Sandra Spaniercredit Scott Johnson
Hemingway's Practical Side
Another aspect of Hemingway that emerges from these dispatches is his practical side, says Spanier. One letter addressed to Sunny includes “all kinds of instructions for getting the car ready for a long trip, down to what brand of motor oil to put in it. When we think of Hemingway, we think of the artist or the public figure. But you don’t think about somebody who has to change the oil in his car and knows exactly how to do it and what brand to buy.”
Hemingway was twenty-nine years old when his father died, and “the picture we get of him in letters from this time is of someone taking on a huge amount of responsibility and really becoming the head of the family,” explains Spanier. “You get the sense that he is expected to provide, and in many ways he would like to. For instance, Sunny was musical and in the mid-1930s wanted his help buying a harp. There are letters to her in which he keeps telling her that it’s the Depression and if he had $100 dollars, he’d love to give it to her, but he just doesn’t have it right now.” He probably was a little defensive, Spanier adds, because “his wife Pauline had a lot of money, relatively speaking. And they were taking a safari to Africa in the midst of the Great Depression.”
He wrote to Sunny, “I move around a lot and do plenty shooting and fishing but I make my living out of that and if don’t move about have nothing to write about.”
Notes Sandra Stelts, “I particularly like one letter to his mother. She is a little miffed at all the instructions he is giving her about her finances. And Hemingway replies, “Praying for advice and guidance is an excellent thing but advice and guidance even though unprayed for when accompanied by cash can be an excellent thing too.’”
That must have been a very satisfying letter to write, Stelts adds. “His mother had been a dominant force in the family for a long time and was now in a more dependent situation. The letter shows his wit and sarcasm, as well as the role-reversal in the family.”
Some of the most intriguing letters in the collection, say the curators, are those containing fresh accounts of experiences the author would later transform into literature. “I go to the front tomorrow, ” the 18-year-old Hemingway wrote home on a postcard from Milan, dated June 9, 1918. Wounded seriously in a mortar explosion one month later, he was treated at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan. (“P.S. Don’t worry, Pop,” ends one hospital-bed letter home.) These are among the experiences that helped shape his World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms.
The Hemingway letters have found a fitting home at Penn State, given the University’s long and distinguished tradition in American literary studies, dating back to Fred Lewis Pattee’s arrival on campus in 1894. Pattee—one of the first professors in the nation to hold the title of professor of American literature—helped establish American literature as a distinct and credible field of study in its own right, rather than a lesser branch of English literature. Penn State is noted for pioneering research in Hemingway studies as well. The late Philip Young, an Evan Pugh professor of English, authored the first book on Hemingway in 1952. In the late 1960s, he and the late Charles W. Mann, Jr.—the University’s chief of Rare Books and Special Collections for over 40 years—were the first people to catalog the Hemingway papers that Hemingway’s widow later donated to the Kennedy Library. In 1969, Penn State University Press published the landmark book by Mann and Young, The Hemingway Manuscripts: An Inventory.
When Spanier’s husband, Graham Spanier, interviewed for a beginning faculty position at Penn State in 1973, she learned that “the foremost Hemingway scholar, Philip Young, was here. That’s when I applied to graduate school and really got more professionally interested. At the time, I had no aspirations of being a full-time academic. I was a high school teacher. I did my Master’s degree in evenings and summers, and my very first course was taught by Charley Mann—a notorious boot camp course, English 501. I spent 60 hours in the library on the first assignment, tracking down answers to a list of 50 incredibly obscure questions. Looking back, there’s no doubt that it was very serendipitous for me to be here at that time.”
Spanier’s interest in Hemingway pre-dates her studies at Penn State. “I can actually pinpoint when it really began,” recalls Spanier. “We went to Key West for a friend’s wedding in 1972 and decided to go visit the Hemingway house. At that time, it wasn’t the cultivated tourist experience it is now. There were descendants of Hemingway’s famous six-toed cats roaming all over the place, including one sleeping on top of the stove, I remember. At that time, you could even take a cat home with you, if you wanted to! I was captivated by the whole ambiance of Key West and by Hemingway. I wasn’t a big Hemingway buff until that trip, but when we came back I started reading furiously.”
Spanier’s scholarship has led her to her current project—“a monumental thing,” as Sandra Stelts describes it. As general editor of Cambridge University’s Press planned release (over the next fifteen years) of a 12-volume scholarly edition of Hemingway’s letters, Spanier is directing an international team of scholars in editing, annotating, and introducing the letters. At the project’s headquarters at Penn State, she works closely with Associate Editor and Project Coordinator LaVerne Maginnis, graduate research assistants, and specially trained undergraduate interns. To date they have collected and transcribed more than 6.000 photocopied letters for the master archive. Notes Stelts, “This will be the definitive edition of Hemingway’s letters, so Sandy and her colleagues want to get everything right—all the references, all the names. It’s an unbelievably complicated task.” The Hemingway Letters Project is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been designated a We, the People project, "a special recognition by the NEH for model projects that advance the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture." The first volume is expected to be published in 2009.
Continuing the tradition of mentoring within Penn State Hemingway studies, Spanier has served as an adviser to graduate student Verna Kale, who has been Spanier’s research assistant on the Letters Project and served as guest curator of the library’s Spring 2008 exhibit of Hemingway letters, called “Hemingway Writing Home: Letters To His Family 1917-1957.”
“I came to Penn State primarily because of the strong tradition of Hemingway studies here,” Kale explains. “I began with the same picture of Hemingway that a lot of people have—as this gun-toting, hard-drinking man. But working with the letters has shown me different sides of him. He was an extremely complicated person. He was very emotional. He was very funny. He also had a great respect for nature. And he had a strong work ethic, with Midwestern values that he kept his whole life.” Of working with Sandra Spanier, Kale says, “She’s a wonderful, supportive mentor. She encourages me to take on more than I thought I could. I’ve learned a lot from her about editing and research.”
Turning back to the letters themselves, Spanier’s voice is full of emotion as she says, “You have to cut through the stereotype of this swaggering, macho character and go to the work. That’s the touchstone. That’s what matters.” The candidness of his family letters, which “are not self-conscious and were certainly not written with posterity in mind,” reminds the public of the complex humanity behind the icon. Spanier’s favorite letters? Perhaps the ones from his early years, she says. “It’s just so poignant to me to be privy to the thoughts and experiences of this person who is on the brink of his whole life opening up and feels that magnitude.” RPS
Sandra Spanier, Ph.D., is professor of English in the College of the Liberal Arts; sxs74@psu.edu.
Sandra Stelts is Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Special Collections department of the University Libraries; sks5@psu.edu.
William L.Joyce is the Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair for Special Collections and head of Penn State’s Special Collections Library; wlj2@psulias.psu.edu.
Verna Kale is a doctoral candidate in English; verna.kale@gmail.com.
