lending library and never returned it).Ī reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune praised Garnett’s “simple but extremely lucid English” and his “power of making fiction appear to be fact,” qualities that are the hallmark of Hemingway’s own distinctive style. It’s easy to see why Hemingway liked “The Sailor’s Return” (so well, it appears, that he checked it out from Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. The letter also suggests that Garnett has been overlooked as one of Hemingway’s influences. “You have meant very much to me as a writer,” he declares, “and now that you have written me that letter I should feel very fine – But instead all that happens is I don’t believe it.”
The Sundial Pressīut in the letter to Garnett we see another side of Hemingway: an avid reader overcome with boyish excitement. “ The Torrents of Spring” (1926), his first published novel, was a parody of his own mentors, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein and “all the rest of the pretensious faking bastards,” as he put it in a 1925 letter to Ezra Pound.īritish novelist David Garnett. It’s a reputation that’s not entirely undeserved – after all, one of Hemingway’s earliest publications was a tribute to Joseph Conrad in which Hemingway expressed a desire to run T.S. Hemingway’s response to Garnett – written the same day as his letter to Walpole – is notable for several reasons.įirst, it complicates the popular portrait of Hemingway as an antagonist to other writers. It is still the only book I would like to have written of all the books since our father’s and mother’s times.” (Garnett was seven years older than Hemingway Hemingway greatly admired the translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy by Constance Garnett, David’s mother.) An overlooked influence “…all I did was to go around wishing to god I could have written it. He then goes on to praise Garnett’s 1925 novel, “The Sailor’s Return”: “I hope to god what you say about the book will be true,” Hemingway replies, “though how we are to know whether they last I don’t know – But anyway you were fine to say it would.” Though we don’t have Garnett’s letter to Hemingway, Garnett appears to have predicted, rightly, that “A Farewell to Arms” would be more than a fleeting success. What are you supposed to do when you really start to get letters?”Īmong the fan mail he received was a letter from David Garnett, an English novelist from a literary family with connections to the Bloomsbury Group, a network of writers, artists and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf.
‘Men Without Women’ brought no letters at all. “When ‘The Sun Also Rises’ came out there were only letters from a few old ladies who wanted to make a home for me and said my disability would be no drawback and drunks who claimed we had met places. Quentin.Īt the same time, writing to novelist Hugh Walpole in December 1929, Hemingway lamented the amount of effort – and postage – required to answer all those letters: Sometimes he offered writerly advice, and even went so far as to send – upon request and at his own expense – several of his books to a prisoner at St. In response to the many fan letters he received, Hemingway was typically gracious. Trogdon, a Hemingway scholar and member of the Letters Project’s editorial team, traces the author’s relationship with Scribner’s and notes that while it ordered an initial printing of over 31,000 copies – six times as many as the first printing of “The Sun Also Rises” – the publisher still underestimated the demand for the book.Īdditional print runs brought the total edition to over 101,000 copies before the year was out – and that was after the devastating 1929 stock market crash. The success of “A Farewell to Arms” surprised even Hemingway’s own publisher. They offer a glimpse at how Hemingway handled his growing celebrity, shedding new light on the author’s influences and his relationships with other writers. Mandel – brought to light 430 annotated letters, 85 percent of which were published for the first time. “ The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 4 (1929-1931)” – edited by Sandra Spanier and Miriam B.
And he wasn’t really sure how to deal with the attention.Īt the Hemingway Letters Project, I’ve had the privilege of working with Hemingway’s approximately 6,000 outgoing letters. With this newfound fame, Hemingway learned, came fan mail. But it was “ A Farewell to Arms,” published in October 1929, that made him a celebrity. When he published “ The Sun Also Rises” in 1926, Ernest Hemingway was well-known among the expatriate literati of Paris and to cosmopolitan literary circles in New York and Chicago.