A four-page letter that Ernest Hemingway
wrote to his lawyer after the writer survived two back-to-back plane crashes in
East Africa in 1954 sold at auction for $237,055, according to Nate Sanders
Auctions.
اضافة اعلان
Bidding for the letter started at $19,250,
and there were 12 total bids before the letter was sold last month, according
to the auction house, which is based in Los Angeles and specializes in
autographed items. It’s unclear who bought the letter.
Hemingway, 55 at the time, had been
visiting Congo, Kenya, and Rwanda with his fourth wife, American journalist
Mary Welsh Hemingway, on a hunting safari. Over the course of a few days, the
couple were involved in two crashes, the second more violent than the first,
that would leave their mark on him for the rest of his life.
In the first crash, their plane “clipped a
telegraph wire and plunged onto the crocodile-infested shores of the Nile,”
according to PBS. Hemingway wrote about his trip to Africa in Look Magazine in
1954, which included a 16-page spread about his safari to Kenya.
The Associated Press recounted the incident
in 1954: “A chartered plane carrying the novelist and his wife on a sightseeing
trip cracked up Saturday in the wilds near the Murchison Falls but they were
picked up unhurt yesterday by a launch taking tourists to the falls.”
The couple had been reported missing when
their plane failed to land as expected for refueling, the AP reported. They
were later brought to a plane meant to rescue them, which then itself “crashed
and burned on the take-off,” the news agency said. Everyone aboard escaped.
Dr. Andrew Farah, who wrote a book about
Hemingway’s brain, described the second crash as more fiery and more violent,
during a 2017 talk at the John F. Kennedy library. The pilot kicked out his
front window to escape and save his passengers.
“He pulls Mary out, but Hemingway’s too big
to get out the window,” Farah said. To escape from the aircraft, Hemingway, his
shoulder still injured from the earlier crash, “chooses very unwisely to bust
open the door with his head, giving himself a skull fracture and another
concussion,” Farah said.
That decision would affect Hemingway’s
brain for the rest of his life. After the crash, Farah said, “his memory was
worse,” and he had persistent headaches.
Farah has theorized that Hemingway suffered
from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which in later years would be linked to
the suicides of former NFL players who suffered the brain disease because of
repeated concussions and other injuries. Hemingway killed himself in 1961.
Hemingway memorabilia such as letters with
his original signature or first editions of his books are auctioned off
regularly and often fetch thousands of dollars, with some going for much
higher. In Philadelphia in February, a first edition of Hemingway’s “In Our
Time” from 1924 was auctioned for $277,000. Another signed letter was auctioned
off last month at Nate Sanders Auctions but went for much less: $6,875 after
only one bid. In February, a more modern copy of “The Old Man and the Sea” went
for more than $10,000 for a special reason: It had been the copy taken out of a
high school library by a young Kobe Bryant.
In the crash letter — which was written
April 17, 1954, but was misdated as 1953 — Hemingway recounted the crashes and
their effect on him and told his lawyer Alfred Rice that he needed money. He
also expressed his dissatisfaction with Abercrombie & Fitch, the brand now
known for its all-American apparel but at the time was more known for selling
outdoor gear like guns.
“They sent me two .22 rifles of a type I
did not order, several hundred rounds of ammo of another type than I had
ordered,” Hemingway wrote, adding that he had to “shoot my first lion with a
borrowed .256 Mannlicher which was so old it would come apart in my hands and
had to be held together with tape and Scotch tape. Their carelessness in
shipping imperiled both my life and livelihood.”
Much of the letter, which was handwritten
on stationery from the Gritti Palace-Hotel in Venice, Italy, also goes into the
gritty details of his injuries.
“The trouble is inside where right kidney
was ruptured and liver and spleen injured,” he wrote. “We’ll get them checked
out at this clinic where they have the best man at that stuff in Europe.
“I am weak from so much internal bleeding,”
he added. “Have been a good boy and tried to rest.”
Hemingway’s wife did not come out of the
plane crashes unscathed. According to an article by the United Press, she had
two cracked ribs and was limping. Hemingway also focused on her mental state:
“Mary had a big shock and her memory not too hot yet and it will take quite a
time to sort things out,” he wrote to Rice.
Still, a sense of normalcy is infused in
the letter. As Hemingway wrote on the final page, “Everything is fine here.”
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