By Stuart Mitchner

Photograph of Ernest Hemingway at the Finca Vigia in 1952 posing in front of Waldo Peirce’s oil portrait of the author in 1929. (The Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

The best news I’ve heard lately is that Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has become a bestseller in France in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. With sales surging, copies of his bittersweet celebration of life and art in the City of Light are appearing among the flowers and candles in makeshift memorials honoring the victims. The title in French, Paris est une fête, has become a trending hashtag on Twitter. 

It’s only to be expected then that much of the buried treasure revealed in the Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibit, “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,” was discovered in Paris. In a July 2009 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Hemingway’s friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner recalls a lunch at the Paris Ritz in 1956 when Charles Ritz, the hotel’s chairman, asked Hemingway if he was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room. After Ritz had the trunk brought up to his office, Hemingway opened it to find clothes, menus, receipts, memos, racing forms, correspondence and, “on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest … two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren” that he had filled “with his careful handwriting” when he was living in Paris in the 1920s.

At Home in Manhattan

Notebooks like those found in the trunk can be seen first-hand now that Ernest Hemingway is residing at the Morgan. His September 25-January 31 stay in the building on the corner of 36th and Madison represents the only time he ever, so to speak, “settled down” in Manhattan. Until the fall of 1959 when he rented a one-bed, one-bath, 900-square-foot apartment on the fourth floor at 1 East 62nd Street, with a sidelong view of Central Park, Hemingway made do with short-term stops at hotels like the Brevoort, the Barclay, and the Sherry Netherland. Even so, the time spent in the apartment amounted to little more than a month, if that. According to Carlos Baker’s 1969 biography, Hemingway “set up a card table in a corner of the living room to serve as an office” where he met with his publisher Charles Scribner Jr; the date being July 1960, it’s likely that one of the matters under discussion was the Paris book that would be published posthumously in 1964 as A Moveable Feast.

“This Ain’t My Town”

“Wouldn’t live in it for anything,” Hemingway vows in an October 11, 1923 letter from New York to Gertrude Stein expressing how “homesick for Paris” he and his wife Hadley have been. Not surprisingly, it’s the too-busy too-muchness of the city that overwhelms him: “I have understood for the first time how men can commit suicide simply because of too many things in business piling up ahead of them that they can’t get through …. All the time I was there I never saw anybody even grin.”

Three years later, Hemingway came to Manhattan on his own for a 19-day whirlwind tour in which he met “any hell’s amount of people,” paid his first visit to Scribners’ headquarters on Fifth Avenue, and met his editor-to-be, Maxwell Perkins, “sitting in his paper-strewn office on the fifth floor while the morning traffic flowed by outside.”

Undoubtedly the most amusing and indelible account of Hemingway in New York is Lillian Ross’s May 1950 New Yorker profile (“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?”), in which he says “This ain’t my town …. It’s a town you come to for a short time. It’s murder.” Still, there’s a lot do: “Want to go to the Bronx Zoo, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, ditto of Natural History, and see a fight. Want to see the good Breughel at the Met, the one, no two, fine Goyas and Mr. El Greco’s Toledo.” As in the past, however, Paris is where he feels truly at home: “I am as lonesome and as happy as I can be in that town we lived in and worked and learned and grew up in, and then fought our way back into.”

The last reference is to Hemingway’s role in the liberation of Paris in August 1944 (in particular the bar at the Ritz), an event described in onetime Princeton resident Sylvia Beach’s 1956 memoir, Shakespeare and Company. In residence at the Morgan, as it happens, are some letters she wrote to Hemingway bearing the legendary bookstore’s distinctive letterhead. There are also letters from Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Scott Fitzgerald, and Edmund Wilson, as well as dog tags, photos, wartime identity cards and other items relating to the two wars bookending the exhibit.

Portrait of the Artist

The assertion that Hemingway is at home at the Morgan makes sense when you gaze into the eyes of the 29-year-old man in Waldo Peirce’s painting, dated April 1, 1929, which commands your full attention as soon you set foot in the West Gallery. There’s no getting around it: you’ve entered his space, he’s looking right at you, sizing you up.

