Visiting Hemingway

The writer makes himself known in a small room full of photos, manuscripts, and trunks.

Ernest Hemingway and Carlos Gutierrez aboard Hemingway’s boat Pilar , 1934. Hemingway fished the Gulf Stream from his home ports in Key West and Havana. During the early years of World War II, he equipped the boat to hunt German submarines. Hemingway christened The Pilar with his nickname for his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. (Public domain. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.)

My window commands a view of the harbor, shrouded in low clouds, and across the water I can see the vague outline of downtown Boston swaddled in gray. The wind has been steady and cold for a few days and yesterday’s sparse erratic mist, halfway between rain and snow, turned during the night into a steady Spring shower of heavy flakes. The weatherman apologetically explains that, although it’s April, some meteorological traffic jam over the Atlantic leaves us stuck in January-style weather. Now, late in the afternoon, it’s snowing again. A 747 fresh from its Atlantic crossing flies low overhead in its final approach to Logan International Airport.

On the desk in front of me a photocopy of a handwritten manuscript gives me another, much older link to Europe. The manuscript is Ernest Hemingway’s first draft of The Sun Also Rises. I am in the reading room of the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library.

End of the Sunrise

I looked at the ultimate handwritten line of The Sun Also Rises: a line of dialog spoken by the novel’s hero, Jake, to Hemingway’s femme fatale, Brett. Hemingway wrestled a long time with this line — as he did with much of what he wrote — before it…