From the Hemingway Letters Project.

Spanier, Sandra ; Sanderson, Rena ; Trodgon, Robert 等

At the invitation of Hemingway Review editor Suzanne del Gizzo, we are offering here the first of what will be periodic contribution from the Hemingway Letters Project, in which members of the editorial team will share thoughts and experiences concerning particular letters or groups of letters and try to give some sense of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the making of the Cambridge Edition of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. In this issue, in addition to my providing an overview of the Project to date, each of us who served as editors of volume 3--Rena Sanderson, Robert Trogdon, and I--will share some of our reflections and experiences in working on this volume.

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When I was exploring topics for a doctoral dissertation at Penn State in the late 1970s, my advisor, Philip Young, one of the founding fathers of Hemingway studies, told me, "Don't write about Hemingway. There's nothing new to say. He's been done to death." I followed his advice and discovered (for myself, at least) the work of another American expatriate in Paris in the Twenties, Kay Boyle (1902-1992). Boyle's work appeared in the first issue of This Quarter alongside Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," and her sister worked at Paris Vogue with Pauline Pfeiffer. Although Kay Boyle admired In Our Time, she told me decades later that she had refused to meet Hemingway on the grounds that he was a "dirty double-dealing bastard" for having an affair with Pauline while she pretended to be Hadley's good friend. Never mind that at the same time, Boyle had left her French husband in early 1926 to live in the South of France with This Quarter editor Ernest Walsh and gave birth to Walsh's daughter five months after he died that October. The difference was obvious, Boyle told me when I finally worked up the courage to ask: She had been completely honest with her husband when she fell in love with Walsh, whereas Hemingway had been deceitful.

Philip Young inscribed a copy of his 1966 book Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, "For Sandy Spanier, remembering that this was once a dissertation and hoping for luck with her own." I had no idea then that I was embarking on such a long-term project. My work on Boyle evolved into the first book about her (Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist, Southern Illinois UP, 1986), and in 2015, I published an edition of her selected letters--a project she had asked me to take on shortly before her death (Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters, U of Illinois P). But my fascination with Hemingway never flagged, and over the years I pursued my scholarly interests in Hemingway studies as well.

In 2002, I was honored to be named General Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, charged with producing a comprehensive scholarly edition of his some 6,000 surviving letters. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway is being published by Cambridge University Press in a projected seventeen volumes. The project, headquartered at Penn State, is authorized by the Hemingway Foundation/Society and the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust, holders, respectively, of the U.S. and international copyrights to the letters. Patrick Hemingway, who originally conceived of a published collection of his father's complete letters, has been particularly generous and supportive of this project. He has stipulated that all royalties due to the Trust from publication of the Letters be directed back to sustaining the Project over the long run, and the Foundation/Society has generously done the same.

As insightful as Philip Young was about Hemingway's work, he was a poor prognosticator of the future of Hemingway studies. To be fair, his advice against writing about Hemingway came shortly before the vast trove of Hemingway's papers was opened to research at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston in 1980, and before the publication of such posthumous works as The Garden of Eden (1986) opened new veins of scholarship and stoked powerful new waves of popular and scholarly interest in Hemingway that still show no signs of abating.

The third volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway was published in October 2015. Spanning 1926 into early April 1929, volume 3 is edited by Rena Sanderson, Sandra Spanier, and Robert W. Trogdon, with advisory editors J. Gerald Kennedy and Rodger L. Tarr. We are gratified to have been awarded a fourth three-year Scholarly Editions Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the work of the Hemingway Letters Project for the period October 2015-September 2018. 2015 also saw the publication of a Portuguese translation of volume 1 by the Brazilian publishing house Martins Editora Livraria: As cartas de Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 1 (1907-1922), edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, translated by Rogerio Bettoni. My sympathies went out to the translator, who had to contend with young Ernest's private slang, puns, and other linguistic acrobatics that had sometimes stumped our own editorial team. We received a series of queries seeking guidance for translating such expressions as "whangleberries," "the frigid" (as in "No time for a screed except to slip you the frigid"), "When a baby balls does a baseball cry?" and (from a 1918 letter to his sister Sunny): "Well muy Love Faret thee well old Minga And Cavironi till the Chingi's come home and tont forget to breath a Cracatua now and then as you keep the pour L'Diablo's burning."

