The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway
Yesterday—21st July—marked 125 years since the birth of Ernest Miller Hemingway, a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning literary colossus who, when he wasn’t reshaping American fiction with novels like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, could often be found firing off letters in all directions. In 1981, twenty years after Hemingway’s death, Scribner’s published Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, an engrossing collection of almost 600 letters, edited by Carlos Baker, that represented just a tenth of his surviving correspondence. In 2011, The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway began to rear its head with the first of seventeen volumes that aim to publish the vast majority of his letters. In May of this year, the sixth volume—covering 1934–36—arrived.
The following collection is the tiniest of snapshots, all plucked from the above books. I’ve arranged them chronologically.
My conduct at the Coloseum yesterday was bad and my conduct this morning in church was bad my conduct tomorrow will be good.
Ernest Hemingway, aged 13
Letter to his father, Clarence
11th May 1913
My pants are so small every time I wiggle I think they are going to split. . .
P.S. My shirt buttons all fly off when I take a full Breath.
Ernest Hemingway, age 15
Letter to his mother, Grace
8th September 1914
Now your stupendous and very magnisifant brother must go back to work, so called, and so he bids thee all farewell and hopes you will send him many Christmas, thanksgiving and any other presents that are fitting. So begin to save your money now my children for the Harvest is heavy and the Labourers few.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to his younger siblings
5th November 1917
For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. . .1
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
28th May 1924
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4—that you can write the way I want to.
So when you see anything of mine that you don’t like remember that I’m sincere in doing it and that I’m working toward something. If I write an ugly story that might be hateful to you or to mother the next one might be one that you would like exceedingly.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to his father
20th March 1925
Whoever did the editing on the whole book was very intelligent and most of the changes of punctuation I agree with. Those I don’t I have changed to their original form. My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to his publisher, Horace Liveright
22nd May 1925
[After reading her son’s debut novel, The Sun Also Rises]
It is a doubtful honor to produce one of the filthiest books of the year. What is the matter? Have you ceased to be interested in loyalty, nobility, honor and fineness in life? Surely you have other words in your vocabulary besides “damn” and “bitch”—Every page fills me with a sick loathing—if I should pick up a book by any other writer with such words in it, I should read no more—but pitch it in the fire.
Ernest Hemingway’s mother, Grace
Letter to Ernest Hemingway
4th December 1926
I would rather fight a guy who had a knife and no talent with same than a guy with a good left hook.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Waldo Peirce
1st October 1928
If you want to publish any more books of mine, and it is quite all right if you do not, it is necessary to understand this very clearly. You are not my vicar. If the Pope is the vicar of Christ it is because Our Lord is not here upon earth to make his own decisions. I am not Christ (oddly enough) and as long as I am here upon earth will make my own bloody decisions as to what I write and what I do not write.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to his publisher, Jonathan Cape
19th November 1932
Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Gerald and Sara Murphy
29th March 1935
I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well being that rum does? I would as soon not eat at night as not to have red wine and water. The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Ivan Kashkin
19th August 1935
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Maxwell Perkins
23rd July 1945
There isn’t any symbolism [in The Old Man and the Sea]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Bernard Berenson
13th September 1952
The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Dorothy Connable
17th February 1953
For the next week, our Hemingway print—featuring this quote and designed by Stanley Chow—is £5 cheaper than usual. Details here. (And read the full letter here.)
What a great selection, especially for writers. You picked the perfect quote for the poster. His attitude to drink is refreshing too. A passion, rather than an addiction.
So go FISH^^