From The Times Literary Supplement:
The publication of Ernest Hemingway’s complete correspondence is shaping up to be an astonishing scholarly achievement. We are already on the third of a projected seventeen volumes, minimum, which will include in their entirety every surviving letter, postcard and telegram sent by Hemingway. Meticulously edited, with shrewd introductory summaries and footnotes tracking down every reference, the series brings into sharp focus this contradictory, alternately smart and stupid, blustering, fragile man who was also a giant of modern literature.
The third volume, ably edited by Rena Sanderson, Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, takes us through a particularly eventful and productive patch of Hemingway’s life, from 1926 to 1929. At the beginning he is just tackling the rewrites of The Sun Also Rises (1926) and seeing through publication his satiric novel The Torrents of Spring (1926) – his first, chronologically speaking, though it is seldom credited as such. He will switch publishers to land with the prestigious editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s, will write some of his greatest short stories for the collection Men Without Women (1927), and go on to compose his second proper novel, the hugely successful A Farewell to Arms (1929). Having entered the four-year period aged twenty-seven as a promising if uncommercial newcomer backed by obscure experimental presses, he will exit it at thirty transformed into a literary lion and international celebrity.
. . . .
Considering what a conscientious stylist Hemingway was in his serious prose, he brought little precision or care to his correspondence. Nor did he use letters as an opportunity for introspection or self-examination. Indeed, he confessed to having a hard time putting his private life into them. He apologized for being an irregular, undependable correspondent, begging off with the excuse that he needed to save the verbal energy for his books. He loved to receive mail and be connected to the literary world’s gossip, but one senses his own responses were the reluctant obligatory dues paid to stay in that sphere. An irony of this monumental project is that Hemingway was not one of literature’s great letter writers; his efforts are nevertheless steadfastly interesting to read, partly because he could never write poorly, and partly because they offer many insights into his character and milieu.
While Hemingway frequently expressed dissatisfaction with his writing, his comments about the actual problems involved in composing were sparse, in keeping with his conviction that “It’s a terrible mistake to talk about a book”. He would state the number of pages he’d written but little about their substance. As someone who never attended college, he was always playing catch-up, reading omnivorously, with an eye towards finding models for the rhetorically chaste style he tried to perfect. He had little patience for Whitman or Stendhal or Henry James. About James, his opposite, he wrote: “My impression is that he knew NOTHING about people . . . . He seems to need to bring in a drawing room whenever he is scared he will have to think what the characters do the rest of the time and the men all without exception talk and think like fairies except a couple of caricatures of brutal ‘outsiders’”. In the original draft of The Sun Also Rises he ridiculed James as impotent from a rumoured bicycling accident, but Maxwell Perkins made him change it.
Link to the rest at The Times Literary Supplement
Perkins made almost no changes in THE SUN ALSO RISES. That much is clear.
Read the book, EVERYBODY BEHAVING BADLY on the writing of SUN. It’s a clear and pretty complete record.
The rest? You’re probably, roughly, right.
😮 )
thanks for the book hint Ryan. I’ll look it up. Its a great title, btw
Hemingway was a drunk, with rolling depression, and a mania as well, seeking as lift, various ill judged endeavors. Max Perkins the svengali of publishinginhis time heavily edited H. We will never know what H actually wrote after MP got hold of him.
It was in the days of choosing stars forhow they looked and for their personas, in other words their sellability to the public, it ran across filmaking and publishing …Rock Hudson,Tab Hunter, Clark Gable, etc/imo hemingway was hollywoodized by Perkins, withPerkins encouraging H’s intemperate choices, without regard for the man’s clear lability, mood swings, alcoholism and other impulsive endeavors that would lead to more and more deteriorations yet to come.
Given the stilted writing of H’s letters and the smooth smooth of MP’s edited books, the actual writer was the one in the letters. H’s condemnation of so many notwithstanding.
I remember how sad we were when H killed himself with a shotgun. Not because we thought he was a great writer, other than being told he was so… but because we could see through magazine articles on him in Life, and Lookand others, how tormented he was. And we hoped,given his father’s choice, he would make it and keep on living
I love Hemingway’s books, including “A Moveable Feast,” but what he did to Fitzgerald was pretty low. Presenting himself as a true friend that provides moral support and practical tips..ugh. Entrusted with somebody else’s deepest secret, he goes and shares it with the world. Some friendship.
I agree. There are any number of cringe-worthy moments.
I recommend the new book, EVERYBODY BEHAVING BADLY. (Title is approximate.) Regarding the writing of THE SUN ALSO RISES.
…which will include in their entirety every surviving letter, postcard and telegram sent by Hemingway.
I look forward to future scholarly works that will capture in their entirety every tweet, email, and text message.
The internet is forever. But so is the written word, maybe. He didn’t care enough to censor himself; but he must have known the people he disparaged might find out.
I’m seven chapters into writing a novella in which Hemingway appears as a central a character and so, as background, I’ve read a ton of his writings and biography recently, particularly covering the period included in this comprehensive book of his correspondence (his Paris years).
He was an early devotee to the ideas of fame and branding as they are known to us now, and his biography is all mixed up, its truths and its fictions, with the merits and demerits of his work as a writer. He can be at times a tremendous disappointment, but also endearing and endlessly fascinating.
I have only just scratched the correspondence in this volume, but I trust this reviewer (Phillip Lopate) has a very good feel for it.