long as we are fighting and then catch up with the other people. We are fighting the most important part now and I do not want to leave because timeliness means nothing and like to finish what you start. Also am learning very much that is new to me about our infantry division and do not want to leave this good one now when it is a sticky time. It is not so much sticky as interesting.

Just read this and it sounds so righteous and boreing but will make only good jokes when we are together, or anyway jokes, and never righteous.

I know can write good story once alone and with typewriter after this over and will go some good place for a couple or three days to do it. All notes are in the head. There are some terrific things - Shouldn't waste on Colliers (Hemingway was under contract to that magazine). Could write book now on this last week. ...

Of (war) correspondents the best here I have met (as guys) are Ken Crawford and Bill Walton. I do not know Bill Walton well but he was so happy at haveing made the air-borne show that it was very nice and touching. Also he was kind and loveing. I wish you were here because you are intelligent and brave and then, too, you would be here.

France is fun now. I mean we have liberated great areas without destruction due to useing infantry, air, and armour intelligently. Have a chance to send this off now - excuse long letter -will write some more tonight. Much love from us all - please write to this address

-Your Big Friend E. HEMINGWAY War Correspondent

HARVEY BREIT, NEAR MAGADI, KENYA, 3 JANUARY 1954

Dear Harvey:

How are you kid and how is everything? (Breit was an editor of The New York Times Book Review.) We're camped here on the KenyaTanganyika border. I've been in this area now about seven weeks. Got made an Honorary Game Warden and due to the emergency (the Mau-Mau rebellion) been acting game ranger here. It is a first class life. Problems all day and every night. Like yest. 21 elephants hit a shamba (a village) belonging to my Wakamba Fiancee's family. They are travelling and nine go through the corn which is nearly 15 feet high now after the rain. But they are not really bad we figure because they just go through and eat a swathe as they move. One group of seven and one of five go by outside. Track them up in the hills and then leave Arab Minor the game scout with another man to spook them off if they come back that night. Check the buffalo herd (82) and they are OK. Find the lioness that had the cubs day before Christmas; she is OK. She killed a water buck out of a herd of 11. He was a friend of mine since September but there are six young bucks coming up and one will take over the herd. But I feel bad about him. Go to bed and get up in the night and take a walk with my spear. Study the noises and the different ones the game make at night. Don't use any flash light and go by myself in soft shoes. In the morning tea at 5:30 and Miss Mary and I go out with her gun bearer Charo who must be around 80 and is shorter than she is, and mine, N'Gui, who is the son of M'Cola who was my gun bearer when I wrote TGHOA (''The Green Hills of Africa''). N'Gui is a very tough boy- served 7 years in K.A.R. (King's African Rifles) Abyssinia, Burma, etc. He speaks some Italian from Abyssinia. He and I are in love with 2 girls here in the Wakamba Shamba. It is a beautiful shamba on a creek with anyway 15 acres of corn and small crops and our girls are heiresses, sort of like Brenda Frazier (a much publicized debutante and, later, society figure) in the old days only black and very beautiful. Every day they bring us presents; sweet corn and beer they make (very good) and today I gave them a pound of lard and the haunch of a war@thog Miss Mary shot. Also some salt and a copy of Life. Yesterday I met my girl's mother and her brother and two sisters. Her father is not awfully distinguished altho he is very well off. Her mother is very nice and has a new baby. Miss Mary just stays the hell away from it and is understanding and wonderful. I got to know my fiancee while she (Mary) was away when we killed a leopard in an awful dog fight and everybody came to celebrate in a big N'Goma (a feast and dance) sort of an Epworth League (a Methodist young people's society) meeting only a little different. I have to kill the beasts that kill their stock or molest and destroy their crops. So as long as I go OK on that I have a certain popularity. The beasts are no dopes by the time they take up marauding. Harvey really I think you would be interested. It is like knowing every day you are going to pitch in big league ball. Pitching you have to do with your arm so you could never start every day but I am a relief pitcher in this. You never come on until it's no good. Have gone back to chewing tobacco to have confidence.

It's like this. You sit down to write like Flaubert, H. James (not Jesse) etc. and two characters with spears come and stand easy outside the tent. I am trying to write and Miss Mary says, ''There are two of your friends to see you. I don't know whether they are from your girl's family or if they have a problem.'' ''They must have a problem,'' I say. So they have. They live 25 miles away. There are no young warriors. (Young warriors have all taken to drink.) The lion came into the boma (village) and killed 2 cows. He is outside the boma now eating one of the cows and growling. It is 25 miles away. 3/4 of it passable by moto-cah. So you go, view the remains of the cows, ascertain where the water is, follow (track) the lion out of the country. The exercise will be repeated in 3 to 4 days. I tracked one lion down Kilimanjaro with N'Gui and the other hunting dogs and then (sweating) had to go back up in the rain.

Now weigh 186. Was steady at 190-192 for a long time. Have my head shaved because that is how my fiancee likes it. She likes to feel all the holes in my head and the wealts. It is sort of fun too. I never knew about it before. I thought they were a kind of disgrace. But not here. Harvey, African girls, Kamba and Masai anyway, are really wonderful and all that nonsense about that they can't love you is not true. It is just that they are more cheerful than girls at home. My girl is completely impudent, her face is impudent in repose, but absolutely loving and delicate rough. I better quit writing about it because I want to write it really and I mustn't spoil it. ...

N'Gui is about 30 he thinks and he has five wives and with the money from this trip he will get maybe 2 more. Maybe only one, the sister of my girl. Maybe he will marry my girl because he and I are brothers so it is OK. But my girl wants to go to N.Y. where she will see me kill all those animals in that prehistoric animal number of Life. She thinks they have all those brontosauruses and Pterodactyls where I live along with the Mammoth, the Sabertoothed tigers and Irish Elk and the Giant Sloth because she saw the pictures.

