Books: Papa's Moveable Treats

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ERNEST HEMINGWAY: SELECTED LETTERS, 1917-1961

Edited by Carlos Baker; Scribners; 948pages; $27.50

Hemingway molded his life in his own image before the image makers took over and gave us the Marlboro man of American letters. He played the game when it suited him. When it did not, he was apt to circulate statements like 'While Mr. H. appreciates the publicity attempt to build him into a glamorous personality like Floyd Gibbons or Tom Mix's horse Tony he deprecates it and asks the motion picture people to leave his private life alone."

His letters, which he never intended for publication, reveal just how rich that life was. They also indicate why his convictions about hunting, fishing, drinking, warring, fornicating, storymaking and dying were certain to become public property. Hemingway's code of conquest and survival was on the continent before the white man. His best stories focused a nostalgia for the New World's uncorrupted bounty. The letters, too, are full of firm trout tricked from pure streams, plump birds hosed out of clear skies, fleet beasts felled by one clean shot and blank slopes marked by the signature of a lone skier. There are also enemies worthy of bashing and friends to be gathered and embraced.

Because he traveled much and lived in remote places, Hemingway sustained his friendships and antagonisms through the mails. They enabled him to exchange the latest dope and "gen" (military jargon for intelligence). He also used the epistolary form to procrastinate: "Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something." It is estimated that he wrote about 6,000 letters. Carlos Baker vetted 2,500 pieces of correspondence for his biography, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). As editor, he has selected nearly 600 moveable treats, from World War I until two weeks before Hemingway's suicide in 1961.

"Papa" holds forth on subjects ranging from his art to his bowels. But much of the collection reads like the scoreboard of a ferocious competitor. "The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn't hurt a bit at the time," he writes his parents in 1918. "We've killed 3 big bull elk—2 bucks—2 bear—an eagle and a coyote—Grouse all the time —Killed enough meat for the two guides to get married on—" The years pass the tallies mount. Noble critters are immortalized by his marksmanship in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Africa. Off Key West and Cuba, tons of tarpon, swordfish and sharks succumb to his brawn, will and, at one point his tommy gun. He boasts of bagging 122 enemies in combat, outboxing the biggest man on Bimini and having intercourse three times on his 50th birthday. He furnishes his editor and pubisher with exact counts of his word production.

That, too, was an adversary pursuit. Advice to William Faulkner, 1947: "Why do you want to fight Dostoevsky in your first fight? Beat Turgenieff . . . Then try and take Stendhal. . . But don't fight with the poor pathological characters of our time (we won't name)."