The letter to Bill Smith, Hemingway’s lifelong best friend, is one of several Hemingway highlights in the May auction at Potter & Potter. Hemingway wrote the letter in 1959 on stationery from Finca Vigía, his house in Cuba, where he resided at the time.
In the letter Hemingway discusses logistical details for an upcoming trip to see Smith, “If this is ok with you let’s go direct to your house. About car: we should certainly have one. Could you hire a Mercedes with pretty good baggage room and good visibility, and a chauffeur for when we arrive. Then we can see how it works out and whether buying is better. Take it for a week, say, with option of monthly sale if we decide to keep it on.”
Hemingway also references the recent long road trip with Ed Hotchner and his wife Mary’s recovery from anemia. “PS we had very good physical check ups—Mary has the anemia that she’d had since Africa beat finally … .”
In addition to the letter to Smith, the May auction includes a 1925 first printing in dust jacket of the Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, Hemingway’s first collection of short stories, and a postcard that a very young Hemingway sent to his father, possibly the earliest confirmed Hemingway letter. The postcard reads in part, “Dear papa, I saw a mother duck with seven little babies,” offering a small detail of life at Windemere, the Hemingway summer home on Walloon Lake in Michigan. The boy’s early fascination with nature would continue into his adulthood, when Hemingway would gain notoriety as a big game hunter.
