Letter from Ernest Hemingway’s widow could solve Cuban farmhouse mystery

Finca Vigía/ en.wikipedia.org

The Guardian

Alison Flood

Ernest and Mary Hemingway at their Cuban farmhouse, Finca Vigía. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

The mystery of whether Ernest Hemingway’s widow volunteered or was coerced into leaving their Cuban house to the nation has come a step closer to being solved, with the discovery of a letter in which she states that her late husband “would be pleased” that Finca Vigía be “given to the people of Cuba … as a centre for opportunities for wider education and research”.

Hemingway lived on the 19th-century Cuban farm for 21 years, between 1939 and 1961, writing his masterpieces The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls there as well as posthumously published works including A Moveable Feast and Islands in the Stream. He committed suicide in Idaho in 1961. The property became a museum in 1962, but it has been unclear whether this was following the wishes of Mary Hemingway, his fourth wife, or at the insistence of the Cuban government, with differing accounts from different parties.

The newly discovered letter, dated 25 August 1961, sees Mary Hemingway specifically donate the Finca Vigía to the Cuban people. “…Whereas – my husband, Ernest Hemingway, was for twenty-five years a friend of the Pueblo of Cuba … he never took part in the politics of Cuba … he never sold any possessions of his, except his words, having given away cars, guns, books and his Nobel prize medal to the Virgen del Cobre,” she wrote to her husband’s friend Roberto Herrera.

“I believe that he would be pleased that his property … in Cuba be given to the people of Cuba … as a center for opportunities for wider education and research, to be maintained in his memory. With this document, as the only heir of Ernest’s estate, I hereby give to the people of Cuba this property, in the hope that they will learn and profit from, and enjoy it, as much as Ernest and I did.”

The letter from Mary Hemingway to to her husband Ernest’s friend Roberto Herrera. Photograph: Alexander Historial Auctions©

Sold this week via Alexander Historical Auctions, the letter was found among the papers of Herrera. “Ernest Hemingway had committed suicide in Ketchum less than two months earlier. However, at some point shortly thereafter, Mary backtracked and stated that after Hemingway’s suicide, the Cuban government contacted her in Idaho and announced that it intended to expropriate the house, along with all real property in Cuba. These documents show that Mary did indeed intend to donate the home to the Cuban people,” said the auction house in its catalogue. The handwritten note was snapped up on Wednesday for $1,100 (£716), a price well below the estimate of $2,000-$3,000.

Valerie Hemingway – who was Ernest’s secretary before marrying his youngest son, whom she met at the author’s funeral – went to Finca Vigía with Mary shortly after Hemingway’s death to sort through his papers. She said via email that “what is being auctioned is a draft of a memo Mary intended to give to [Fidel] Castro that Roberto Herrera was going to translate. As far as I can remember Mary never actually sent the memo; she gave the draft to Roberto afterwards.”

Her own memoir, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, sees Valerie write that Mary “genuinely wanted to see her husband’s memory endure by creating a shrine of the home he loved and dedicating it to the Cuban people, among whom he had lived for more than a third of his life … Mary’s first idea was that the finca would become a learning centre, and to that end she wanted to leave there as complete a record of her husband’s life and most especially of his work as was prudent.”

But Naomi Wood, author of the novel Mrs Hemingway, said that Mary Hemingway’s own memoir suggests the situation was not quite as straightforward. “The question is whether the Hemingway house was ‘donated’ by Mary, or coerced from her, or extracted from her via diplomacy. In all likelihood it was a mixture of all three,” she said.

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Ernest and Mary relax on their fishing boat, Filar. Photograph: Popperfoto/CPL

“In her memoir, How It Was, she uses the words ‘acquisition’ and ‘appropriation’, which suggests the takeover of Hemingway’s property was done with some unwillingness on her part, rather than a donation as the auctioned letter suggests. Though the auctioned letter suggests a donation, her memoir suggests bullying, though Castro does it in the most gentlemanly fashion, even asking her: ‘Why don’t you stay here with us in Cuba?’”

Mary Hemingway recounts a telephone conversation from the time in How it Was, in which she says to a Cuban official that “I’m not sure if I wish to give you our finca. [They could appropriate it, of course, as they had done to so much US property there.] Perhaps your government would give me permission to go down to remove our personal papers. Would you find out and call me back tomorrow? This same hour? Muy bien.”

She was advised, she writes, “to take the chance of recovering Ernest’s manuscripts, if nothing more. By this time United States citizens were prohibited journeys to Cuba, but the US immigration authorities in Miami gave me the exit and re-entry permits.”

