After spending a few weeks in the archives at the JFK Library, I came across several unpublished letters written by Hemingway in 1949 and 1950 that caught my attention.
I knew that the writer had a temper and did not shy from voicing his disagreements. I did not realise, however, the extent to which he went to voice these opinions - sometimes putting his reputation in jeopardy.
The most striking one is perhaps a letter addressed to Joseph McCarthy, written in May 1950, in which he accuses the senator of being a coward who never truly fought for his country. Another letter, addressed to the editors of Life Magazine in November 1950, shows Hemingway asking for the personal addresses of several men accused of torturing and killing a black bear cub in New Mexico.1 Hemingway eventually obtains their addresses and proceeds to write to the accused men separately. The letters, in short, threaten these men: Hemingway asserts that he will come for them and punish them for their disgusting behaviour. There is an undeniable self-righteousness about these letters, bordering on recklessness. They show, however, Hemingway’s belief that hunting should be exempt from torture.
While the intention behind these letters is admirable - not many American artists voiced their disagreement with McCarthy directly to him - I could not help but wonder how they were received. There is no trace of complaints; nor is there any form of retaliation from the recipients or from Hemingway’s behalf. It is as if, once the letters were written and sent, Hemingway moved on. The simple act of writing and sending them was enough.
The public aspect of these letters is also surprising. Hemingway did not use an alias or a fake name when writing these letters. On the contrary, he used his name as a form of guarantee - a guarantee that he was serious about the matter; a guarantee that he was brave enough to sign with his own name, and that he was not afraid of a fight. Perhaps there is no complaint from the recipients because they knew Hemingway was more bark than action; perhaps his public figure also kept them in check.
With this whole act, Hemingway embodies contemporary online trolling. His open dislike for someone was not followed by anything else, just like most haters online. The impulse is the same: he felt that his opinion was important enough to write and send, just as it is nowadays for haters to write their negative opinions and share them publicly. More importantly, he used these letters to prove that he was not afraid of confrontation, when in reality there was a very slim chance that there would be any consequences, just as there is with online confrontations.
No doubt that if Hemingway had known the Twitter era, there would have been some juicy posts and replies - it is perhaps for the best that he did not.
Notes
1 All of these unpublished letters were reviewed during archival research at the JFK Library in May 2024 and can be found in Hemingway’s outgoing correspondence in box OC07.
Laëtitia Nebot-Deneuville is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the School of English of Dublin City University. With a background in English and Italian translation, her research now explores Anglo-American literary tourism in northern Italy in the twentieth century, especially through the fiction of E.M. Forster, Frederick Rolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and Edith Wharton. Nebot-Deneuville has been awarded several research grants from the Irish Association of American Studies, the European Association of American Studies, the Edith Wharton Society, and DCU’s School of English, and her research is supported by the Irish Research Council.