Hemingway’s Collected Letters

Ernest Hemingway wrote a great many letters in his lifetime.  They were usually very informal, often full of strong enthusiasms, coarse language, and unbridled emotion.  They were not written as works of literature, or anything close to that.  They were spontaneous and of the moment.  They reveal a great deal about the man, less about the writer.

Hemingway’s letters are scattered all over the world, some in libraries and some in private hands.  After Hemingway’s death, Carlos Baker sifted through what was then available to him and in 1969 published a collection of letters he thought were the best.  But they were just a small fraction of the entire corpus.  Now, a group of scholars is in the process of publishing a multi-volume collection of every known Hemingway letter in existence, fulsomely annotated and carefully documented – The Letters of Ernest Hemingway.  The first volume was published in 2011 and three volumes of an anticipated twelve have been published so far, in beautifully-bound editions by Cambridge University Press.  The letters are being published in chronological order, and the editors supplement them with copious introductions, notes, chronologies, glossaries, maps, and indexes.      

Bruce Bawer reviewed (link) the first three volumes in the February, 2016, issue of The New Criterion, a terrific journal of criticism and commentary to which I subscribe.  He is not very enamored with the letters he has read thus far.  Bawer finds them for the most part uninteresting, often casually written, and not indicative of the great writer’s literary talent.  Bawer sees in the letters a very human, flawed man  – he sees the man behind the curtain and doesn’t like what he finds.

Having now read many Hemingway biographies, most of the letters in the Baker collection, and all the letters in the first two volumes in this new collection, my view is different from Bawer’s.  Although Bawer’s points are well taken, and valid to a point, I find Hemingway the man fascinating, and his letters flesh out that man more than any other source.     

In his letters we see how Hemingway approached his life and his writing.  He may have been economical with words in his serious writing, but he was garrulous in his letters.  We see how his relationships with family and friends (such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Archibald MacLeish) grew, blossomed, and deteriorated.   We see his need to be surrounded by friends, with himself as the center of attention, in his frequent urgings to friends to come and stay with him to fish and hunt and travel.  The letters are often emotional, frequently gossipy, and occasionally petty.  There’s bluster, and passion, and anger.  He was very numeric – we see a man continually aware of his finances and his productivity (page counts of works in progress are frequently conveyed to friends and editors), a man who kept detailed logs of fish caught and animals shot, of miles driven and expenses incurred.  He could be very kind and considerate, or a total jerk, and he was definitely not a family man, mostly neglecting his three sons, four wives, and others in his orbit.  We see a man whose friends and family and women are cast off one-by-one along the way, and wonder why.  Hemingway was funny and inquisitive, and very competitive, always exploring, thinking, pushing limits.  He was a man full of vim and enthusiasm, who could not stay in one place (or with the same people) for very long.   

The plan for the series is to publish only letters from Hemingway himself, and not those of his correspondents, providing explanatory notes to help with context.  About 85% of the letters have never been published before, and a great deal of effort seems to have gone into tracking them down all over the world.  At the time of the first volume, letters had been collected from almost 250 sources, not only libraries and similar institutions but from over 175 dealers, private collectors, and individual Hemingway correspondents.  Hemingway himself had saved some material – early drafts and some copies, whole or in part.  He seems never to have thrown out even a scrap of paper with writing on it, perhaps learning the value of saving material from his mother, who meticulously kept detailed scrapbooks on each of her children, filling six large volumes on her son Earnest’s activities through his involvement in the First World War.  Hemingway, by the way, saved a great many lists, from shopping items to camping trip needs, and, like his father, organized himself through them.

Hemingway’s letters in a very real sense constitute his autobiography, however unintended.  He took life his way with passion and vigor, and though the picture is not always pretty, there’s much to be taken away in his letters by those of us more inclined to quiet reading and quiet times.

R Balsamo

Nobody Talks To a Horse Of Course

Alan Young, Wil...burrrrrrrr to his fans, has passed away at age 96.

From memory, after all these years (maybe we should put the stuff we really want to remember to music, in rhyme):

A horse is a horse of course of course

And nobody talks to a horse of course

Unless of course that talking horse

Is the famous Mr. Ed

Go right to the source and ask the horse

He'll give you an answer that you'll endorse

He's always on a steady course

Talk to Mr. Ed 

I've carried this jingle around in my head almost my entire life, through countless courses and exams on a myriad of topics.  And it never got lost in the shuffle; exactly how and why I do not know.

