Rare Hemingway letters found
The first set to be published in spring 2011
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FLORIDA STATE ARCHIVES
Ernest Hemingway shows two sailfish he landed while living in Key West. (Photo courtesy FLORIDA STATE ARCHIVES)
The handwriting is spidery and faded by nearly a century of wear. "We go to the front tomorrow," the young ambulance driver, freshly arrived in the Italy of World War I, wrote home in June 1918. "We've been treated like kings -- we've been two days here. Wonderful in the Alps." Just weeks after he mailed that postcard, that young ambulance driver, an 18-year-old from Oak Park, Ill., named Ernest Hemingway, would be seriously wounded in a mortar attack along the Piave River in northern Italy as he delivered cigarettes and chocolates to frontline soldiers.
The postcard is among the thousands of pieces of mail that have been meticulously catalogued as scholars at Penn State University, working from cramped offices and in conjunction with colleagues across the country and the world, gear up for publication of the complete correspondence of a man widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the history of American letters.
"We have this image of him as the tough guy, the adventurer," said Sandra Spanier, a Penn State English professor -- and wife of university President Graham Spanier -- who is leading the Herculean, 15-year effort to publish the 12-volume set.
It's a calling, she said, that first began when she was an undergraduate in the 1970s and then reached full bloom when she arrived at Penn State to begin her graduate work.
"I was a English major, and I went to Key West at the age of 19," she said of the island that Hemingway called home in the 1930s. "In the early 1970s, Key West was very exotic. It wasn't the Spring Break destination it is now."
While in Key West, Spanier said she visited Hemingway's house at 907 Whitehead St. And that's where it all started.
"This was before the house was so polished," she said. "There were cats everywhere. That was the initial draw. Here was someone from the Midwest, as I was, who had built this life in exotic locations. I started to read. Then I came to Penn State."
For Spanier, the letters project is the culmination of a career spent studying Hemingway's terse and economical prose.
Though it's not associated with the Hemingway myth, Penn State has quietly become one of the major centers of scholarship on the author, who committed suicide in 1961 after a five-decade career that produced such seminal works as "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and "The Old Man and the Sea," along with scores of short stories, poems and newspaper articles.
Revealed in the letters -- many of them never before seen -- is Hemingway the family man, who took a paternal interest in his family's affairs and was known to scribble down instructions in Spanish so his cook could prepare his favorite salads.
"It is fun living in the oldest quarter of Paris," the then-unknown Hemingway wrote home to his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, on Feb. 14, 1922, not long after arriving in the City of Lights. "It is so very beautiful it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America."
The first edition is set to be published through Cambridge University Press in the spring of 2011.
Spanier has compared the work of collating, researching and collecting Hemingway's letters to solving a mystery.
Each letter was entered into a computer by hand by student interns, scholars and graduate research assistants. The initial transcriptions were provided to scholars who corrected them against archived copies, Spanier explained.
Finally, scholars also checked the transcriptions against the originals.
That meant, for instance, that a researcher had to travel to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, which is the prime repository for Hemingway's papers, to inspect a letter in person.
Written between 1917 and 1957, the 100 unpublished letters, postcards, cables and notes were amassed by Hemingway's younger sister, Madelaine "Sunny" Hemingway, and passed on to her son, Ernest H. Mainland of Petoskey, Mich.