The author’s widow would bring back crates of papers on a shrimp boat travelling from Havana to Tampa. “Mary also recounts her negotiations with Castro to remove a few paintings back to the US: including a Paul Klee and Juan Gris,” said Wood. “She also manages to remove Hemingway’s wax-sealed manuscripts they’d found at the Banco Nacional. Mary’s cargo left on a shrimp boat back to Tampa, which was the last to have any clearance papers from the US. More importantly for scholars than the nature of the deal for the Finca Vigía donation or appropriation was the fact that she managed to get those manuscripts out.”

Dr Susan Beegel, editor emerita of The Hemingway Review, said the discovery of the letter – first covered in Fine Books & Collections – was “new and interesting”.

“It’s nice to see her thoughts on how she intended the people of Cuba to enjoy the museum – still thriving today,” said Beegal. “It’s well-known that Mary deeded the Finca Vigía to the people of Cuba. After the Castro revolution, the house could have been appropriated, as was the case with other US property in Cuba, but instead the Cuban government approached Mary to request the house as a gift, to be used as a monument to Hemingway. She negotiated with them (and the Kennedy administration as well, because US citizens were not allowed to visit Cuba) to be able to return and remove personal belongings, art, and Hemingway’s manuscripts from the house in exchange for the donation.”

Fidel Castro's friend Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez Dies at 87

NBC News.com

www.periodismosinfronteras.org

Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, known the world over for his world of magical realism in books like "One Hundred Years of Solitude," died in his home in Mexico City at age 87.

Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, his books blended the everyday with fantasy elements such as a boy born with a pig's tail and a man trailed by a swarm of yellow butterflies.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" was "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure," biographer Gerald Martin told The Associated Press.

When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described Latin America as a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune."

British author Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at 94

Danica Kirka/

Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning, free-thinking, world-traveling and often-polarizing author of "The Golden Notebook" and dozens of other novels that reflected her own improbable journey across the former British empire, died Sunday. She was 94. 

Her publisher, HarperCollins, said the author of more than 55 works of fiction, opera, nonfiction and poetry, died peacefully early Sunday. Her family requested privacy, and the exact cause of death was not immediately clear.

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Nobel literature prize goes to Canadian writer Alice Munro

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PETER MUHLY / AFP - Getty Images

A photo taken on June 25, 2009 in Dublin, Ireland 

shows Canadian author Alice Munro who

 has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Literature Prize.

Alice Munro, a Canadian master of the short story revered as a thorough but forgiving chronicler of the human spirit, won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. 

Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award from the Swedish Academy since Saul Bellow, who left for the U.S. as a boy and won in 1976. 

Seen as a contemporary Chekhov for her warmth, insight and compassion, she has captured a wide range of lives and personalities without passing judgment on her characters. Unusually for Nobel winners, Munro's work consists almost entirely of short stories. "Lives of Girls and Women" is her only novel. 

"I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win," the 82-year-old said by telephone when contacted by The Canadian Press in Victoria, British Columbia. 

Munro is beloved among her peers, from Lorrie Moore and George Saunders to Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen. She is equally admired by critics. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor. 

Atwood — a fellow Canadian who also figured prominently in the Nobel buzz — tweeted, "Hooray! Alice Munro wins 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature." 

Munro's publisher, Penguin Random House, welcomed the award with "jubilation and great pride," and sent "joyous good wishes to our beloved author and to our family of her publishers and editors." Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper congratulated Munro on Twitter "on behalf of all Canadians." 

The award is likely to be the capstone to Munro's career. She told Canada's National Post in June that she was "probably not going to write anymore." 

In announcing the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called her a "master of the contemporary short story." The academy's permanent secretary, Peter Englund, said he had not managed to get hold of her but left a message on her answering machine. 

"She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection," Englund told The Associated Press 

Munro is the 13th female literature laureate in the 112-year history of the Nobel Prizes. 

Her published work often turns on the difference between Munro's youth in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s. 

In an interview with AP in 2003, she described the '60s as "wonderful." 

It was "because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around," she said. 

Munro, the daughter of a fox farmer and a teacher, was born Alice Anne Laidlaw. She was a literary person in a nonliterary town, concealing her ambition like a forbidden passion. 

"It was glory I was after ... walking the streets like an exile or a spy," recalls the narrator of Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women," a novel published in 1971. 

She received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism, and was still an undergraduate when she sold a story to CBC radio in Canada. 

