Volume 28, Number 6 · April 16, 1981
The Battler
By Alfred Kazin
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
edited by Carlos Baker
Scribner's, 948 pp., $27.50
Hemingway liked to write letters; his biographer Carlos Baker, selecting nearly six hundred here, thinks he wrote six or seven thousand in the fifty years preceding his death in 1961. He liked to write, scoffed at Conrad and others for grumbling. Since Hemingway's 'real writing' came so hard (he counted each day's words like a prospector weighing his find) and was above all intended to look hard, it is obvious from these more than nine hundred pages of letters that letters were play, relaxation, a chance to warm up before the day's stint and to cool down after it. With his usual devastating shrewdness about former friends and allies who had put him down in some way, he said in 1948 of Gertrude Stein:
Review, 1913 words
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