Six previously unpublished letters written by Ernest Hemingway reveal he was terrified of losing his original manuscripts and believed his war correspondent wife was trying to put him out of business.
The letters, owned by a rare book collector, won the Hemingwayana Contest, a national search for Hemingway memorabilia.The letters were written in the 1930s to Jane and Richard Armstrong, friends who lived in Havana, Cuba, and helped the author with typing and research.
One letter addressed to both Armstrongs was signed, "Best to you both from your bastardly friend."
In a letter to Jane Armstrong, Hemingway relayed his fear of sending her the only existing manuscript of a novel, writing in a clipped, journalistic style.
"Am so damned spooked of something happening to the original and there being no copy or (if I) should just hang onto it and not bother (sending it)," Hemingway wrote.
It also contained a request that the typist should correct his punctuation and grammar, an apparent admission that he did not expect the typewritten manuscript to be exactly the same as his handwritten version.
In another letter to Jane Armstrong, Hemingway wrote, "It is now raining like hell and I have been working since 6 a.m. and now there will be no tennis which ain't good for work tomorrow. Neither is having a wife try to put you out of business when you are writing the best book you ever wrote."
Jim Nagel, a Hemingway scholar at the University of Georgia, said the book Hemingway referred to was "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and the wife was Martha Gellhorn, a war correspondent for Collier's Magazine who went to the war theater in Europe ahead of him.
Nagel said the remark about putting him out of business referred to the professional jealousy he felt toward Gellhorn. Hemingway later went to Europe as a war correspondent, wrote and asked Collier's for a job and was hired, putting Gellhorn out of business.
"That had to be only a year after they married and already he thinks she's trying to put him out of business," Nagel said. "He was pretty bitter about her leaving him alone - and when she left for the war they never saw one another again."
Contest winner David Meeker bought the letters two years ago from Jane Armstrong's grand-daughter.
"Letters in which an author talks about his writing are the most sought-after that one can have from a writer," said Meeker, the owner of Nick Adams & Co. Rare Books in Sacramento, Calif.
In another letter to Richard Armstrong, head of the International News Service bureau in Havana, Hemingway asked for background information on Cuban politics, which he used in "To Have and Have Not."
Hemingway sought eyewitness accounts that "I can rewrite or steal from what facts I want of these events."
"I want to contrast the events in K.W. (Key West) and Havana and carry a thing through both of them," wrote Hemingway.
"I know this is a hell of a job but if you can get it for me will give you any amount of Mss. (manuscripts), first editions items. etc."