The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 1 - Sandra Spanier & Robert W. Trogdon

The book is exactly what the title suggests, a collection of letters Hemingway wrote to various people. Letters to his parents, his sisters, his friends, prospective employers, any letters that could be located. In this case, from 1907 up through 1922. There are three more volumes of this, which my dad seems very intent on purchasing for me.

It can be interesting as a way to track Hemingway's mood on things, the points when he gets fed up with someone. You can track his progress through his relationship with the nurse he met while serving in the Ambulance Corps in Italy. From being head over heels and ready to marry her, to finding out she met someone else while he was back in the States. First he's heartbroken, then he's insisting he really dodged a bullet, and by the final time he refers to her, he's adopted the approach that it was a good learning experience, if nothing else.

There can be a lot of humor in the letters, when he's bullshitting with his friends or his sisters. Or seeing how he chooses to sign his letters. During his stint in Europe during World War I, he seems fond of adding little drawings of different things. Beer steins sometimes, I think there's at least one that's meant to depict the state of his leg after he got a lot of shrapnel in it from a shell. He makes me look like a good artist, which is saying something.

At times only part of the letter was located, or whatever was written or typed is unintelligible. Or Hemingway will use a Latin phrase, but change one of the words, so Spanier and Trogdon are left trying to decipher what he meant by it. That's probably the main point of the book, that at the end of each letter is a series of footnotes explaining things. Sometimes it's simply the context of a person or event that's referred to, or translating something he writes in French. Other times they have to try and guess at what might have been written or said to him in earlier correspondence that he's responding to (since I'm guessing the collection of letters Hemingway received that he kept is fairly spotty).

'To Marcelline Hemingway, [5 May 1915]

You poor bonus caput how in the name of all things just and unjust did you get in the story club. If I couldn't write a better story than you I'd consign myself to purgatory. Congratulations.

Thine eternally,
Ernestum'