This is an article by Alexander Fiske-Harrison as published in The Spectator.

Do we really need 17 volumes of letters especially when Hemingway specifically requested in his will that his personal letters not be published?

‘In the years since 1961 Hemingway’s reputation as “the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare” shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large had been bamboozled, somehow.’ So wrote Raymond Carver in the New York Times in 1981. My, how times have changed.

In the past 12 months alone this reviewer has seen Hemingway elegantly caricatured in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, strut the West End stage thinly disguised as Jake Barnes in an adaptation of his novel The Sun Also Rises (a production on which I was pleasingly credited as ‘bullfighting consultant’), be traduced with neither art nor foundation in Paula McLain’s novel about his first marriage, The Paris Wife, and fascinatingly explicated in the monograph, Beyond Death in the Afternoon by Allen Josephs (who, unlike McLain, knows well the difference between a banderillero and a picador.)

And I wasn’t even in England for most of the year. Orson Welles had it right when he said in his interview with Michael Parkinson in 1974 that although Hemingway ‘was in total eclipse for the last ten years, the sun is rising again critically for him. He’s been dead long enough.’

However, one wonders how long do you have to be dead for, and how good a writer do you have to be, for 17 volumes of collected letters to be too much of a good thing. The first volume begins when the author was seven years old, for Christ’s sake. Indeed, that it is a good thing at all is in serious doubt: in the introduction to this volume Hemingway himself is quoted, from a letter to his executors three years before his death, quite explicitly:

It is my wish that none of the letters written by me during my lifetime shall be published. Accordingly, I hereby request and direct to you not to publish, or consent to the publication by others, of any such letters.

This is followed by some rather sketchy and self-serving argument by the editors — along with his only surviving son, Patrick — that his correspondence is owed to posterity, to scholarship, and that anyway, if he didn’t want them published, he should have burned them. One wonders, in this age of total information, whether just such an argument won’t be used to publish the credit- card statements of, say, Saul Bellow or John Updike, ‘so we can more accurately know the writer as he actually lived, rather than the mask he wrote for himself’. If the academics are after you, God forbid they find your email password after you’re gone.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, there is no denying that the letters are of interest, although the interest is necessarily patchy, given the inclusion of everything from financial instructions to stockbrokers to artistic advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scholars will undoubtedly find the minutiae fascinating, while literary gossips will focus on familiar names such as Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Gertude Stein.

My own interest was piqued, admittedly, by Hemingway’s discovery of bullfighting and Spain during these years, his reaction to which was the inspiration for my stint as an amateur torero in 2010. So I was intrigued to see quite how little hispanophilia and tauromania impinged on his everyday life and professional thoughts, given what some would have us believe. That a man of an aesthetically sensitive temperament who survived gruesome wounds, psychological and physical, in the first world war should be drawn to the gore of the corrida de toros is not exactly surprising; but those who try to make it central to Hemingway’s intellectual development will be disappointed by this evidence. As A Moveable Feast made clear, someone like Pound, who impressed so hard on his protégé a combination of minimalism and le mot juste, was far more important to the development of Hemingway’s mid-1920s style of ‘omission’ than his infrequent, though devout, hero-worship of matadores including Juan Belmonte, El Niño de la Palma and Maera.

However developmentally intriguing such speculations may be, one still has to ask oneself why one is reading someone’s letters without their permission in the first place. In Hemingway’s case it could be because he developed a style within his métier as powerful, innovative and influential as, say Marlon Brando’s in acting or, indeed, Belmonte’s in toreo. But this is the very thing that is not in the letters. Apart from a few flashes of distinctly mannered rhythms, the style is warmly unpretentious and frequently playful.

What is most striking is how accurately he assessed his own worth and impact; that if he wrote ‘awfully well’ it would ‘last right on through’. It didn’t just last, but changed literature ever after — although not all would say for the better.

And this is not restricted to literature: in July this year, while participating in my 19th ‘running of the bulls’ in Pamplona, I was tripped and trampled by a rampaging herd of drunken tourists, 5,000 of whom were crowded into the half-mile that comprise the world’s most famous encierro. After I was dragged to safety before a group of bulls could add their weight to the melée, I discovered that my saviour was none other than John Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson. As we later shared a drink, I half-jokingly remarked: ‘You know it’s you Hemingways’ fault that all of us idiots are here in the first place.’ There are more than a few novelists — Norman Mailer and Elmore Leonard spring immediately to mind — who could say the same thing.

This is an amazing feat! Read on!

Dr. Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway scholar, is heading the Hemingway letters project. She and her international team have spent the past few years pouring over letters from Hemingway and then cataloguing them and getting them ready for publication. They are currently working to publish every—yes, you read that correctly—letter written by Ernest Hemingway. The collection will span 17 volumes. The letters include those written to his family, to other authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald, and to the women in his life with whom he was romantically involved or with whom he was simply friends. At Penn State alone there are 13 members on staff helping with this massive task. The team currently has 6,000 letters from all over the world. People still continue to send letters from their own private collections to be published. They are being published in chronological order.

