Word: hemingways
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...letters, which he never intended for publication, reveal just how rich that life was. They also indicate why his convictions about hunting, fishing, drinking, warring, fornicating, storymaking and dying were certain to become public property. Hemingway's code of conquest and survival was on the continent before the white man. His best stories focused a nostalgia for the New World's uncorrupted bounty. The letters, too, are full of firm trout tricked from pure streams, plump birds hosed out of clear skies, fleet beasts felled by one clean shot and blank slopes marked by the signature...
Because he traveled much and lived in remote places, Hemingway sustained his friendships and antagonisms through the mails. They enabled him to exchange the latest dope and "gen" (military jargon for intelligence). He also used the epistolary form to procrastinate: "Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something." It is estimated that he wrote about 6,000 letters. Carlos Baker vetted 2,500 pieces of correspondence for his biography, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). As editor, he has selected nearly 600 moveable treats, from World War I until two weeks before...
Perhaps one reason for this uncharacteristic reticence is that Faulkner was among the names Hemingway had in mind. Letter to Lillian Ross, 1953: "I cannot help but think that people who talk about God as though they knew him intimately and had received The Word etc. are frauds. Faulkner has always been fairly fraudulent but it is only recently that he has introduced God when he is conning people...
Critics came in for rougher treatment. Edmund Wilson boosted young Hemingway's career in the '20s. By the time of To Have and Have Not, The Fifth Column and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the critic was using phrases like "a growing antagonism to women" and "the all-too-perfect felicity of a youthful erotic dream." Hemingway responded to his editor Maxwell Perkins. Wilson, he writes, "reads most interestingly on all the things one does not know about. On the things one knows about truly he is stupid, inaccurate, uninformative and pretentious. But because he is so pretentious...
Wilson later provided some basis for the charge when he argued proper Russian usage with Vladimir Nabokov. But he was right about Hemingway's sexual antagonism. It started with his mother. "I hate her guts and she hates mine. She forced my father to suicide," he writes Publisher Charles Scribner in 1949. Women, he suggests frequently, will trap and destroy a man. They can also be too competitive. After his divorce from Combat Correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway writes Scribner: "Have a new housemaid named Martha and certainly is a pleasure to give her orders. Marty was a lovely girl...