Beschreibung:

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. Autograph letter signed ("Ernest") to Charles Thompson, n.p., n.d. [Havana, May 1933]. EIGHT PAGES, 4to, written in pencil on four sheets of stationery of "Inglaterra" Restaurant-Cafe-Bar in Havana, fold creases, slight rubbing at fold on last page. A lengthy letter in which Hemingway writes of deep-sea fishing off Cuba (the first 1 1/2 pages), his car that he left in Key West (the next 2 pages), and of postponing his up-coming African trip, etc. (the final 3 1/2 pages). "...Had letter from Uncle Gus [Pfeiffer] asking if I wanted to postpone African trip for a year in chance Archie [Archibald MacLeish] could go then -- Said anytime we went was O.K. with him -- Didn't want to influence our decision but wanted us to know it was O.K. if we wanted to wait -- Said income from African fund was ours to use in any case (this amounts to $1,500 in a year). It occured to me that it might be O.K. to suggest to Uncle Gus that we would go [to] Africa next June -- and meantime work out this [agiya?] business while we are still pioneers -- get you and Mike [Strater] over for June -- Uncle Gus if possible -- follow the fish -- and pay for trip out of interest on money...We have unique position pioneering this -- There are new species [of fish] never before classified -- can do new and valuable work beside the wonderful damned excitment with which you are familiar -- We can go...to Mariel-Bahia Honda and beyond -- Next year somebody will have worked it out -- Africa is all pioneered and collected -- we can go there better in next June-July-August for your business and mine too -- Trip is absolutely secure unless money and everything goes haywire -- This [agiya?] thing seems chance of our lifetime -- Interest on trip funds will also cover ram and grizzly hunt in Wyo[ming] this fall and we can all hunt quail together in Piggott [Arkansas] this fall...Don't think I am trying to yellow out on African trip -- Know you don't -- but truly -- this thing is worth doing -- Have never felt anything was more so..." Hemingway met Charles Thompson when he first went to Key West in 1928. As Carlos Baker notes ( Ernest Hemingway: a Life Story , 1980 ed., pp. 247-8): "His closest friendship [in Key West] was with Charles Thompson, a broad-shouldered, brown-blond young man roughly his own age. Charles loved hunting and fishing with something of Ernest's own passionate devotion. Pauline [Hemingway's wife] immediately took to his handsome wife, Lorine. The Thompson family ran a fishhouse, a cigarbox factory, a ship's chandlery, an icehouse, and a hardward store and tackle shop. Almost nightly after Charles got off from work, he and Ernest went out fishing..." Thompson was the only one of Hemingway's friends to accompany him on his African safari (not postponed), in 1933-34 (where he bagged more trophies than Hemingway, much to the latter's chagrin). He of course figures in The Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway's account of the safari. In For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) in a discourse on friends (p. 381) Robert Jordan mentions four names, among them Charles Thompson (see Baker, p. 852). None of the four Hemingway letters in this and the following three lots are in Letters , ed. C. Baker, and are presumably unpublished.