The Hemingway Letters Project benefits from the experience, wise counsel, and inexhaustible generosity of the members of our Editorial Advisory Board, headed by Linda Patterson Miller and including Jackson R. Bryer, Scott Donaldson, Debra Moddelmog, and James L. W. West III. An international team of scholars serves in a variety of roles, including as volume editors and as expert consultants. In addition to those volume editors already mentioned, the core editorial team includes Miriam Mandel, who has a lead role in editing volumes 4 and 5; Albert J. DeFazio III, a co-editor of volume 2; and Mark Cirino, who is focusing on letters for later volumes. We expect that additional scholars will come aboard as the project progresses.

The publication of Hemingway's letters has attracted a degree of media attention that is unusual for scholarly work. Cambridge is producing the volumes as trade books, accessibly priced, in order to maximize the reach of the edition. The jacket cover was designed by Chip Kidd, who has been called the closest thing to a rock star in the world of graphic design. Each cover will feature a photograph of Hemingway from the period of the volume, along with the stylized signature that was embossed on the cloth covers of many of the Scribner's editions of Hemingway's books during his lifetime.

Concurrent with the publication of volume 1 (1907-1922), the October 2011 issue of Vanity Fair featured a fourteen-page illustrated spread, including a selection of previously unpublished letters, introduced by Pulitzer-prize winning biographer A. Scott Berg. Volume 2 (1923-1925), released in October 2013, includes a previously unpublished humorous short story that Hemingway had enclosed in a 1924 letter to the editor of Vanity Fair and that the magazine rejected. That comic sketch, "My Life in the Bull Ring with Donald Ogden Stewart," was excerpted and published both in the Guardian and in the October 2013 issue of Harper's magazine. Volume 3 letters have been excerpted in the literary magazine Tin House, the London Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast, and early articles and reviews have appeared in such venues as Booklist, Esquire, Kansas City Star, and the Wall Street Journal.

Since 2011, the Hemingway Letters Project and the volumes of the Cambridge Edition have been the subject of more than 170 articles and reviews in an array of print, online, and broadcast venues. These include, in North America, the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Library Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, Humanities, Toronto Star, and National Public Radio; in the United Kingdom, the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Spectator, Guardian, Scotsman, London Review of Books, Daily Telegraph, and BBC Radio; in such online venues as B uzzFeed, Omnivoracious, and the Huffing ton Post, in scholarly publications including the Hemingway Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, American Literary History Online Review, and the Polish Journal of American Studies; and in other periodicals and broadcast venues based around the globe, including in Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Australia.

Following are some reflections by the volume 3 editors concerning our work on the volume and some of the letters it includes. Rena Sanderson focuses on travel to archives and our process of "perfecting" our transcriptions of Hemingway's letters against the original documents whenever feasible. Robert Trogdon addresses the challenges of researching annotations and some of the resources we draw upon in our research.

Sandra Spanier

Simply assembling the transcriptions of the hundreds of Hemingway letters that make up a single volume is like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle. The dated letters to known correspondents are easy--the edge pieces of the puzzle--but then there are the letters to previously unknown individuals to whom he wrote only a single surviving letter. And there are those letters dated simply "Tuesday" or "November (?) 1927." Our research includes locating and reviewing extant incoming letters that Hemingway received, which often include valuable clues for dating and annotating references in his outgoing letters. Fortunately, Hemingway was a packrat and saved thousands of the letters sent to him. The Kennedy Library's Hemingway Collection alone contains some 9,500 incoming letters gathered together after his death, and the research staff have been tireless in answering our questions and providing copies of materials we need to consult.

Each member of the Letters Project team can no doubt recount a particularly memorable "Eureka moment" in the course of researching annotations. One of my own involved the mystery of the "mistering" in Hemingway's letter of c. 18 January 1929 to Maxwell Perkins--the first letter in which Hemingway addressed his editor as "Dear Max," rather than "Dear Mr. Perkins." The letter begins: "I'm sorry to have mistered you so long--Early got the habit of mistering anyone from whom I received money--on the theory of never make a friend of either a servant or an employer--" (Letters vol. 3, 505). In the author correspondence files of the Scribner's Archive at Princeton University Library, the unsigned carbon copy of Perkins's letter of 15 January 1929--a sheet of yellow onion-skin paper neatly affixed to this response of Hemingway's--yielded no clue. Only when I saw the original, signed letter from Perkins that Hemingway actually received did Hemingway's comment suddenly make complete sense. At the end of the typewritten letter, under his signature, Perkins had added a handwritten postscript not present on the carbon copy in the Scribner's files. The postscript reads: "For Gods Sake un-Mister me anyhow."

