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ALS in pencil, two pages, 8.5 x 11, Finca Vigia letterhead, October 3, 1951. Handwritten letter to aspiring writer James Vizas, in full: “Thank you very much for your letter and for the article. Sometimes the critics give me the black-ass too. This last time it was strange how complete a gang-up there was. Maybe I have just been around too long trying to write too well. Anyway I am going to continue the exercise.
Did you notice how they all have a hatred toward anyone trying to give a non-f— up soldier’s viewpoint (Col. Cantwell) and a hatred for anybody who knows what combat is about? That shows in a pattern like the weaving in a cheap carpet.
I am very sorry you have had bad luck with writing and teaching writing, its-self, is such a completely exhausting job, if you manage to make what you try to convey and work at it with everything you have you are always worked out completely if you carry it far enough; that I can understand why the two, with the great obligations, would not mix. But it is bad luck that you could not do them both and be happy with them. I know that when I write, I can do nothing else; if that’s any comfort.
Actually nothing is any comfort except getting your work done well although there are many pleasures and ways of being happy we should be grateful enough for. I wonder what made them all deride that drinking, with out being an alcoholic, and knowing that bed was a good place and enjoying the different pleasures of living were a cheapness? Very probably because they are not equipped or suited to enjoy life. Because it is tragic doesn’t mean we have to be gloomy about it.
This is a dull letter. But I wanted to thank you for liking the book and for writing about it. Kazin who doesn’t know anything about the Veneto nor about love, nor war, nor drinking, nor death, nor about professional soldiers (good ones) attacked the book on what journalists have written about my own personality. I really doubt if he read the book. An Italian writer I know wrote me that nobody would ever be able to write a book about Venice again. That is as exagerated (mis-spelled) as the silly stuff John O’Hara wrote in praise of me while ½ downing the book. But the Italian was from the Veneto and he said I made him see it truly for the first time. But what can you make Kazin see? Nothing. He writes only in reference to personalities and, actually, he knows nothing of mine, only crap he has read.
Well the hell with all of it. Thank you very much for writing me and I’ll keep on writing. Have 182,231 words completed, cut, and re-written on the new book. Now I would like to take a vacation to get away from it and then come back to go over it all again. Wish me luck. Haven’t had any lag-off from writing for 18 months.” Includes the original mailing envelope, hand-addressed by Hemingway, who, ostensibly, has added the initial “E.” before his surname on the reverse flap. In fine condition.
Accompanied by a copy of the article Vizas sent to Hemingway, ‘Criticism: The Author or the Book?,’ which derides critic Alfred Kazin’s scathing review of Hemingway’s 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees, drafts and copies of Vizas’s letters to Hemingway, and three folders rife with newspaper and magazine clippings related to Hemingway.
An exceptional handwritten Hemingway letter from a pivotal time in the author’s career. Despite becoming a bestseller and his only novel to top The New York Times bestseller list, Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway's sixth and last novel written during his lifetime was also his first major work to receive widespread negative press and reviews. Critics wrote off Hemingway as finished, and, as this letter illustrates, neither praise nor opprobrium was lost on Papa, despite his shirky exclamation, “Well the hell with all of it.” At 52, Hemingway was still pushing, still searching for his perfect prose, an endless hunt he alludes to at the letter’s start, “Anyway I am going to continue the exercise.” His efforts led to the publication of the novella, The Old Man and the Sea, which was published on September 1, 1952, less than a year after he wrote this letter. The work, widely deemed as Hemingway’s greatest, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was the only work explicitly mentioned when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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