5 pages on Hôtel Ritz letterhead (7 1/8 x 5 3/8 in.; 181 x 137 mm), Paris, 2 August 1953; horizontal fold. With autograph envelope.

Condition as described in catalogue entry.
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"[W]hen I tell you I will put something in the hands of a lawyer, if such and such is not done etc, it is as impersonal as though I should say that if you advance beyond a certain line I would fire. It is never a threat. It is a promise." Ernest Hemingway's forceful letter to a young PhD candidate.

Charles A. Fenton was a doctoral candidate at Yale in the early 1950's and a friend of George Plimpton, editor of the newly-formed Paris Review.  Fenton's thesis was on Hemingway and his early years. It was eventually published in book form in 1958 as The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years. In the summer of 1953, Fenton sent the thesis to Hemingway, who read it as he crossed the Atlantic on his way to Paris and on to Africa. He was furious that Fenton was planning to quote extensively from his early unpublished notebooks.  Plimpton, who wanted to publish excerpts from the thesis in the Paris Review attempted to intercede. Heming♎way sets out his displeasure in this amazing unpublished five-page letter, w💖ritten from the Ritz.

Of the thesis, Hemingway writes, "Being damned near as big as the N.Y. Telephone Book and the Flandre a pleasant ship I did not get all through it. I hope you'll understand that a man can't writꦉe hard for 3 years and then devote his vacation to reading a😼bout his early life.

"The whole school of reporting a battle by survivors' tales (those of fuck-offs and those who st꧅ayed and fought🤪 but can't remember} has never been to my taste. But reading the pieces was interesting and I was happy about what you wrote of Miss Briggs and Miss Dixon …." 

Hemingway urges Fenton to correct his mistakes in spelling foreign words (" I cannot over-emphasize its importance") before lowering the boom on the young scholar: "🍰I hope you get your Phd, or whatever it was you were bucking for.…

"Here is how things stand now. If I should go for a shit in Africa (what I have contracted to do makes it permissible to include this as a possibility) you are welcome to publish your thesis as it stan෴ds.

"If Africa is a piece of cake, as it should be, then I have to keep on writing and much of what is in your thesis is my note book, oil resource, and basic material for 3 novels I have to write. It is wicked for anyone to publish it when I have saved it all my life to write it as n🔴ovels. Please think this over…. I cannot give away my reserve. If you had ever soldiered you would knoꦉw what that means." 

"You can see for yourself how much un-used material there is; most especially the German stuff. There was a time when I was beginning to write well and that stuff belongs to me and not to anyone else. After comparing his notebooks to his farm, his dog, and his boat," Hemingway declares, "[Y]ou would have to take me dead too; and I would shoot my dog, sink my boat, raze my farm and break the barrells [sic] of my g𓆏uns before I would allow them to be taken.

"If you wish to publish a part of your thesis in the Paris Review which young Plimpton is editing that is OK. with me providing you copy write [sic] all of my material in my name. I saw some of those boys here and at Pamplona and they are a good lot. Plimpton spoke highly of you. So have other people. That is the type of publication which is useful and not destructive to the main b♒ody of my work."

On the final page of the letter, Hemingway softens a little and describes his recent trip to Spain with Mary: bullfights, Pamplon🗹a, visits with old friends and five days at the Prado. "When they asked me if I would change anything in For Whom the Bell Tolls I told them anything I had written I had written and anything I had signed I was responsible for. We left it ♚there."

The letter ends, "Please don't ever think I am trying to fuck you up. I only have to think things out straight. It is not always too easy." The postscript is another attempt at a conciliatory note: "The Paris Review director seemed to think you were very angry at me and thought me more or less a shit (personally). Nobody knows how they are of course, but I'm really not a shit when the chips are down. You are such a fast worker that a slow worker who has to write the stuff may annoy you."

A great unpublished letter showing Hemingway in attack-dog mode.