This is very interesting to me. The decision to publish every letter rather than to edit and pick and choose the ones that may seem more significant historically or academically than others, is at the request and insistence of Hemingway’s surviving son, Patrick. Patrick insisted that it was either all or nothing—all letters get published or none get published.

The scholarly investigation has been painstaking and awe-inspiring. Dr. Spanier noted that, for example, finding out whether or not Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was with him in Pamplona for the Fiesta Day San Fermin in 1929 was an important part of the annotating process. It is the intent to clarify every detail that can be extracted from these letters.

Kristin Quesenberry, an editorial and researcher associate, has a favorite letter. “There’s a hilarious letter that showed up in the second volume. He just lists off dozens and dozens of things he hates. There was a research worksheet for every single word in the list and this rant was 100 words or so.”

Dr. Spanier estimated that not a month goes by in which she does not hear from someone who has a copy of a letter. The volume the team is working on right now will follow Hemingway from 1929 through 1931. During those years, he lived in Key West and was married to Pauline. That’s about when A Farewell to Arms came out. This is the fourth volume so the task is about a quarter of the way done if 17 volumes are anticipated.

Another unique aspect of the project that Dr. Spanier noted is the public’s continued interest in Hemingway. The letters have even been featured in an article in Vanity Fair. A Cambridge University press recently advised Dr. Spanier that they picked up the first volume as one of their top holiday gift picks for the season.

Emily Knell of The Daily Collegian, wrote an article from which I’m quoting much of the above from. She noted that, “Public interest could be due to the letters’ ability to by-pass the macho myth surrounding Hemingway and focus more on his life and his work. However, it could also be due to the fact that Hemingway led a life full of love—enough for four wives, adventures, and friendships with people like Gertrude Stein.”

This is me speaking: I don’t know if I’ll get through all 17 volumes, but what a delight and what a treasure-trove of amazing information directly from Hemingway. I think you’ll get to see the blustering side; the sensitive side; empathic side; the funny side; and at times, perhaps, the ugly side. What a treat!

David Hendricks published a review of a new book by Terry Mort, Hemingway At War. He found much to admire. I’ll quote directly from the review:

“The two key words in Terry Mort’s new book—“Hemingway” and “War”—carry equal weight. Although Hemingway is the hook for most readers, Mort’s book has long stretches about World War II that have little to do with the Nobel Prize winning novelist who was also a correspondent in Europe for Colliers Magazine. That’s not a bad thing. Mort’s buildup to the D-Day invasion at Normandy and the allied forces liberating Paris and their deadly struggle to cross into Germany is fascinating.

“The Hemingway narrative in the book starts with his romance and marriage to another war correspondence, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife. Hemingway himself engaged in the war while living in Cuba as World War II began, patrolling the Cuban shores to hunt down German U-boats. This period was fictionalized in Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. Gellhorn left Hemingway in Cuba to report news in Europe, a move he ultimately followed in 1944 in time for D-Day. Mort alternates between the war and Hemingway’s exploits as a war correspondent.

“He also follows the novelist as Hemingway’s marriage to Gellhorn dissolves and he romances Mary Welsh, yet another foreign correspondent who became his fourth wife.

“Mort does not idealize Hemingway and the main point of the book’s first half is to demonstrate that Hemingway was a poor war correspondent, at least in comparison with others such as Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite.

“He did show bravery in certain episodes and suffered several head injuries. Hemingway actually landed with allied troops on D-Day at Omaha Beach, certainly a courageous act.

“Hemingway At War, demonstrates a trend that seems to have no end—that as meritorious as some of Hemingway’s novels are, it is his vigorous life and outsized personality, more than his books, that provide continuous grist for interesting history books.”

So, I would say that Mr. Hendricks enjoyed the book and feels that it added to the Hemingway legend and full involvement in the second war.

Kirkus felt it was too short on facts. So take a look and you decide.

Hemingway At War: Hemingway’s Adventures as a World War II Correspondent, by Terry Mort.

I always think of Hemingway and Fitzgerald somewhat together because of their beginning in Paris. They had a falling out early on in their relationship and Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44, well before Hemingway’s who died in 1961. However, it is hard to avoid thinking of the early years, the promise, the romance, the excitement of a new direction in writing. Both were originals and true to their visions (well for the most part. Fitzgerald was not happy with writing for Hollywood in lieu of penning a great novel.) And you can’t think of Scott without Zelda. There is a new series about Zelda. Please read Ms. Felsenthal’s take on it all. The article was printed in Vogue and i have lifted only the first third. There is also an interview with Christina Ricci. And I added the photos. Love, Christine

by JULIA FELSENTHAL

You probably have some less-than-flattering preconceived notions of Zelda Fitzgerald, and there’s a good chance you cribbed them, at least indirectly, from Ernest Hemingway. In A Moveable Feast, his posthumously published (1964), now-beloved memoir of ex-patriot life in 1920s Paris, Hemingway wrote extensively about his good friend, the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, and about Fitzgerald’s muse, his wife Zelda, the entrancing, free-spirited flapper extraordinaire. Except in Hemingway’s telling, she was actually a cruel, frivolous, controlling harpy who jealously undermined her husband’s success, manipulated him into a life of hard-drinking, and even convinced him he was too poorly endowed to keep a woman happy. When Zelda’s erratic behavior landed her in an institution (her diagnosis was schizophrenia, though we now speculate she might have been bipolar), Hemingway was pleased that it meant his poor put-upon buddy could finally get some real writing done.

