“So Now We Are Thirty-Five”: Imaginary Letters on a Milestone

Abstract

To celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Hemingway Review , this collection of fictional letters explores Ernest Hemingway’s mindset on 21 July 1934, the day he turned that exact age. The milestone arrived during a generally happy period for the writer: He was drafting Green Hills of Africa , his nonfiction account of his 1933–1934 safari, and only two days earlier he had crossed from Key West to Havana for the inaugural marlin season aboard his recently acquired cabin cruiser, the Pilar . As always with Hemingway, however, darker undercurrents swirled. This imaginary correspondence finds his feelings about aging complicated by the legacy of his father’s suicide; by his rivalry with Scott Fitzgerald; by his ambivalence toward his wife, Pauline, and his putative mistress, Jane Mason; and by his resentment toward his mother. Drawing from imagery and motifs prevalent in Hemingway’s prose from this period, the letters find Hemingway struggling to construct a definition of aging that embraces the life cycle instead of lamenting lost youth.