She dropped out of college to marry a fellow student, James Munro, had three children and became a full-time housewife. By her early 30s, she was so frightened and depressed she could barely write a full sentence. 

Her good fortune was to open a bookstore with her husband, in 1963. Stimulated by everything from the conversation of adults to simply filling out invoices, her narrative talents resurfaced but her marriage collapsed. Her first collection, "Dance of the Happy Shades," came out in 1968 and won the Governor's prize. 

She later married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. 

Her stories are usually set in Ontario, her home province. Among her best known is "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the story of a woman who begins losing her memory and agrees with her husband that she should be placed in a nursing home. 

The narrative begins in a relatively tender, traditional mood. But we soon learn that the husband has been unfaithful in the past and didn't always regret it — "What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being." The wife, meanwhile, has fallen for a man at the nursing home. 

Some have called her "the greatest author in North America and, yes, I tend to agree with that," said the academy's Englund. "We're not saying just that she can say a lot in just 20 pages — more than an average novel writer can — but also that she can cover ground. She can have a single short story that covers decades and it works." 

Last year's Nobel literature award went to Mo Yan of China. 

The 2013 Nobel announcements continue Friday with the Nobel Peace Prize, followed by the economics prize on Monday. The awards will be handed to the winners on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Come to papa: Ernest Hemingway's papers return from Cuba

latimes.com

Ernest Hemingway at Finca Vigia in Cuba with, from left, an unidentified woman, his wife Mary Hemingway, and guests Juan "Sinsky" Dunabeitia and Gianfranco Ivancich. (Associated Press)

By Jenny Hendrix

Records from the estate in Cuba where Ernest Hemingway wrote many of his most famous books have been digitized and brought to the United States, the Associated Press reports. The materials will be held at Boston's John F. Kennedy Library, which holds a Hemingway collection of over 100,000 pages.

The Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation -- named after the estate near Havana where Hemingway lived from 1939 to 1960 -- has been working in Cuba to preserve the papers, books, and belongings that have remained at the house since the Nobel Prize-winner died in 1961. 

The foundation was started by Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Hemingway's editor Maxwell Perkins. In 2001, she noticed that the Hemingway home had fallen into disrepair and that many of the author's papers were being stored in a damp basement. After long negotiations navigating the complex relationship between Cuba and the U.S., permission was obtained for the U.S. Treasury and State departments to send conservators to Cuba to help save the artifacts. The foundation also seeks to restore and maintain Hemingway's Cuba home and grounds.

Because of travel restrictions to Cuba, this will be the first time most U.S. citizens will have the opportunity to see and examine these Hemingway papers. Among the 2,000 records that have been digitized are passports showing Hemingway's travel itineraries, letters, shopping lists, bar bills (undoubtedly large), notes from Hemingway to his wife, Mary, and handwritten notebooks full of weather observations, including hurricane sightings.

"This is the flotsam and jetsam of a writer's life," Phillips said. "All these bits and pieces get assembled in a big puzzle." 

Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway scholar at Penn State who reviewed the documents, said that they would undoubtedly help future biographers. "While there is no one single bombshell document," she said, "these new details add texture and nuance to our understanding of the man."

Included in the records is a letter written by the critic Malcolm Cowley, praising Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea": " 'The Old Man and the Sea' is pretty marvelous,' " Cowley writes, "the sea is, too, and so is the fish."

A telegram from poet and writer Archibald MacLeish contains more praise, this time for Hemingway's novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls": "The word great had stopped meaning anything in this language until your book. You have given it all its meaning back. I'm proud to have shared any part of your sky."

There is also a carbon copy of a confidential note Hemingway wrote to actress Ingrid Bergman, telling her he wanted her to have the female lead in the 1943 film version of "For Whom the Bell Tolls," opposite Gary Cooper: "There is no one I would rather see do it and I have consistently refused all suggestions that I endorse other people for the role," he wrote. Bergman did win the role of Maria.

The documents also reveal more about Hemingway's role in World War II: While in Cuba in 1942 and '43 he was authorized by the U.S. Embassy to patrol the island's north coast in his fishing boat, searching for German submarines.

Restoration is ongoing at the Finca Vigia estate. Among other projects, a climate-controlled building is being constructed at the site to house Hemingway's books and the original records. 

Although tensions still exists between the US and Cuba, Phillips sees the Hemingway project as a unique feat of cooperation forged through literature. "Because of the political situation between the two countries, the Cubans held on very fast to what they had there," Phillips said. "I think this is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind collaboration."