The first season of Z takes place years before all that: Zelda is the belle of the ball in Montgomery, Alabama, less the wild child we’ve read about, and more an actual child testing out the boundaries of her rebelliousness. Then she meets a very young, enlisted F. Scott Fitzgerald (David Hoflin), stationed near Montgomery before shipping off overseas (the war would end before he had to), a Minnesota-born Princetonian who dreams of becoming a great writer and who has already incubated a not-so-great drinking problem.

The first few episodes of Z feel a little bit like Roaring ’20s Muppet Babies: a sunny, sanitized, myopic romp through the scrappy early years of a pair who would one day become icons of their age. But as the skies darken over the Fitzgeralds’ charmed life, the show becomes an unremitting examination of a complicated marriage in the early stages of curdling, and a kind, but not wholly apologetic spotlight on Zelda, who is struggling in real time to keep up bon vivant appearances, to keep her husband productive, and to locate any sense of personal creativity within a partnership that’s proving as stifling as Montgomery ever was.

We watch as Scott nixes Zelda’s acting aspirations and unabashedly mines her diaries for his own fiction. (Literary history goes that he would also later publish her stories under his name—he commanded the bigger paycheck—and that he excised from her only novel, Save Me the Waltz, biographical material that he wanted for his Tender Is the Night.) We also watch as Zelda’s unrealistic lifestyle-demands and ravenous appetite for novelty keep her husband away from his work.

Was F. Scott Fitzgerald the domineering husband who squashed his wife’s potential, or was she the succubus who ruined him? In the first season of Z it’s too early to tell, though the show seems far more interested in exploring the murky corners of their flawed coupling—the very definition of can’t live with/can’t live without—than it does in issuing a final verdict.

When her novel came out, The New Yorker criticized Fowler for smoothing out her character’s rough edges. Her Zelda was “easy to relate to even as she runs wild, sensible while allegedly insane.”

Ricci’s Zelda is no less relatable. We are, after all, in the age of the anti-heroine, when empathizing with women behaving badly is a thing. But in the actress’s hands, the character is also enigmatically feral. Her Zelda is unpredictable to a fault, a prisoner of her own racing mind, whose vagaries often lead her into situations she’s ill-equipped to handle. There’s always something roiling behind the actress’s eyes, a charge that makes her electric to watch.

“Our hope is that this for people is almost like a first-person experience,” Ricci told me over the phone. “It really gives you the time to go through her life with her. You feel more intimacy.”

•             One of Hemingway’s least popular and most poorly received novels, Across the River and Into the Trees, is being adapted for film.  Pierce Brosnan is going to play the colonel and Maria Valverde will play Renata.  Many years ago, Gary Cooper, who had been in two of Hemingway’s films already and who was a close friend of Hemingway’s, considered playing the colonel if it were ever adapted.  It never came to pass and has never happened since. 
• 
•             For those unfamiliar with this novel, published in 1950, it tells the story of an American colonel, Richard Cantwell, who is in Italy right after World War II.  He has just learned that he has a terminal illness yet he carries on without telling anyone, with a stoic disregard of his fate.  I haven’t read the novel in a while but my recollection is that the colonel was in his mid to late fifties and embittered by life.  He decides to spend a weekend in quiet solitude. To that end, he grabs a military driver to take him on a duck hunting trip as well as to enjoy a visit to his old haunts in Venice.  As his plans unravel, he meets a young countess, Renata, by chance and he begins to rekindle hope for a future possibly and he becomes less eager to die. Clearly infatuated with her, Cantwell dreams that he may have life left in him yet.

  

              The inspiration for the novel was Hemingway’s love/infatuation for eighteen-year-old Adriana Ivancich. He met her in a rain storm. She was a bit bedraggled and Hemingway took his comb and broke it in half, giving her one half. The book became something of a scandal, more for her than for him, as the implication was that she and Hemingway were lovers. He would have wanted that but it appears that that did not happen. Adriana created the first cover art for the book, which was also widely criticized as amateurish.  Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, also was none too keen on this book for many reasons. The reviews were brutal. Still it became a best seller within 7 weeks of its release in America.  

  

  

              Isabella Rosallini has signed on as the countess’s mother.   

  

              Filming is supposed to start in January on location in Venice and Trieste.

   

              So we’ll see.