The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 5: 1932–1934 ed. by Sandra Spanier and Miriam B. Mandel (review)

If you are reading this in the Hemingway Review, you are already familiar with the stellar attributes of the Cambridge University Press volumes 1–4 of the Hemingway Letters. Under the leadership of Sandra Spanier and her various co-editors, the first four volumes of a projected seventeen have been the model of how to publish private letters and papers of a major literary figure. Carefully catalogued, meticulously glossed and footnoted, supplemented with high quality historical maps, photos, explanatory material, chronologies, and brief biographies of all of Hemingway’s correspondents, the collections have been gratefully received and treasured by Hemingway scholars—each volume, it seems, more eagerly anticipated than the last.

Volume 5, to no one’s surprise, has been worth the wait. It is in every detail as impressive as its forebears. And most of its included material will be new to readers. As Spanier informs us in her fine introductory essay, roughly 85 percent of the volume’s 393 items are previously unpublished, and only a few of these are found at the JFK Library. The volume lists 38 different locations for the letters, spanning the U.S. from coast to coast, and it is unimaginable that any one scholar could have the energy or expense account to track them all down. The sheer breadth of the project continues to amaze.

If you noted that each volume published to date exceeded the previous in length, beginning with the modest 423 pages of Volume 1 and ballooning to the 726-page heft of Volume 4, and then worried when early publicity indicated that Volume 5 would come in at a whopping 840 pages, you can rest easy. It seems that Spanier and her co-editor for this volume, Miriam Mandel, reconsidered the length and have limited the new volume to a mere 699 pages. Could it be they reasoned that 700 pages provides the maximum mass an aging Hemingway scholar ought to be asked to lift repeatedly? Even better news for those who prefer to work on their biceps at the gym rather than the library is the announcement that the letters volumes will all soon be available in electronic editions. All we need worry about now is survival till the publication of Volume 17, presumably sometime around 2045, if all goes according to plan.

The scholarship is breathtaking, certainly, but what about Hemingway’s contribution— the letters themselves? This collection spans a period in Hemingway’s life, from January 1932 through May 1934, that many find problematic for several reasons. Following his breakthrough in the 1920s, which arguably culminated in the critical and commercial success of A Farewell to Arms in 1929, Hemingway had, by 1932, become a celebrity, a figure of mass media, who lived the life of the rich and famous, partly owing to book sales and a movie contract, but also partly owing to his wife’s inherited fortune. Europe in the 1920s had been an inexpensive place to live and travel, but now, as the new owner of a Key West mansion, he was able to afford activities he could have only dreamed about a few years before. In the letters, we can sense his joy in their new lifestyle, to the point of swagger and arrogance, but, to his credit, he makes generous efforts to share his bounty and expensive pursuits with friends. Many of the letters are devoted to attempts to cajole pals to join him on fishing and hunting jaunts.

During this period, more so than any other in Hemingway’s life, these jaunts were fully engrossed in blood sport. Volume 5 opens with Hemingway adding final touches to the gory bullfight guide Death in the Afternoon and concludes with his three-month African safari and preparation for the writing of Green Hills of Africa. Between these bloody bookends, he actively depletes the population of Atlantic blue marlin, elk, mountain sheep, bear...