Hemingway's Manuscripts: The Vault Reconsidered

HEMINGWAY'S MANUSCRIPTS: THE VAULT RECONSIDERED Philip Young* As learned scholars and masters of our trade, you will all remember how Whitman once paraphrased Emerson: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes). So permit me a little paraphrase of Whitman: Do I repeat myself? Very well then I repeat myself (I am small, I contain platitudes). For no one is more keenly aware than the present speaker that he is already in print—three times!—on the topic before us, which was assigned. This is a story that I wrote up once for the New York Times Book Review, revised and updated for a journal, and reprinted in my last book (which is called Three Bags Full: Essays in American Fiction, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, newly out in paperback and attractively priced). Not to mention the fact that the principal result of all this effort—everything that was presented to Mary Hemingway as a book, called The Hemingway Manuscripts: An Inventory—is, though never exactly a best-seller, still in print too (Pennsylvania State University Press) . Nor did I realize until I read our program that this was supposed to be some kind of "keynote," which I see defined as "a policy line to be followed, set forth authoritatively in advance by formal announcement ." If I should here inadvertently establish any key, major or minor, or accidentally sound any note, tonic or dominant, then this Conference is cursed, damned, and doomed before it ever saw light of day. (Faulkner.) But as some of you know, the impresario of this get-together is a very hard man to say no to. So here we are, back at the old stand. In 1950 Hemingway wrote someone or other a letter that I have seen in which he says he figures to have all his papers and uncompleted •Philip Young is Research Professor of English at Penn State. His last book was Three Bags Full: Essays in American Fiction, and he is at work on one to be called, perhaps, Revolutionary Ladies: Tales of 1776. 4 Philip Young manuscripts burned when he is buried; he doesn't want that sort of crap to go on. Well, as some of you also know, quite a bit of stuff escaped the flames (which will ignite later), and so it goes on all right—precisely as here and now. But I do not really wish to seem cynical or sarcastic about this. Going through all of Hemingway's manuscript (I doubt that a single sheet of it was destroyed) was a profoundly rewarding experience that I never for a moment even dreamed of having, but definitely had. It was the high point of my vicissitudinous "career," and, as I have said before, I could never be happier working than I was in that vault if I lived to be a hundred. I suppose that for present purposes the place to start is at the point when, following her husband's death in July of 1961, Mary Hemingway realized that she had the responsibility of gathering up all the manuscript of a man who moved about a great deal, kept practically every piece of paper he ever wrote a word on, and left it behind, without regard for hardly any of it. Chiefly this meant going to Key West, where large boxes of stuff were stored away in a back room (no longer there) of Sloppy Joe's, and to Cuba—then as now completely out of bounds. She hasn't told that story yet, since she is saving it (I think) for her autobiography. But it would appear that there was some sort of deal with Castro here, whereby in exchange for the Finca, their house in the country outside Havana, and the Pilar, their boat, she was allowed to retrieve such manuscript as was down there, as well as an extremely valuable collection of paintings. Then, via an empty shrimp boat, I've heard, she got the cargo to this country—first to Ketchum and the house where he died, which she still summers in, then to New York, to her penthouse and the vaults of a...