Inscribing it “For Ernest, Key West, (Alias Kid Balzac),” Peirce had in mind the famous daguerreotype of Balzac with his naked bull-neck and chest exposed. Just as Hemingway’s Paris enters the building in the form of manuscripts, photos, letters, and those hundred-page “Incroyable” brand student notebooks with the Art Nouveau covers, the author’s Key West is here in the tropical ambience of the portrait, the face flushed from hours in the sun (he and Peirce did a lot of fishing together), or perhaps it’s the painter’s way of expressing the carnal, full-blooded force of Hemingway’s physical presence. While you can easily imagine yourself face to face with a glamorous white-bloused Byronic poet fresh from swimming the Hellespont, or a mustached Errol Flynn fresh from Hollywood, it takes no more than the painter’s reference to Kid Balzac and a passing knowledge of Hemingway’s I-can-beat-any writer-in-the-house attitude to see the red splotches over one eye and on both cheeks, and the base of his neck, as evidence of blows landed in bouts with Tolstoy, Turgenev, Stendhal, and the Kid from Tours.

Boxing aside, it’s the intensity of Hemingway’s gaze that brings the man into the room. Peirce knew he was painting an artist in his prime, the same one who wrote The Sun Also Rises in six weeks in the notebooks displayed at the Morgan and who sat in the cafes described in Moveable Feast writing “The Big Two-Hearted River,” the first page of which can be seen in manuscript at the Morgan. When his notebook was not at hand, Hemingway used whatever was convenient, including the stationary of the American Red Cross and a postal telegraph form. Also on view is the famous first page of A Farewell to Arms, the novel that would make his fortune. At the time of Peirce’s painting, installments had begun appearing in Scribners magazine ahead of its September 1929 book publication with a cover design Hemingway complained about in a letter to Max Perkins that visitors to the Morgan can read in the angry original.

Fitzgerald’s Touch

Another thing Hemingway’s residence at the Morgan vividly underscores is the impact F. Scott Fitzgerald had on his work. Maxwell Perkins made editorial suggestions, but Fitzgerald boldly exposed the waste of deadly passages in both The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. His suggestions on the latter are on display (with the proviso “even if it costs me your friendship”), with Hemingway’s firmly circled “Kiss My Ass” at the bottom of the page. Reading personal recollections like those in Denis Brian’s 1988 oral history, The True Gen, you soon realize that in addition to his no-holds-barred attitude toward rival writers, Hemingway, as Malcolm Cowley puts it, “couldn’t forgive anyone for doing him a favor.”

The Salinger Letter

Having missed the Morgan exhibit of J.D. Salinger’s letters in March-May 2010 after the author’s January 27 death, I gave special attention to the letter he wrote to Hemingway in July 1945 while at a German hospital. Opening with a playful reference to A Farewell to Arms before admitting he’s been “in a state of almost constant despondency,” Salinger asks how Hemingway’s novel is coming, claiming to be “Chairman of your many fan clubs” while advising him not to sell it to the movies. On the subject of his own work, he mentions “a very sensitive novel,” and “part of a play” he might invite Margaret O’Brien “to play with me in,” adding, “I could play Holden Caulfield myself.” The reference to Salinger’s most famous character six years before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye suggests that he’s already talked with Hemingway about the novel he’s been working on, typewriter in tow, from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge.

Salinger is clearly reaching out to Hemingway when he says at the end, “I hope the next time you come to New York that I’ll be around and that if you have time I can see you. The talks I had with you here were the only hopeful minutes of the whole business.”

From all accounts, Salinger and Hemingway never did get together in New York — at least not until Hemingway’s current four-month residence at the Morgan.

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There will be a Gallery Talk by Declan Kiely, Robert H. Taylor curator and department head, literary and historical manuscripts, at 6:30 p.m. on December 18. The exhibit will run through January 31, 2016. Also very much worth seeing at the Morgan: “Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts” will be on view through January 18, and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol through January 10.