Ernest Hemingway wears the look of the successful novelist in Paris, in 1927, just after his book "The Sun Also Rises" hit the bestseller list.The Associated Press
What a quintessentially academic undertaking: 16 volumes (of which The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: 1907-1922 is only the first) crammed full of the collected correspondence of the author, more than 6,000 letters in total, from 250 sources.
Because newer is clearly superior to older, and more is always better than less, isn't it? By this logic, 1981's Selected Letters, as edited by pioneering Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, is as dispensable as your great-grandfather's pocket watch (because you can't take digital pictures on it like you can on your awesome new thousand-dollar wristwatch). But don't throw out your copy of the Selected Letters just yet.
To the quantitative mind, the superior product principally means more, and more up-to-date, information. And professors Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon have to be commended for their diligence and scholarly fastidiousness, over the last nine years gathering these letters from a staggering number of universities, institutions and individuals, their primary editorial achievement being that 85 per cent of these letters have never before been published. To ask whether they all should be published, however, is to enter the arena of the qualitative.
There are some undeniable, if lesser, revelations. An unearthed letter to Hemingway's mother is noteworthy because, as a footnote relates, "This letter, new to scholarship, places the meeting of EH and [Gertrude]Stein earlier than 1922, as previously believed."
More interesting to the non-scholar, it's delightful to learn that "morting" was Hemingway's youthful slang for finishing a drink, a perfect Hemingwayism. A letter to Harriet Monroe is redolent of the best of Hemingway's brilliantly tactile mature prose style: "The hot rum and checker season has come in. It looks like a good winter."
There are even fresh examples of his legendary distaste for Canada – Toronto in particular – incurred while briefly working for the Toronto Star, as when, writing to a potential newspaper employer, he complains of how "constantly writing Canadian stuff for inmates of Canada without yourself being Canadian palls after a time."
Nonetheless, when Spanier and Trogdon write, "Publication of Hemingway's collected letters will be a crucial step forward for the study of American literature and literary modernism," they weren't, presumably, thinking of missives like this one to his mother in 1918: "Much obliged for all the foodstuffs mother! They were awfully good and Carl and I had a feast last night. I didn't think at first that the buns would have kept so long but they were great."
Or this correspondence with an employee of the Paris office of the International News Service: "In your note of December 4th you say that you sent me a check for 2/6 week salary and expenses at $60. a week and 4/6 week at $90. figured into francs at the rate of 14.40. According to a wire I received from Mr. Mason dated the 29th of November the weekly increase was to be $35.00, not $30.00. I will ask you to add to my next check the difference between 4/6 week salary at $90. and the same length of time at $95. figured at 14.40 francs to the dollar."
And I'd always thought Pound's Cantos was literary modernism's most boring document.
In his review of The Selected Letters 30 years ago, John Updike described the majority of Hemingway's correspondence as "overlong, sludgy, and frequently humiliating." Not that Hemingway should be castigated for this; in another letter to his mother, he apologizes, "I am sorry to write such dull letters, but I get such full expression in my articles and the other work I am doing that I am quite pumped out and exhausted from a writing stand point and so my letters are very common-place." To him, as for many authors, letters were for after the real writing was done for the day, or, occasionally, as a way to avoid the real writing. A 16-volume monument to so much ephemera may be a tribute to scholarly industriousness, though certainly not to aesthetic acumen.
Not surprisingly, then, the best written and most interesting letters here are those already published in the Baker edition, as when Hemingway reports to Sherwood Anderson on the doings of the Joyce family. The last word, as always, should belong to the artist, not the scholar or the critic:
"Joyce has a most god-damn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole Celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week. … The damn Irish, they have to moan about something or other, but you never heard of an Irishman starving."
Contributing reviewer Ray Robertson's collection of essays, Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live , was short-listed for the Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Prize for Non-Fiction.