News from the Hemingway Collection

Abstract

Save America's Treasures: Preservation Update This spring with the support of our Save America's Treasures grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennedy Library celebrated its first year of preservation work on the Ernest Hemingway Collection. All of Hemingway's letters that are housed at the Library—written from when he was nine years old in 1909 to the time of his death in 1961—were conserved at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in Andover, Massachusetts. This preservation task included 2,500 letters, each one individually assessed and treated. In addition, we have updated the Finding Aid for Ernest Hemingway's Outgoing Correspondence and made it available for the first time online. The Finding Aid is located at: http://www.jfklibrary.org/fa_ehcat_outgoingcorr.html. Along with the outgoing correspondence, the Finding Aid for Ernest Hemingway's Manuscripts is now keyword searchable and is located at http://www.jfklibrary.org/fa_ehcat_mss.html. Among the items that NEDCC conserved was the diary of Agnes Von Kurowsky, Hemingway's Red Cross nurse at the hospital in Milan where he convalesced after his WWI injuries. She is the woman on whom the character Catherine Barkley of A Farewell to Arms was loosely based. Her diary entries describe her first encounters with her new patient, "Mr. Hemingway," who arrived at the hospital on 17 July 1918, only to celebrate his 19th birthday four days later. Agnes writes of the birthday party she and the other nurses and patients threw for him: "Mr. Hemingway's birthday, so we all dressed up and had gelati on the balcony and played the Victrola." Kennedy Library staff has also concentrated preservation efforts on the impressive collection of books from Hemingway's private library. The collection includes an unnumbered and unbound press copy of James Joyce's [End Page 151] Ulysses with Hemingway's signature on the cover page as well as a draft of Ezra Pound's Cantos published by Three Mountain Press printed specifically for Hemingway on handmade watermarked paper. These are among the books in the collection that are scheduled for conservation along with several signed first editions of Hemingway's works, some of which were donated to the Collection. Hemingway's handwriting is scrawled along the margins throughout his personal copies, providing a glimpse into his analysis of other authors. As one can imagine, Ernest Hemingway's library is filled with books on two of his favorite subjects: Spain and African wildlife. Each book in his personal library has been cleaned and precisely measured for a custom made, acid free box to ensure its preservation. Four of the books, including Los Proverbios by Francisco Goya, Portrait of Mabel Dodge by Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and the The Torrents of Spring, received conservation treatment at NEDCC. Preservation efforts have also been directed toward Hemingway's considerable collection of non-print materials. In the process of cleaning, cataloging, and re-housing the diverse objects, staff have revisited some of the wonderful pieces that comprise the Collection: a sterling silver baby spoon with "EH" engraved in the curved handle, a lock of Ernest Hemingway's hair cut in August of 1947 that has surprising tints of red blended with the shock of white that we have come to recognize as Papa's, and the Al Valore Militare Medal, the Italian medal of honor, awarded to Hemingway on 8 June 1918 for his heroism at the battle of Piave. 10th International Colloquium on Ernest Hemingway in Cuba In late May, the Kennedy Library's Ernest Hemingway Curator, Susan Wrynn, traveled to Havana, Cuba for the Ernest Hemingway Colloquium at the Ambos Mundos hotel. The conference, which celebrated the 65th anniversary of the first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, was attended by fifty plus scholars from Cuba, the United States, and as far away as Italy. Susan's presentation offered an overview of the...