PSU correspondence collection shows softer side of Hemingway

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By John L. Micek - The (Allentown) Morning Call

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 front-line soldiers.

Photo provided/Wilson Hutton, University Libraries Public Relations and Marketing, Penn State

From left: Sandra Spanier, Penn State professor of English and general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project; Ernest Hemingway Mainland, who donated the letters; and Nancy Eaton, dean of the University Libraries and Scholarly Communications, look over some of the donated letters.

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The postcard is among the thousands of pieces of mail that have been meticulously catalogued as scholars at Penn State, 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.

But also 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. Such hands-on research is critical, Spanier said. In one instance, a scanned postcard that researchers believed portrayed a street scene turned out to be a garden when it was seen up-close. “You have to see the original,” said LaVerne M. Maginnis, the associate editor and coordinator of the effort officially known as The Hemingway Letters Project. “It’s like putting together a huge puzzle.” A large chunk of that puzzle arrived in 2006, when Penn State came into possession of the last known collection of Hemingway correspondence still in private hands. 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.

The letters, many of which were not seen outside the Hemingway family, show “the more sensitive side of Hemingway,” Maginnis said. “In early letters, he is very kind and generous to his friends and family,” she explained. “He was very considerate, even if he doesn’t always agree with what his parents want him to do.” An exhibition of the letters, “Hemingway Writing Home, Letters to His Family, 1917-1957,” was mounted at Penn State’s Paterno Library in 2008.

According to both Spanier and Mainland, the letters defuse the long-standing assumption that Hemingway and his mother were often at loggerheads. Spanier says it’s true that the author often clashed with his willful and artistically inclined mother, but “it is revealing to see letters in there written with great affection.”

Mainland agreed, saying in a phone interview that the stories of acrimony between the author and his mother were “manufactured to sell lecture fees on the rubber chicken circuit.”

In addition to the cache of letters, Mainland also donated massive baby books kept for his mother by Grace Hall Hemingway. Each is intricately detailed and contains notes and observations written by Hall Hemingway, photographs and, in one instance, a piece of the christening dress worn by Mainland’s mother.

“I donated the scrapbooks because of the very cordial relationship that has developed between me and my family and Penn State,” Mainland said. “After entrusting the letters to Penn State, I learned that the university was a site of Hemingway scholarship.” Mainland said he developed a professional relationship with Spanier when she “arrived on my doorstep looking for copies of letters that I had.” “I learned that Dr. Spanier was the general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project and that Penn State was an early hotbed of Hemingway scholarship,” he said. “I knew it was the right place for mother’s baby books so that scholars could review them, instead of their sitting on my bookshelves getting moldy where no one could see them.”

Spanier said the photobooks were an invaluable tool as she made her way through the author’s correspondence. In letters, Hemingway often used pseudonyms to refer to himself and his siblings. And the letters were shot through with period slang.

For instance, Hemingway sometimes referred to himself as “Wemedge,” “Hemingstein,” and “Oinbones.” “It’s not even a simple matter to transcribe the letter,” she said. “You want to make it readable, but you don’t want to lose the flavor.” That meant, for instance, that editors did not correct Hemingway’s sometimes idiosyncratic spelling. The author was a good speller but a lousy typist and would insert asides into the letters apologizing for the errors.

The task of preserving the letters and photo albums fell to Sandra Stelts, curator of rare books and manuscripts for the Penn State University Libraries. With boxes of Hemingway’s letters and the scrapbooks arrayed on a table before her, Stelts said it’s “my job to oversee the care, preservation and access to the materials.”

Moving gently, Spanier reached into one box and removed a folder made of acid-free paper. Inside sat the picture postcard that the then-18-year-old Hemingway sent to his parents from Italy in 1918. The Paris letter, sent in 1922, matter-of-factly states that Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson Hemingway, had enjoyed a recent dinner with the author Gertrude Stein and had been invited to tea by the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Those are extraordinary revelations to scholars and fans, but a run-of-the mill occurrence for Hemingway, who routinely rubbed shoulders with titanic figures of American literature.

“We know a good patch of people here in Paris if we allowed it would have all our time taken up socially,” he wrote to his mother. The letters are kept in a temperature-controlled vault, and more fragile artifacts are kept in Mylar sleeves, Stelts explained. “To prevent wear and tear, we’ve been making preservation scans and color facsimiles for most users to use,” she said.

For Spanier, the letters project is the culmination of a career spent studying Hemingway’s terse and economical prose.

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 Florida 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.”

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. One of Spanier’s Penn State mentors, Philip Young, wrote one of the earliest books on Hemingway’s life and works.

According to Spanier, Hemingway claimed not to have read the book, titled simply, “Ernest Hemingway.” But a copy of it sits on Hemingway’s desk in the library at his home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, Spanier recalled with a laugh. The house, called Finca Vigia, is now a national museum.

Another Penn State scholar, Charles W. Mann Jr., worked with Young to inventory Hemingway manuscripts that the author’s fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, had rescued from communist Cuba in August 1961 and from other locations. The resulting book, “The Hemingway Manuscripts: An Inventory,” was published in 1969.

Four decades later, Spanier says she sees herself as an inheritor of the tradition started by her mentors.

“I’m delighted to be doing it carrying on the tradition that Philip Young and Charley Mann started so early on,” she said.