Ernest Hemingway portrays F. Scott Fitzgerald in an unnamed short fiction that spans three pages as a scrappy boxer who exits the ring beaten and damaged but emerges triumphant in the end. The narrative is based on Fitzgerald’s life.
Hemingway, then 18 years old, is seen here huddling in a trench with Italian soldiers during World War I while wearing his American Red Cross uniform and beaming at the camera. This photo was taken just a few days before Hemingway was injured in World War I by a mortar shell and machine gun fire, an experience that later inspired him to write “A Farewell to Arms.”
In addition, there is a three-page reflection on death and suicide written in a notebook entry that he made in 1926, which is 35 years before he took his own life.
The objects, which are part of the most important cache of Hemingway papers discovered in the last 60 years, may be found at a new repository at Penn State University that was only recently accessible to researchers as well as the general public. The material, which is part of a collection that is dedicated to Ernest Hemingway and is known as the Toby and Betty Bruce Collection of Ernest Hemingway, consists of four unpublished short stories, draughts of manuscripts, hundreds of photographs, bundles of correspondence, and boxes of personal effects. Specialists believe that the material will reshape the public and academic perception of an artist whose life and work defined an era.
After Hemingway’s death, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, looked through the material, packed up what she wanted, and handed the rest to old friends Betty and Telly Otto Bruce, who was known to his friends as Toby. Mary Welsh Hemingway was married to Ernest Hemingway for 54 years. Not only was Toby Bruce Hemingway’s right-hand man for many years, but he was also his contractor, mechanic, and sometimes even his driver. Toby Bruce was a member of Hemingway’s inner circle.
Dink Bruce expressed his hope to The New York Times in 2017 that his family’s collection will one day be housed in a permanent archive after it was reported that the discovery had been made. It was also the opinion of Spanier, an English professor at Penn State who was the general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. She worked tirelessly over the following five years to get the archive to the university, which eventually made the purchase of it in October 2021 for an amount that was not revealed.
Hemingway writes to Bruce about his son Jack, who was known by the nickname Bumby, in a letter that was just unearthed and dates back to the summer of 1945. Jack had just been liberated from a prisoner of war camp run by the Germans during World War II.
These paragraphs were written by Hemingway two years before his father committed himself, which suggests that the author’s own suicidal thoughts began far earlier and was perhaps more profound than was previously known to academics. In 1961, the author who had won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize committed suicide by shooting himself in the head at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, just a few weeks before he would have been 62.
Due to the fact that the narrative lacks a date, it is impossible to pinpoint its position in their relationship; nonetheless, Curnutt believes that it may be connected to a well-known source of dispute between the two of them.
Fitzgerald acted as the timekeeper for a sparring bout that took place in 1929 between Ernest Hemingway and the Canadian author Morley Callaghan. Callaghan and Hemingway had worked together at The Toronto Star at one point in their careers. However, after Callaghan landed numerous blows, the bout became bloody and took on a more serious tone. Hemingway, who fancied himself to be somewhat of a boxer, said that Fitzgerald had lost track of time and continued the round for an additional minute, during which he was pummelling by his opponent.
A boxing wager has been settled with a cheque for ten dollars made out to Arnold Gingrich, one of the co-founders of Esquire magazine. Also included in this collection is the whole of Hemingway’s fishing journal for the years 1934-1935, which details not only what he was doing but also what he saw and who he was with. His nonfiction work “Death in the Afternoon,” which was published in 1932 and is about bullfighting, is represented in the collection by two fragmentary typescripts. Hemingway imagines a reader who wonders whether it’s acceptable to write about an entertainment like bullfighting with the possibility of civil war in Spain, at a time when other authors were directing their attention to politics. This line of thought is included in a paragraph that was cut from the novel.