A funny show then through the eyes of a kid, and a funny show still today.  Comedy is hard, but they got it right.

R Balsamo

Illinois State Workers, the Highest Paid in America. And the Happiest? – Not

So today I drove over to the state Dept of Motor Vehicles to get a new license plate sticker for my car.  My current sticker was expired – two months ago, which I noticed just the other day.  In the past, the Illinois Secretary of State sent out reminder post cards about the need to renew one’s 12-month plate sticker.  But due to a budget crisis in Illinois, as I now have learned, the Secretary of State is no longer does that.  One more thing to keep track of. 

Quite coincidentally, just this morning I read a brief report from the Illinois Policy Institute, a good-government watchdog organization.  Here’s a part of that message:

For years, Illinois taxpayers haven't been represented at the bargaining table between Illinois' largest government union and the state.  Illinois' former governors cared more about appeasing the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees than protecting the taxpayers the governors were supposed to represent.  That's how AFSCME workers have become some the highest-compensated state workers in the nation.

    

AFSCME wants to remove the governor from contract negotiations because union officials know [Gov.] Rauner will not agree to [their] outrageous demands.  Union leaders are demanding $3 billion in additional salary and benefits for union members in a new contract.  They're seeking four-year raises ranging from 11.5 to 29 percent, overtime after 37.5 hours of work per week, five weeks of vacation and enhanced health care coverage.  Those additional demands would come on top of the costly benefits that AFSCME workers already receive.

Here are four facts about [Illinois] state-worker compensation the union doesn’t want taxpayers to know:

1. Illinois state workers are the highest-paid state workers in the country [when compensation is adjusted for the cost of living]

2. AFSCME workers receive Cadillac health care benefits

3. Most state workers receive free retiree health insurance

4. Career state retirees on average receive $1.6 million in pension benefits. [O]ver half of state workers end up retiring in their 50s.

State of Illinois workers should be the happiest on earth.  Every Illinois state government facility should be filled with beaming, cheerful workers that would put Disney World, the erstwhile “Happiest Place on Earth,” to shame.  But for some reason, when at the Illinois DMV today it was clear I wasn’t at Disney World.

By the way, the State of Illinois is functionally bankrupt, as are the City of Chicago and the Chicago Public School System, all long-controlled by Democrats and all of which are kept afloat through financial chicanery and legerdemain.  But, as the saying goes, they have all finally run out of other people’s money, and the slight-of-hand isn’t working any longer.  But don’t try to tell that to the Democrat government worker unions.

At the Jesuit Church in Palermo One Day

The Jesuit Church in Palermo, Sicily

When in Sicily last month we sought out the Jesuit church in Palermo, the Chiesa del Gesu.  We discovered a magnificent space, filled with figures and patterns of stunning craftsmanship carved in white marble.  It is perhaps the most ornately decorated church I have ever seen. 

Inside a wedding was taking place.  From the back we could see the ceremony way up front in the distance.  There was movement and talking.  The priest spoke, in Italian of course.  Then a woman rose and began singing, in a clear, strong voice.  The melody jarred me for a moment, as I recognized it as the hauntingly beautiful wordless vocals used as a leitmotif for the character Jill, the prostitute yearning for a better life, in Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (long one of my favorites).  The composer was the great Ennio Morricone.

The melody is first heard as Jill arrives in a very unfamiliar place to attend her wedding reception and start a new life.  As beautiful as the music is, it is sad and melancholic, the most penetrating Morricone melody I have heard.  There's a wistfulness as well, all befitting the emotional state of the character Jill, played by the Sicilian actress Claudia Cardinale.   The film is a story of vengeful justice and the banality of evil, all played out in a most violent way in the old American West.  And Jill is caught in the middle of it all.  But she is a remarkably strong and resilient woman amidst great tragedies and dangers.  

So there it was, in a remarkable church on a sunny April afternoon in ancient Palermo, Jill's Theme, sung strong and clear echoing though the ornate, very Italian space.  A curious choice, perhaps, but certainly a perceptive and assertive one ... befitting no doubt a strong woman, like Jill, arriving to start a new married life.

R Balsamo

Here is a montage of scenes with Claudia Cardinale from Once Upon a Time in the West, with voice-over vocals of Jill's Theme by Patricia Janeckova.