Foundation is preserving Ernest Hemingway's papers from Cuba

Foundation is preserving Ernest Hemingway's papers from Cuba
May 8, 2013 |

While most Americans have never seen Ernest Hemingway's home in Cuba
where he wrote some of his most famous books, a set of 2,000 recently
digitized records delivered to the United States will give scholars and
the public a fuller view of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist's life.

A private U.S. foundation is working with Cuba to preserve more of
Hemingway's papers, books and belongings that have been kept at his home
near Havana since he died in 1961. On Monday at the U.S. Capitol, Rep.
James McGovern and the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation announced
that 2,000 digital copies of Hemingway papers and materials will be
transferred to Boston's John F. Kennedy Library.

This is the first time anyone in the United States has been able to
examine these items from the writer's Cuban estate, Finca Vigia. The
records include passports showing Hemingway's travels and letters
commenting on such works as his 1954 Nobel Prize-winning "The Old Man
and the Sea." An earlier digitization effort that opened 3,000 Hemingway
files in 2008 uncovered fragments of manuscripts, including an alternate
ending to "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and corrected proofs of "The Old Man
and the Sea."

The newest trove includes some of Hemingway's personal correspondence,
including a letter that literary critic Malcolm Cowley wrote to
Hemingway about the award-winning book.

" 'The Old Man and the Sea' is pretty marvelous," Cowley wrote. "The old
man is marvelous, the sea is, too, and so is the fish."

American poet and writer Archibald MacLeish wrote a telegram in 1940
after the publication of "For Whom the Bell Tolls," praising Hemingway's
work.

"The word great had stopped meaning anything in this language until your
book," MacLeish wrote. "You have given it all its meaning back. I'm
proud to have shared any part of your sky."

To the actress Ingrid Bergman, Hemingway typed a confidential note in
1941 saying he wanted her to play a lead role opposite Gary Cooper in a
film of "For Whom the Bell Tolls. "There is no one that I would rather
see do it, and I have consistently refused all suggestions that I
endorse other people for the role," he wrote in the note and kept a
carbon copy.

Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Hemingway's editor, Maxwell
Perkins, founded the Finca Vigia Foundation in 2004 after a visit to
Havana. She saw Hemingway's home falling into disrepair and became aware
of the many records kept in a damp basement at the estate. She worked to
get permission from the U.S. Treasury and State departments to send
conservators and archivists to Cuba to help save the literary records
and to help train Cuban archivists. The newly digitized files include
handwritten letters to his wife, Mary, bar bills, grocery lists,
notations of hurricane sightings and handwritten notebooks full of
weather observations. It does not include any manuscripts.

Restoration work continues at Hemingway's Finca Vigia estate in Cuba. A
new building is being constructed with library-quality atmospheric
controls to house the writer's books and original records.

Documents found in Cuba reveal more about Hemingway's role in World War
II. He had details of daily troop movements, labeled secret, from his
days as a war correspondent during the Battle of the Bulge. Also, while
in Cuba in 1942 and 1943, he was authorized by the U.S. embassy in
Havana to patrol the north coast of Cuba in his fishing boat, in search
of German submarines.

The Kennedy Library holds a large Hemingway collection of more than
100,000 pages of writings and 10,000 photographs because Jacqueline
Kennedy helped arrange a place for the items. Hemingway's wife, Mary
Welsh Hemingway, returned to Cuba in 1961, after the writer's death,
hoping to retrieve his belongings. Because of Fidel Castro's rise to
power, President John F. Kennedy helped arrange for her visit to take
Hemingway's possessions back to the United States.

Mary Hemingway took a boatload of materials back to the U.S., burned
some records deemed sensitive and left thousands of other volumes and
documents at the home near Havana.

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