Hemingway, Ernest — Leonard Brown | Draft of Hemingway's collected works with extensive revisions and manuscript notes by Hemingway

Hemingway, Ernest — Leonard Brown

Typescript draft introduction, biographic note and prefaces to a proposed collected works of Hemingway, with Hemingway’s autograph revisions, ca. 1952

63 pages (280 x 215 mm). Typescript prepared by Leonard Brown, including prefaces for A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, as well as an introduction and a biographical note on Hemingway, with autograph manuscript annotations and corrections by Hemingway on 17 pages, in blue ink, many initialed “E.H.”; light spotting and rust marks from paperclips.

A draft of Hemingway’s collected works—extensively annotated by Hemingway.

Leonard Brown, an early academic champion of Hemingway and professor at Syracuse University, prepared this typescript for a proposed collected edition of the author’s work, originally commissioned by Charles Scribner’s Sons. The project was intended to replace Malcolm Cowley’s earlier anthology. The present typescript includes prefaces to Hemingway's works, and an introduction and biographical note on Hemingway.

Here, Hemingway refutes Brown’s readings line by line. When Brown interprets the title A Farewell to Arms as “a noble pun… a farewell to the arms of war, but a farewell too to Catherine’s,” Hemingway retorts: “Untrue. I had no such intention ever in the title. This truly must be removed.” Brown sees economic meaning in To Have and Have Not; Hemingway addresses Scribner editor Wallace Meyer directly: “Dear Wallace: In this title I thought the title meant: To have happiness, or the possibility of it and yet not be able to attain it. This was never an economical title.” When Brown attributes a key execution scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls to the city of Avila, Hemingway writes, “Who ever said it was Avila?... There is no cliff beyond the plaza in Avila.”

Hemingway’s commentary on Brown’s prose is equally candid: “Can a man write worse prose than this?”; “Really Wallace no man should write ‘clinging tenaciously’”; “This last paragraph is, to me, state phrasing—could not be worse.” Brown’s closing tribute—“a service for which we should be grateful”—is struck through by Hemingway and revised to read, simply: “something we should thank him for.”

The edition was never published, and when The Hemingway Reader finally appeared in 1953, the editor was Charles Poore—not Leonard Brown. Hemingway’s sharp annotations here may well explain why.

A striking example of Hemingway’s uncompromising voice and editorial hand—one author reasserting control over how he was to be read.