Beschreibung:

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. Typed letter signed ("Papa" in pencil) with autograph closing and two initialed autograph postcripts, all in pencil, to Virginia ("Jigee") Schulberg Viertel (addressed as "Dear Jige") in Paris, written from Nice, "Ruhl Hotel," 28 December 1949. One page, 4to, single-spaced the typed portion comprising half a page, on thin paper, a little wrinkled. "HAPPINESS IS A MOVABLE FEAST" On 24 December 1949 Hemingway, his wife Mary, the writer Peter Viertel and his wife Virginia ("Jigee"), and A.E. Hotchner (at the time working for Cosmopolitan magazine) had set off from Paris for the South of France, with the idea of continuing on to Venice for hunting. During the leisurely journey Hemingway became infatuated with "Jigee" Viertel (previously married to Budd Schulberg, and noted for her beauty and wit) and paid her special attention. When the group reached Nice on 27 December, the Viertels decided to return to Paris by the night train. Hotchner accompanied them, taking the corrected last three chapters of Across the River and into the Trees for its serialization installment in Cosmopolitan . Upon reaching their Paris hotel, Hotchner discovered that he had left the manuscript on the train. It was eventually recovered, but not without causing Hemingway great distress (see his letter of 2 January 1950). This episode is recounted by Peter Viertel in his Dangerous Friends: at Large with Hemingway and Huston in the Fifties (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 95-99. Of this "dangerous" friendship, Viertel writes (p. 102): "...I again questioned Jigee about her relationship with Papa...She admitted that Papa had suggested she marry him...It was not a serious proposal, but merely the result of a long, intimate conversation during which she had told him [revealing intimate details of their married life] of our difficult period of readjustment after the war...I felt that I had been betrayed by both Hemingway and my wife, and the fact that she had never countenanced him as a lover or husband seemed unimportant to me." Later in the book (p. 270) Viertel, in commenting on Hemingway's relationship with another woman, remarks: "...he had behaved the same way with Jigee, had made her the heroine of his daydreams, but had never made an overt physical advance." Hemingway writes: "The day is no good and the fog is over all the roads so we stayed here [in Nice] and I did my business and duties...When you went away I missed you so badly that better not talk, nor think, nor write it. I could write it but was not going to go to station and make it worse. Figured you understood. I hope you had a good trip and I hope you are happy. Happiness is a movable feast [the epigraph for his A Moveable Feast , 1964; here 'movable' is spelled correctly], I know, but you are with good peoples and in a good town. This is a no good letter except that it is from me to you and tells you no one could be happier than we were, given what we were given, and that I love you very much...P.S. I feel like people feel after leg amputations..."