This letter from Perkins is among the thousands of pages of documents in the collection of the Museo Hemingway at Finca Vigia that for decades had been inaccessible to researchers outside Cuba. Scanned copies of these materials came to the Kennedy Library in 2009 and 2013 as a result of an historic international cooperative project sponsored by the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation to restore, preserve, and digitize the papers in the Cuban museum's collection. (For more about the beginnings of the project, see "The Finca Vigia Archives: A Joint Cuban-American Project to Preserve Hemingway's Papers" by Jenny Phillips, granddaughter of Maxwell Perkins, in the Hemingway Review, Vol. 22, No. 1, Fall 2002).

Volume 3 chronicles an exceptionally eventful and productive period of Hemingway's life and career. Reading the letters, we follow along as he moves to Scribner's and begins his lifelong friendship with Maxwell Perkins, pursues his affair with Pauline, suffers through the three-month separation from her that Hadley stipulated as a condition for granting a divorce, marries Pauline, discovers Key West and the American West, becomes a father for the second time, and copes with the suicide of his own father six months later. Through it all he "bit on the nail" and kept writing. In the course of the volume, he publishes The Torrents of Spring (1926), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Men Without Women (1927), and completes the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms in January 1929. As the volume ends in early April 1929, he is headed for Havana, where he will set sail on his return to Paris, poised on the cusp of worldwide recognition as a writer.

Of the 345 letters in the volume, more than 70% are new to print. Among my favorite of the previously unpublished letters are those that log his progress and chart his fluctuating moods as he hammers out the first draft of what he does not yet know will be a masterpiece of modern literature, A Farewell to Arms. In a letter to Henry Strater of 13 May 1928, Hemingway reported from Key West, "I have written 167 pages on my newest (and let us hope best gentlemen) novel (Christnose what it is all about) but this is a fine place to write it" (Letters vol. 3, 385).

On 15 July 1928, he wrote to Archibald MacLeish from Kansas City, where Pauline had given birth to Patrick on 28 June by Caesarean section after a dangerous protracted labor, and the temperature had been above ninety degrees since the day he was born. His exasperation partly leavened by self-deprecating humor, Hemingway reported his progress on the novel:

I am now on page 455 (one of the shittiest yet and I hoped it wd. be one of the best)--as near as I can figure out I will go on writing this book forever. I am next going to try writing in Wyoming. I have had some success writing in Key West--writing in Piggott was equally difficult--writing in Kansas City has charms of its own but have we given the great west a chance? No. Therefore I will hope to conclude the volumne in Wyoming. If it doesn't go well I will move on to Idaho. Will probably finish neck deep in the Pacific oceon (Letters vol. 3, 411).

Eight days later, still sweltering in Kansas City, Hemingway complained to Waldo Peirce in a letter of 23 July, "I am no nearer finished on my fooking book than ever--now on page 478 or something like that and six weeks more work. The bloody heat ruins my head. Also the cries of Patrick." Yet the letter reveals his dogged discipline, his uncompromising standards, and his refusal to indulge in excuses: "Christ I will be happy if I get this book done and any good. I have been cogida so much while doing it that my faena (performed daily) is that of a very groggy bastard--There are no fooking alibis in life--the stuff is good or not--Your reasons for it not being so good arent worth a turd--Have to make it good--Temptation is just to make it--" (Letters vol. 3,416).

In late July, Hemingway received a letter from his friend Barklie McKee Henry, whose debut novel Deceit (1924) had been a runaway success, reporting that he had just taken a job at the Guaranty Trust Company of New York. He hoped Hemingway would not snub him if they met on the street. In a letter of 27 July 1928, Hemingway (then on page 486 of his novel) responded:

I wish to hell I was in the Guaranty Trust instead of trying to write--work 24 hrs. a day--never sleep--don't give a damn about anything--exept getting it done--then find that it's not enough to drive it doggedly on--have to make it good at the same time--always cockeyed discouraged--stuff they praise seems like merde to him that writes it because it isnt what you worked for--feel fine just a while each day after you've finished work--then worried about the next. If it wasnt that I am so utterly unhappy if I don't write would go in the bank with you if they'd take me. or I'd sail a boat for somebody or teach skiing--may yet. But when this book is finished then comes the fine time--and that will be about when we'll hit N.Y. (Letters vol. 3, 419).