Mo Yan, Nobel Prize Winner, and Chinese Politics

El escritor chino Mo Yan logra el Premio Nobel de Literatura

• El escritor chino Mo Yan logra el Premio Nobel de Literatura

lo que me inquieta es si el nobel se debe a su seudonimo de "No Hables", a sus valores literarios [no he pasado de su version filmica de 'el sorgo rojo'] o es una simple deferencia a la china de los mandarines del siglo xxi por la irritacion causada por el nobel de la paz en el 2010 a Liu Xiaobo  al que aun matienen en prision. 

Lev Grossman 

It’s traditional for English betting houses like Ladbrokes and Oddschecker to offer odds on the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s also traditional for those odds to be completely unrelated to the actual outcome. You don’t meet a lot of people whose ship came in with Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio in 2008.

This year the Swedish Academy broke with that tradition by awarding the prize to the Chinese writer Mo Yan, who was considered by the betting houses and everyone else to be a frontrunner, behind only the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and the Hungarian Péter Nádas. Mo is prolific and popular, arguably China’s most prominent contemporary novelist. His work has been filmed—the movie Red Sorghum was based on one of his novels—and even sells a few copies in America. And we’re notorious for our xenophobic reading habits.

Yes, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, described Mo’s reaction: “he said he was overjoyed and scared.” The Nobel citation praised Mo as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” The prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.4 million.

If anything Mo is almost too well known. He’s the second Chinese author to win the prize for literature, after Gao Xingjian in 2000, but he’s the first who retained his Chinese citizenship—Gao was born in China but went into exile the 1980s, and had taken French citizenship by the time he won. Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, was (and is) in prison. The Chinese response to Mo’s selection appears to be a mixture of huge national pride with a certain strain of bitterness among writers and critics who don’t consider Mo radical enough in his opposition to the Chinese state.

“Mo Yan” is in fact a pen name—in Chinese it means “don’t speak.” The irony, for a novelist, is intentional: Mo chose his pseudonym, he has said, to remind himself to moderate his natural outspokenness. Mo was born Guan Moye in Shandong province in 1955. His family were farmers, but during the Cultural Revolution he went to work in a factory and then joined the Army.

Mo has published 11 novels so far, as well as dozens of short stories and novellas. His work is set largely in the past, in rural areas, and many of his books are described as family histories, though they also have a strong affinity with magical realism—he once remarked: “García Márquez wrote my novel.” His 2006 novel Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, for example, is the story of a landowner who, following his execution under Mao Zedong, is reincarnated as a donkey. Mo also acknowledges a debt to Faulkner:

After reading Faulkner, I felt as if I had awakened from a dream. So one could write nonsense like this, so the trifles in the countryside could be used as fiction topics! His Yoknapatawpha County showed me that a writer could not only fabricate his characters and his stories, but could make up a geographical locale as well.

Stylistically Mo is a maximalist: his novels are distinguished by their playfulness and their stylistic flamboyance, as well as occasional scenes of graphic violence—The Red Sorghum Family, on which the movie is based, includes a scene in which a human being is flayed alive. He occasionally includes himself as a character in his fictions. Mo is frequently classified as a satirist: The Republic of Wine tells the story of an official sent to the countryside to investigate rumors of cannibalism. His novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips, which appeared in China in 1996 and the West in 2005, was an epic, sprawling indictment of the male dominance of Chinese society. Frog, his most recent novel, addresses the Chinese policy of one family, one child.

Mo’s work unquestionably contains powerful elements of social criticism, but he has been engaged in a career-long game of brinksmanship with the Chinese government, and while he has had his share of run-ins with the censors, he still lives in Beijing and writes and publishes within the constraints of Chinese state censorship. Critics often point out that Mo participated in a commemorative volume in which a hundred writers and artists hand-copied paragraphs from one of Mao’s speeches. A blog at the South China Morning Post adds further detail to the controversy. “He withdrew from the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair to protest the attendance of dissidents Dai Qing and Bei Ling. He’s a vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers’ Association. When asked for his thoughts on the 11-year sentence given to Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, Mo said he wasn’t familiar with the situation and wished not to discuss it.”

It’s debatable whether this kind of political criticism is even germane to a discussion of Mo’s literary merits. But the discussion certainly throws into high relief the precarious position of literary figures in contemporary China. Mo may have revealed something of his own feelings about the matter in an address at that same Frankfurt Book Fair: “A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression. Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”

Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/11/chinese-novelist-mo-yan-receives-nobel-prize-but-is-he-politically-correct/#ixzz295lrEqsr