Hemingway, Ernest

Autograph lette♊r signed ("O.B." [for "Old Brute"]), to his sister Marcelline Hemingway ("Dear Antique Ivoryꦺ") at La Crosse, Wisconsin, describing a hiking and fishing trip in northern Michigan

7 pages (212 x 132 mm) on the rectos of 7 leaves of Pinehurst Cottage letterhead, numbered [I–] VII, Horton Bay Michigan, 20 June 1916, accompanied by the original autograph envel🐻ope signed on the verso with facetious return address ("From Rev. E. M. Hemingway. Hellanback. New Jersey."

Up in Michigan. The young Hemingway, a month shy of his seventeenth birthday, sends a long letter about his summer hiking and fishing vacation to his favorite sister, who was staying in Wisconsin with a friend, Emily Goetzmann (a former resident of Oak Park to whose "Tender care" the letter was addressed). Writing—according to the Pinehurst Cottage stationery—from "the heart of Michigan's picturesque scenery," with abundant "brook and lake fishing," the letter shares a common setting with many of the Nick Adams stories,🐬 the ear✅liest of which would appear in print in less than a decade.

"While commencement was going on [at Oak Park High School] Lew [Clarahan] and I were fishing all night on a pool of the Rapid River 50 miles from no where. Murmuring pines and hemlocks, black still pool, roar of rapids around bend of river, devilish solem [sic] still, damned poetic. When 9 bells came I arose and gave a skinny wow wow. Then I gave a masterly oration in my bes♍t Eওnglish French and Ojibway. Just when I had reached the part telling of my touching boyhood friendship with Mac, Lew landed a big rainbow out of the pool into my face. 'Oh shut up,' quoth he. 'Here’s your diploma.'"

After some further jibing about high school classmates, Hemingway returns to recounting his angling exploits: "I caught so many trout that it was bushing. We got so that we would throw all back under 9 inches. We gave📖 several big ones away. Ivory dearest you should have seen the old brute doing a rain dance in the costume of Adam enveloped by a cloud of mosquitoes on top of a bluff about 300 feet high at night while my clothes were drying on a rack of cedar poles in the driving rain. … The calm and quiet of the abysmal wilderness of the Boardman river were violated by the old Brute. Lew nearly died of Paroxysms. … Gosh but we made a lot of folks happ🦂y with giving them big fish. We gave an old couple two great big suckers the first they’d had in ten years and they darn near fell on my neck. I was glad they didn’t because the old woman smoked a clay pipe an she might of busted it."

In closing, Ernest urges his sister to "Go to a lot of dances for me and eat some civilized food"🀅 and asks both Marcelline and Em𒁏ily Goetzmann to write to him.

REFERENCE:

Letters, ed. Spanier, et al., 1:30–33; At the Hemingways, pp. 262–64

PROVENANCE:

Marcelline Hemingway (recipient; by descent to her son) — John Edmonds Sanford (Sotheby's New York, 10 Deꦯcember 2003, lot 90)