Coming into the final stretch, having gone over the entire draft in pencil, and with "twelve chapters of it all finished and typed," Hemingway wrote on 4 January 1929 to his in-laws, Mary and Paul Pfeiffer, that he had done all he could: "As I've read over some of the chapters twelve or more times am at the state when I wish it was much much better and yet can't get it any better" (Letters vol. 3,488). Hemingway declared the novel finished on 22 January, and by the end of the month handed off the complete typescript to Max Perkins when he came to Key West.

Rena Sanderson

One important step in preparing Hemingway's letters for publication is the "perfecting trip," undertaken by a member of the Hemingway Letters Project team to perfect our letter transcriptions, generally made from photocopies or scans, against the original documents. These originals are housed at certain libraries--such as the Firestone Library at Princeton University (for letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner's, and Maxwell Perkins), the John F. Kennedy Library (for those to his mother, father, in-laws, and certain friends), Yale (for Ezra Pound), the Library of Congress (for Archibald MacLeish and Owen Wister), and Colby College (for Waldo Peirce), to name just a few. Trips have to be planned carefully and well in advance. Libraries vary in their rules, but most expect sufficient prior notice. Some allow the use of personal computers and even cameras; others count the number of pages a researcher may bring in and will not allow the use of personal pens. Some prohibit wearing jackets with pockets that might hide forbidden cargo.

Some perfecting work takes place in awe-inspiring settings, steeped in history and tradition. One such place is the reading room of the Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University, where patrons quietly study archival documents and speak in hushed tones. At the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, which houses the largest Hemingway Collection, a lovely Hemingway Room overlooks the bay.

During perfecting, factual information about each letter is recorded on a form to be stored in the master archive of the Hemingway Letters Project Center at Pennsylvania State University. Special attention is given to anything that helps with dating a letter. In a black and white photocopy from which our initial transcription was made, it may look as though Hemingway dated a letter in full, but the original may reveal that he wrote only the day and month (in pen) while someone else, most likely an archivist or sometimes the recipient, added the year (in pencil). Envelopes often provide important clues, and some envelopes that don't show up in the library's finding aid are discovered during perfecting trips. In addition to the place and date of postmarks, addresses, or anything else written on the envelope, letterhead information and physical characteristics of the paper (dimensions, color, markings, holes) are all recorded and may prove useful later, especially with dating. For example, if Hemingway used the same yellow stationery for several letters while he stayed at a certain place for a few days and dated one of those letters, the stationery description provides a good starting point for dating the undated ones.

The "perfector" proofreads the text of the transcription word by word against the original letter and enters corrections on the transcription along the way. Hemingway's handwriting is generally quite legible, but words written in a hurry or in tight spots can be difficult to decipher. The original may show more clearly words that could only be transcribed from a copy as "illegible," as well as any punctuation and words that were transcribed incorrectly. For example, the original may clarify whether the correct word is "read," "rec'ed," or "heard." And in an original 1928 letter to Archibald MacLeish, two words that Hemingway squeezed between lines of his handwritten letter that were initially transcribed as "[illegible] Charles" appeared clearly as "Evan thinks" in the following sentence: "Not what I think matters any where near as much as what Evan thinks--He knows!" (Letters vol. 3, 475).

Perfecting also reveals text omitted from transcriptions that were made from hard-to-read microfilm obtained from a repository during an earlier stage of the Project. From the transcription of a 1928 postcard to Sylvia Beach significant portions were missing that were discovered during perfecting: the color picture on the front of the postcard, the postmark (with the place and date), and Hemingway's handwritten date of "Sept. 14." Within Hemingway's short note, some key words had to be corrected as well: "Also the book near done" was changed to "Also the new book done"; the bracketed rough guess "[Filush] " was changed to "French"; and "Have driven 760 miles" was corrected to "7600 miles," the second zero having been invisible on the reference copy (Letters vol. 3,437).