At night I tell them how we killed George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry and they think we are wasting our time here and should get the hell to America. It's a lovely country, Harvey.

Much love and happy New Year

PAPA TO BERNARD BERENSON, LA FINCA VIGIA, (Italy) 24 SEPTEMBER 1954

Dear B.B.: It was good to hear from you and to know that you are well. (Berenson was a celebrated art critic.) You are very right about how we never achieve what we set out to do. We do make it come off sometimes as we know when we re-read it after a long time. It always reads to me, then, when it's very good as though I must have stolen it from somebody else and then I think and remember that nobody else knew about it and that it never really happened and so I must have invented it and I feel very happy. One always has the illusion about the last thing that has been written and so I have an exaggerated confidence in the Old Man book (''The Old Man and the Sea''). Each day I wrote I marvelled at how wonderfully it was going and I hoped that on the next day I would be able to invent truly as I had done the day before. When I had finished, there were only 3 or 4 corrections to be made and I thought there must be something wrong, but each time I read it, it made the same effect on me as a reader, not as one who had written it, that it made before. I still can't read it without emotion and I know that you will believe that this is not the emotion of someone admiring what he has done, because he did it, but because I was reading it as completely detached as though it were written by someone who was dead for a long time.

We are old enough to try to talk truly and I tell you this only as a curiosity. A few other things which I invented completely such as the story in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' of Pablo and Pilar and their doing away with the fascists in the village. I read, when by chance I have to do it, with complete astonishment that I could have invented as I did. You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it. Obviously, this is impossible and that is probably why it is considered to be valuable when you are able to do it. But it is impossible to hire out or contract to be able to do it, as to hire out to be an alchemist.

But B.B. I think we should never be too pessimistic about what we know we have done well because we should have some reward and the only reward is that which is within ourselves. I would be very proud, that is an understatement, if I had as good a hoja de servicio (service record) as you have. The unobtainable is something else. The mountains have all been climbed, most countries worth visiting have been explored long ago and in old places like Africa you learn that many many people had seen everything long before they were financed by missionary money or (the newspaper publisher) James Gordon Bennett.

Publicity, admiration, adulation, or simply being fashionable are all worthless and are extremely harmful if one is susceptible to them. You must forgive me for presuming that we are the same age but I had the experience of the destruction of vital organs (Hemingway had suffered damage to his liver, spleen, kidney and lower spine in an airplane crash in Uganda earlier that year) which ordinarily would take a long time to achieve. Also the indelicacies that accompany these destructions and our life expectancy is more or less the same. This does not give me the right to tutearte (to use tu, the familiar form of address in Spanish, instead of the formal usted) because I have only the brain of 55 but in the Wakamba tribe to which I belong you are an elder at 55 and once you are an elder you are outranked by older elders but you are considered to have reached a certain age, if not of discretion, of experience.

At present I work at about 1/2 the capacity that I should have but everything is better all the time and, by someone susceptible as good animals to the weather, I can be depressed by it when it is rainy, muggy and with constant barometric changes which change also the pressure of the vertebra on the spinal cord. There's only 6 weeks more of bad weather to get through and then we will have the type of weather that makes you want to write rather than force yourself to write. I am such a simple writer that in my books the temperature and the weather of the day is nearly almost (sic) that of the weather outside. The type of weather we have had this summer I would not wish to inflict on anyone reading what I write and so I'm working in an air-conditioned room which is as false a way to work as to try to write in the pressurized cabin of a plane. You get the writing done but it's as false as though it were done in the reverse of a greenhouse. Probably I will throw it all away, but maybe when the mornings are alive again I can use the skeleton of what I have written and fill it in with the smells and the early noises of the birds and all the lovely things of this finca (Spanish for a country house, ranch or farm) which are in the cold months very much like Africa.

But B.B. there is nothing like Africa as there is nothing like youth and nothing like loving who you love or waking each day not knowing what the day will bring, but knowing that it will bring something. Here now things are quite dull except for annoyances and the occasional presence of people that you like or care for. I think you are better off at Settignano (near Florence) and you are always better off than me because you have more books. Thank God for books. I wish that we could contribute to something which would make people write ones which were worth reading. Mary would send her love but she is taking a sun bath. I think I may send it, safely, without consulting her. Our best to you always,

ERNEST

I dictated this in the process of breaking in a new secretary. Reading it over and correcting her errors (too late to correct my own) it reads a little like a bloody speech.

E.H.

TO CHARLES SCRIBNER JR., ROCHESTER, MINN., 10 JUNE 1961

Dear Charlie:

Thank you very much for your letter and for the Guide to the waters of the Yellowstone area by Wellington. It is the best guide to that fishing that I have ever read - and he is wrong in saying that it would have been un-necessary if the old book were in print - as the earthquake has changed things so completely. One big mud-slide in that country when we fished it used to be able to change a river for years and your friend's guide is really marvellous. If you printed it for him, or could buy one and charge it to my account, I would appreciate it very much if you could send it to my oldest boy Jack - John H.N. Hemingway care of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith, San Francisco, California. He is about as advanced a fisherman as Herbert Wellington and I started him on those waters years ago. It would be impossible to give him a better present as he feels as strongly about them as anyone I ever knew until you introduced me to Wellington's Guide.

I'm awfully happy the books are selling so well. Thank you for what you say about them. It made me feel very good. Hope to be out of here as fit as ever before too long. (Hemingway was attempting to recover from a bout of depression at the Mayo Clinic; three weeks later, he committed suicide.) My very best always to you and to Joan - as ever

- ERNEST