At the Hemingways: With Fifty Years of Correspondence Between Ernest and Marcelline Hemingway (Hardcover)

To make conversation, I asked, "Has the view changed much since you were a boy?"

"Hardly at all," he replied without looking at me.

I persisted, "How long has it been since you were last here?"

"It must be at least forty years," he responded softly.

Gathering courage, I probed deeper. "How do you feel, coming back after so many years?"

For the first time my cousin turned and faced me. "The house seems unchanged. A time capsule. I almost expected Papa to greet me when I opened the door."

My own time capsule experience was in the form of a book I first read thirty-seven years ago -- "At the Hemingways." My mother finished writing it just a few years before she died in 1963. Rereading it today is like opening a door to Ernest Hemingway's youth.

This book has been out of print too long. In honor of my mother's birth in 1898 and Ernest's birth in 1899, we have designated this version, "The Centennial Edition."

In his introduction to this edtion, the preemenent Hemingway biographer, Michael Reynolds, has written, "A very young biographer once said that this was Marcelline's effort to sanitize Oak Park. He may have even called the book a "white-wash." As Scott Fitzgerald was apt to say, 'That was not me. That was a man named Johnson who frequently masquerades as me.' A somewhat older biographer is now more sympathetic with Marcelline's daunting task, for she presents the young Hemingway with more sympathy than most of his biographers have been able to muster. Despite all of Ernest's semi-fictional accounts to friends and strangers about how repressed he was in Oak Park, one sees here a far different story, one that leavens the bread."

As to the significance of 81 pieces of correspondence that have been added to "At the Hemingways", it was also Michael Reynolds who said to me, after reading the fifty years of letters in the new edition, "I wished I'd had those when I wrote my first books about Hemingway."

The Ernie-Marce correspondence reveals that over the years the two "twins" were once very close, very sharing of secrets and then slowly drifted apart. Some of the early letters are like love letters, later Ernest assumes the role of the knowing, paternal adult. Finally there is only a short, sad note at the end of a Christmas card in 1951. Marcelline kept writing until the year of Ernest's death. While he never responded to those late letters; he opened, read and saved them all.

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