Hemingway often wrote comments in the margins, but text in the margins or on the back of pages can be easily cut off or overlooked during copying or microfilming and thus missing from our initial transcriptions of the materials the Project received. Sometimes, too, when Hemingway ran out of paper, he squeezed his last words or even whole sentences and lengthy passages into the margins at the bottom and around the sides or on the back of pages. Discovery of these larger blocks of lost text is one of the rewards of perfecting. Also recovered during perfecting trips may be words that don't show up in copies (and thus in transcriptions of copies) because Hemingway wrote them in pale pencil. The details of Hemingway's doodles, such as the caricature of himself that he superimposed on letterhead of Berlin's Palast Hotel (Letters vol. 3, 325), sometimes also show up best in the original and can be most accurately captured in descriptions prepared during library visits.

Nice surprises--in the form of stray items--are also among the rewards of perfecting trips. There may be discoveries of enclosures separated from letters, such as the poem that Clarence Hemingway sent his son in October 1928, congratulating him upon the completion of the first draft of A Farewell to Arms (Letters vol. 3, plate 26). There may be photos that slip from the folds of a letter, responses stapled to Hemingway's letters, and such gems as the separation agreement handwritten and signed by Hadley that stipulated a "leave of absense without communication between Ernest M. Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer" from "November 3rd to Feb. 3rd" (Letters vol. 3, plate 11). Hadley herself relented, though, calling off the agreement in mid-November 1926 and telling Ernest that she wished to proceed with a divorce.

Robert W. Trogdon

My favorite part of working on the Letters of Ernest Hemingway is researching and writing annotations. Figuring out obscure references in Hemingway's correspondence helps me and hopefully the reader understand his meaning and provide new perspectives on the letter being annotated. In some cases, an annotation can be drafted after consulting general reference works or those specific to Hemingway: Audre Hanneman's and C. Edgar Grissom's bibliographies, one or more of the biographies, and critical studies of Hemingway's work. For every annotation, the Hemingway Letters Project's policies require documentation of at least two sources of information. In many cases, it is necessary to consult the other side of the correspondence--the letter to which Hemingway is responding, either through copies we obtain from a repository (most frequently the Kennedy Library) or in the published correspondence of the recipient (such as Fitzgerald, Pound, or Dos Passos). Other references, including those to boxers or baseball players, require more specialized reference sources such as the online resources boxrec.com or baseball-reference.com. Over the past ten years, we have compiled an impressive list of such web sites and reference works to assist in our research.

Newspapers are among the primary sources we turn to most. When working on volume 1 of the Letters, I would consult the bound volumes of the New York Times Index in the reference section of my university library at Kent State, and then pull the microfilm copies to find the articles I needed. But this only worked if I knew the right subject terms to use. If Hemingway was using a term used in an article that was not related to the official index terms, I was out of luck. In the past three years, though, new databases have come online to make our job much easier. These are full text newspaper databases that include scans of multiple pages and an optical character recognition (OCR) search function. Working with New York Times-Historical (available through many university libraries), Newspapers.com, and Newspaperarchives.com, we have been able to annotate many heretofore obscure references. These resources are not perfect: the OCR has difficulty recognizing some characters.

For example, in a 4 May 1926 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway writes that he had "given 200,000 francs to save the franc" (Letters vol. 3, 71). When I was assisting on the revision of Matthew Bruccoli's Fitzgerald and Hemingway in 1994, this reference eluded us. When we were working on volume 3 of the Cambridge Edition of the Hemingway letters, though, I was able to search the New York Times-Historical database for "save the franc." I found that there was a 'save the franc" fund that was soliciting donations to help France pay its war debt and thus to stabilize the currency. Working with Newspapers, com allowed us to identify the newspaperman Steve O'Grady that Hemingway mentions in his 27 September 1928 letter to Guy Hickok (Letters vol. 3, 448). O'Grady, who had worked for every paper in Kansas City, had a reputation as a heavy drinker and devout Catholic who had once spent six months in a monastery. Such knowledge illuminates Hemingway's statement that "all the newspaper men I started with are dead from drink or syph or alimony, or in monasteries."

These and other new databases that will be coming online in the next few years are a boon to annotators. And they also help us to see that Hemingway's interests and knowledge about the world was more extensive than we had previously imagined.