More than 40 years after his death, the novelist Ernest Hemingway is playing a key part in the delicate relations between the country of his birth and his adopted home. The Cuban government is to work with American scholars and descendants of the man who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in a unique project to preserve the writer’s legacy.
The scheme will also throw new light on the writer’s work. A treasure trove of his writings and letters which will now be made public includes unpublished work and an alternative ending to his best-known book.
Hemingway spent the later years of his writing life in Cuba, making his home at Lookout Farm at San Francisco de Paula, about ten miles from Havana. When he committed suicide in Idaho in 1961, his widow Mary gave the house and its contents to the revolutionary Cuban government which had just deposed the Cuban dictator, Batista. Now, with many of the documents affected by age, a preservation scheme has been launched.
This week Fidel Castro, along with members of the Hemingway family, announced a scheme which will help to preserve the Hemingway legacy with the assistance of American dollars and expertise.
Cuba’s National Council of Cultural Heritage has reached an agreement with the New York-based Social Science Research Council under which Hemingway’s letters and documents will be preserved, some on microfilm and some electronically. The copies will be stored in the John F Kennedy Library in Boston, where they will be available to scholars.
”This is a beautiful initiative,” Fidel Castro said at the ceremony held to announce the agreement, at the writer’s old home. ”I personally have much for which to thank Hemingway … The honour that he gave us by choosing our country in which to live and write some of his best work.”
The two men had known each other during Hemingway’s last years. Castro has always been an admirer of the writer’s work — not least For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he has credited with teaching him about the art of battle, and which he read before embarking on the guerrilla war that led to the 1959 revolution.
The architect of the agreement is James McGovern, a Democrat congressman from Massachusetts, who has been one of the main advocates of an end to the American embargo of the island. McGovern used the event to call for an end to the embargo, introduced by President Eisenhower in the year that Hemingway died.
The scheme is likely to cost around $500 000, which will come from donations and grants in the US. Already the Rockefeller Foundation has contributed $75 000, and work on the preservation is due to start immediately.
Amongst the items which will benefit from the restoration and preservation process is Pilar, the 30-foot boat that Hemingway gave to his friend, the Cuban fisherman Gregorio Fuentes, on whom The Old Man and the Sea was based. Fuentes passed the boat to the Hemingway museum which is housed in his former home, where Hemingway lived on and off from 1939 to 1960. Members of the public are only allowed to look through the windows of the museum.
The more than 2 000 documents had previously been kept in boxes and filing cabinets in the basement of the museum. They include letters to members of his family, including his wife Mary and his son Gregory — and from the actress Ingrid Bergman, and Adriana Ivancich, the 19-year-old Italian countess with whom he was in love. There are also letters about his work, including correspondence with his editor Max Perkins.
For literary archaeologists there are likely to be many finds, although there are no undiscovered novels. One document is an epilogue that he wrote for For Whom the Bell Tolls but decided not to use. While one of the most famous photos of the writer shows him with a swordfish caught while making a film of The Old Man and the Sea, there are more than 3 000 other photos — including negatives which have never been printed — which will now be restored or processed.
Sean Hemingway, the writer’s grandson, said: ”This was his primary residence in the last part of his life, and when he left he was expecting to come back so he really took just a few things.”
”He was a tremendous collector of everything. He kept things as memory aids for what he was writing about.”
The ceremony comes just a week after the director Steven Spielberg also called for an end to the embargo, when he spoke at the Havana film festival. President Bush has so far resisted calls from members of his own party on the issue. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001