HEMINGWAY LETTERS GIVEN TO JFK LIBRARY SAID TO BRIDGE GAP

Author: By Martie Barnes, Associated Press

Date: Sunday, May 4, 1986
Page: 46
Section: METRO

The letters were written to the Nobel Prize recipient by his first wife, Hadley, during the 1920s, a time from which few Hemingway letters remain
because most of them were destroyed at his request.

"It was during this period in which he wrote 'The Sun Also Rises' and it was a formative period in his artistic development," said James Nagle, an English professor at Northeastern University and president of the Hemingway Society.

"During his marriage to Hadley he makes the transition from journalist to becoming one of the world's great novelists," Nagle said. "It was also during the period that he has the counsel, friendship and guidance of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson."

The letters also chronicle Hemingway's and Hadley's divorce and their concerns about their son, Jack, who will be at the library this week for the presentation of the materials.

The library set aside space on the fourth floor for the Hemingway collection in 1980 as the result of an agreement between Jacqueline Onassis, widow of the former president, and Mary Welsh, Hemingway's fourth wife and widow. The two men never met.

Jack Hemingway, 62, is the father of actresses Margaux and Mariel. His book, "Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman," about his father and himself, is scheduled for release this week.

Other new materials the collection will receive include a 60-page document of Hadley's reminiscences, her marriage certificate, divorce papers and Jack Hemingway's baptismal certificate, which is signed by his godmother, Gertrude Stein.

The library's current holdings already contain most of the novelist's manuscript material, including at least one stage of each of his works, as well as shelves of personal effects.

"Hemingway was a saver," said Joan O'Connor, curator of the collection. ''He saved everything that passed by him -- tickets to bullfights, apartment leases, fishing licenses."

Ships' menus, letters from movie stars, newspaper articles he wrote as a rookie reporter for The Kansas City Star and as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star are in the collection.

So is an inscribed copy of the Kansas newspaper's stylebook, which urges the use of vigorous English and is often touted as the basis for the brisk style that appears in much of his writing.

Thousands of letters, including love notes to other wives, bets to boxing buddies and words of encouragement to a once-ostracized Ingrid Bergman, are cataloged on walls of shelves.

So are 10,000 photographs, the contents of trunks and copies of minutiae
from numerous scrapbooks Hemingway and his mother, Grace, compiled.

The unpublished material has provided fodder for several new biographies and ongoing projects.

Two scholars who explored the novelist's adolescence found letters that shed light on his father's suicide.

Another found letters that suggest a drinking party involving his sister and her young teen-age girlfriends may have led to Hemingway's estrangement
from the family when he returned from World War I.

Meanwhile, researchers continue to check out a well-worn story about trunks discovered at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and whether they contained manuscripts fashioned into the novel "A Moveable Feast" after Hemingway's death.

Nagle said he now believes there were trunks and they contained material
from the 1920s that includes one section of "Moveable Feast," a portion cut
from the opening chapter of "The Sun Also Rises."

However, Nagle said, he believes the rest of the material in "Moveable Feast" was written in the 1950s.

"That's terribly important because it indicates Hemingway's creative energies and style did not collapse," he said.

Some scholars suggest an inability to write may have led to the novelist's suicide in Idaho in 1961.

In addition to providing clues for Hemingway's biographical detectives, the collection's manuscript material also indicates he didn't find writing an easy task.

For instance, there are at least 42 endings for "A Farewell to Arms" and at least 30 titles, among them "World Enough and Time," "The Sentimental Education of Frederic Henry" and "I Have Committed Fornication But That Was in Another Country, and Besides the Wench is Dead."

"It shows that Hemingway's was a labored art," Nagle said. "He was a disciplined, hardworking writer. That needs to counter the portrait as a drinker, hunter and fisherman."

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