Photographs courtesy of Special Collections Library, University Libraries
With Penn State’s acquisition of intimate Hemingway letters, new aspects of the famed writer’s personality come to light.
—By Melissa Beattie-Moss
“All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. That sense of linguistic newness and wonder, as well as the tightly-crafted precision of his prose style, made Hemingway one of the most iconic figures in 20th century American literature. His adventurous life—which began in upper-class Oak Park, Illinois in 1899 and ended by suicide in 1961—was as outsized as his fiction is lean, and included being wounded by mortar shells in World War I; narrowly escaping death during the Spanish Civil War; nearly dying of blood poisoning while on safari in Africa; and surviving two plane crashes.
Though the enduring image of the white bearded, barrel-chested “Papa” Hemingway is as a hard-drinking man’s man with a zeal for hunting, fishing, boxing and bullfighting, the author’s private correspondence shows lesser-known dimensions of a man whose life was lived on the public stage.
Penn State’s recent acquisition of the last significant known collection of Hemingway letters provides an especially intimate view of the man behind the mystique.
The collection of over one hundred unpublished letters, notes and telegrams—written primarily to his parents and favorite sister Madelaine (“Sunny”) Hemingway and postmarked from such places as Milan, Key West, Pamplona, Bimini, and Cuba—spans forty years of Hemingway’s life. Comments William Joyce, head of Penn State’s Special Collections Library, “The acquisition of family letters of Ernest Hemingway shows us a side of him that the public rarely saw—a devoted and dutiful son and an affectionate and attentive brother. It shows the multifaceted relationships he had with all his family members, and deepens and enriches our understanding of Hemingway’s family ties.”
Sandra Spanier, professor of English and general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project (a twelve-volume scholarly edition of the writer’s letters, to be published by Cambridge University Press) was instrumental in arranging the purchase of the collection and co-curating a recent exhibit of the letters, along with Sandra Stelts, curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Verna Kale, doctoral candidate in English.
“Almost no one outside the family had seen these letters,” Spanier explains. “They were in possession of Madelaine’s son, Ernest Hemingway Mainland, in Petoskey, Michigan. He had sold a few pieces over the years, so I knew of the collection’s existence. I first visited him in the fall of 2004 to talk about the letters. On my next visit with Ernie, he brought out maybe a third of the letters, to give me a taste. I came back to Penn State and told our Dean of Libraries, Nancy Eaton and Bill Joyce, ‘There’s something really extraordinary here that you might be interested in seeing.’ In November of 2006, Bill and I went to Petoskey and spent a whole Sunday, side by side at a long table, just reading this amazing drama that unfolds, letter to letter.”
Although much has been made of Hemingway’s negative feelings towards his family (he didn’t attend his mother’s funeral, and permanently distanced himself from two of his five siblings), that is far from the complete story, says Spanier. “To be sure, the relationships were complicated and at times contentious. But despite the strains, the ties did bind.”
“When I first read these letters,” she recalls, “I was quite struck by the strength of his relationship with his immediate family in the early years. In the later years, he did become estranged from his mother. His father committed suicide. He had very infrequent contact with all of his siblings. So to read the early letters, when they’re all pals, is very moving.”
Adds Spanier, “He describes in excited terms to his parents what it’s like to be in Kansas City at his first job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. He thanks his mom for sending the great cake that everybody in the newsroom loved. When he lived in Paris, he describes the botanical garden in a letter home, knowing that his father will take a real interest in these naturalist observations. These are the sort of domestic, familial details that represent a side of Hemingway that has gotten lost.”
The University was particularly fortunate to acquire this collection, explains Spanier, since many of the letters were written to Hemingway’s favorite sister and family confidante, Madelaine, whom he nicknamed “Nunbones.” (It was typical of Hemingway, notes Spanier, to confer “a bewildering variety” of nicknames upon his friends and family.)
“There are some rather stunning letters in the collection,” she says, “such as one in which Hemingway writes ‘This is private and confidential,’ and goes on to tell his sister that he’s about to divorce his first wife, Hadley.” In another letter, he confides that he’s working on a book “that the folks will hate.” (Though Hemingway went on to win Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, his religious, Midwestern parents found the themes of his early work morbid and vulgar, and even returned copies of his books sent to them by his publisher.)