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Sale 86
Lot 420
Hemingway, Ernest. Typed letter signed ("Ernest"), 2 pages, 11 x 8½ in., Key West, Feb. 4, 1935. With holograph place, date, and seven words. Paper is toned and brittle; two small edge tears. To Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich, regarding Green Hills of Africa. In part: "I was asleep when you called…thought you were very thoughtful t worry about the lousy disease. Have been fairly sick with it. Max Perkins [Hemingway's literary editor] was down here and a bastard from Cosmopolitan that would buy it for plenty money if I would cut it to 45,000 words (I can't) and you can't do business or refuse to do business and fill up on emetine and entertain a publisher while taking castor oil every two hours. As I read that paragraph in the Trib there is nothing for me to do but turn over whatever money you get for those mss. to various writers and painters….So will give you a list of who to send dough to. If they announce a sale for indigent writers; to indigent writers it bloody well goes. What I had hoped to do was to raise some jack for myself….
In the meantime I am broke pending selling serial rights to the book and need money for my taxes and three hundred bucks I had promised to send for Bumby's schooling the end of last month. So will have to raise that somewhere else. You tell me what Mss. money you get and I will write you how to dispose of it or give you a receipt and an accounting of where to send it. Max is crazy to serialize the book in Scribners but they won't be able to pay much jack. I doubt if I could get ten grand. Would you be interested in it? I know you haven't serialized anything yet but you are at a stage where you can make your policy as you go along. I have been held up sending it waiting for Max to get through with it and then Dos [Pasos] wanted it before I had chance for pauline to correct the carbon. Max and Dos both were very strong for it and Max would not be if it wasn't good as all he would have to do would be pick faults to save money. Dos has always been honest with me and very critical. I hope you will like it. Have divided it into three parts and it has thirteen chapters. Have a good title and it has shaped well. I really ought to gt some good money out of it as it is worth it….After you wrote about reading Farewell to Arms again I read some of it myself and it's good all right. But it is very ghostly to read your own stuff after a long time. How many the hell love stories do they want a guy to write? Max will run the book in either six or seven installments….I'll send it to you as soon as Pauline corrects the carbon. I gave Dick Armstrong's wife the hand-written mss. for typing it."
Hemingway talks about fishing for sailfish, which are "thick as grunts" and invites Gingrich to come down, then asks him to send a copy of the magazine to Spanish artist, Luis Quintanilla, who was imprisoned in his own country for political activities. Friends in the international intellectual community, including Hemingway and Dos Passos, circulated petitions for his release and he was freed after serving a little over eight months. Hemingway expresses concern for the illness of Gingrich's wife, and adds "I'll write the Knopf boy sometime…I couldn't write him now. And what to write someone you've never seen and the son of some one you have no respect for….So long Mr. G…."
Green Hills of Africa was Hemingway's second work of nonfiction. It is an account of a month on safari he spent with his wife Pauline in East Africa during December 1933. It initially appeared in serialization in Scribner's Magazine, and was published in 1935.
Estimated Value $4,000 - 6,000.
Maurice F. Neville Collection, Part II - Sotheby's New York, Nov 16, 2004, lot 326.
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