Ernest Hemingway is the Moveable Feast of American literature.
And the latest entrée comes from Tuesday’s New York Times.
A Mutable Feast
Batch of Hemingway Ephemera From Cuba Is Digitized
BOSTON — Ernest Hemingway was a hoarder. His own prose style may have been spare and economical, but he was unable to part with the words, printed or written, of just about anyone else. According to his fourth wife, Mary, he was incapable of
throwing away “anything but magazine wrappers and three-year old newspapers.” A trove of some 2,500 documents collected and preserved at Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s farm outside Havana, and now digitized and newly available at the Hemingway Collection in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum here, includes diaries, letters, lists, telegrams, insurance policies, bank statements, passports, tickets to bullfights and the Longchamp racecourse in Paris, a brochure from a swimming pool filter company, a page of his son Patrick’s homework and seemingly every Christmas card Hemingway ever received.
The Times piece, by Charles McGrath, has all kinds of material from Mary Hemingway, but nothing from Martha Gellhorn, the great war correspondent who was Hemingway’s third wife and lived with him in Cuba before he divorced her and married Mary (née Welch), yet another war correspondent.
Coincidentally, Gellhorn’s ephemera is also housed in Boston – at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
(Full disclosure: The hardworking staff moonlights at BU, and the Missus wrote Gellhorn’s bio for the Gotlieb Center’s website.)
Campaign Outsider Official Suggestion®: The JFK Library should contact the Gotlieb Center’s irrepressible Vita Paladino and mount a co-curated exhibit.
The matchmaking staff would be glad to provide commentary.
