1 hemingway's library - John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

the 1930's:
He wanted to know everything. Didn't make any difference what it was. He wanted to know how the
fisherman cut the bait and everything. He was greatly interested in everything that went on.... He was
terrifically curious about everything. Gregory once said that if someone committed the perfect murder,
Papa would have a fit until he found out how he did it.(49)
Mary Hemingway says much the same thing: "Ernest's interests were wide-spread, encyclopedic.... He was
indefatigable in his search for information of every sort."(50) It is in this context that the following description by
Lloyd Arnold should be seen: "He'd gone to sleep on my Idaho Encyclopedia and had been absorbing it since first
light. 'A hell of a lot of state, this Idaho, that I didn't know about."' (51) It is not surprising, therefore, that the
composite record reveals that Hemingway owned vast numbers of nonfiction books on many subjects. In a letter to
Bernard Berenson in answer to his friend's queries, Hemingway wrote that he liked best true books about campaigns
and voyages. Undoubtedly, the Homeric allusion was not lost on Berenson. Hemingway went on to write that he
liked novels and continued to read new ones, hopefully, but found most of them worthless. In addition, he added, he
liked to read technical books, biographies and memoirs. (52) This is a good, brief description of the basic contents
of Hemingway's library. However, as he did in the case of the description of his periodical reading, Hemingway
understated to Berenson the range of topics covered by the nonfiction works in his library, which includes matters as
diverse as criminal investigation, taxidermy and Italian Renaissance painting. In 1945, writing to Malcolm Cowley
about his self-education, Hemingway summed up his continuing effort to learn about the world. He told Cowley that
he continued to study and to read. Every year he studied something new in order to keep learning. Learning, he
went on, was fun, and he didn't see why he couldn't keep it up all his life. (53) It was this passion for information
that Hemingway admired in Tolstoy. It was not experience that excited Hemingway, but knowledge. He wanted to
know. His novels had to be supported by knowledge.
C. Literary Pronouncements
Hemingway's letters contain many comments on his reading and on literature in general, but most of these
are naturally topical and very limited in their scope. Occasionally, however, Hemingway made larger
pronouncements on literature in an attempt to articulate his sense of literary context and to acknowledge the writers
who he felt had most influenced him. Typically, these pronouncements took the form of lists of books or authors.
Sometimes they were explicitly presented as guides for young writers. More often they were simply lists of what he
considered the high points of literature or of works that he felt had been particularly important to him. These lists
provide some general insight into the books that Hemingway considered the core of his library, and a brief discussion
of them will add an important dimension to the topic under consideration.(54)
Hemingway's most famous pronouncement on literature occurs in Green Hills of Africa, where, as he later
told George Plimpton, "I was sounding off about American literature with a humorless Austrian character.... I wrote
an accurate account of the conversation. Not to make deathless pronouncements. A fair per cent of the
pronouncements are good enough.(55) What Hemingway tells the humorless Austrian is this: "The good writers are
Henry James, Stephen Crane and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good
writers."(56) Hemingway's relation to James will be discussed in Part II. In the case of Crane, two stories are singled
out: "The Open Boat" and "The Blue Hotel." However, it is Clemens who receives the greatest praise: "All modern
American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... All American writing comes
from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."(57) Even when allowing for
hyperbole and the dramatic context the statement does not conflict with other pronouncements he made about the
same time.
Hemingway finished Green Hills of Africa in the fall of 1934. In 1935 he published two articles in Esquire
that contain lists of books that place his comments on American literature in a larger context. The first list appeared
in "Remembering Shooting-Flying: A Key West Letter" and is cast in hyperbolic manner similar to that of the
pronouncement in Green Hills of Africa:
... I would rather read again for the first time Anna Karenina, Far Away and Long Ago, Buddenbrooks,
Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, A Sportsman's Sketches, The Brothers Karamazov,
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