Hooked on Hemingway: A Collector’s Coup

Thump. Thump. Thump.

That’s what David R. Meeker says his heart did when he unearthed a long-lost cache of letters and materials belonging to his hero, Ernest Hemingway.

“I can’t tell you how excited I was. No one knew of their existence prior to this,” explains the Sacramento administrative law judge and foremost private collector of Hemingway memorabilia. “They had been virtually in a closet for 55 years.”

The most valuable of the 91 items is a complete typescript of Hemingway’s 1935 autobiographical novel, “Green Hills of Africa,” whose only other typescript copy is partly displayed at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and partly at the University of Delaware. But the trove also unearthed dozens of letters from Hemingway and his friends detailing his insecurities, his hangovers, his love life and even his researching methods--which are sure to provide scholars with a flood of new information about the author, whose colorful character is still as much a source of fascination as his Nobel Prize-winning writings.

‘Rounds Out His Personality’

“The vulnerability and sensitivity that he shows in the letters is really enlightening and rounds out his personality,” Meeker says. “It certainly detracts from the super-macho image, which sometimes people seem to focus on.”

After a year and a half of negotiating, Meeker finally succeeded in purchasing the Hemingway memorabilia for “a little less than six figures” from the son and daughter of Phyllis Armstrong Gardner of Chapel Hill, N.C., who as a 15-year-old had worked as a typist for Hemingway in the late 1930s and whose mother had been a close friend of the author.

Though the sale was completed on April 4, it did not come to light until this week, in part because of Meeker’s continuing desire to keep his wheeling and dealing a secret.

But, in a telephone interview about his 23 years of Hemingway collecting, the judge maintains that it’s “the finest material that’s ever been on the market. And I don’t know of any other typescripts for any other Hemingway books in private hands.”

Meeker’s Hemingway collection now numbers nearly 2,000 pieces and is worth an estimated $400,000 because of the dramatic rise in Hemingway memorabilia that’s taken place this decade. But Meeker brushes aside any suggestion he’s done it for the investment potential. “For me, it’s not a function of money really. It’s a function of enthusiasm and interest.”

And Meeker’s enthusiasm for Hemingway first blossomed, appropriately enough, in the jungles of West Africa.

A graduate of Van Nuys High School (where he was a classmate of Stacy Keach, who coincidentally portrayed Hemingway in a syndicated TV miniseries last year) and the University of the Redlands, Meeker in those days had read “The Sun Also Rises” almost by accident. “It didn’t make a big impression on me,” he says.

Then in 1967, after two years at UCLA Law School, Meeker enrolled in the Peace Corps and took off for Monrovia, Liberia. Included in the armful of paperbacks given to each volunteer was “Papa Hemingway” by A. E. Hotchner.

From the time he read that book, Meeker was hooked on Hemingway.

At Meeker’s request, a Lebanese bookstore owner in Monrovia sent away to England for paperback copies of Hemingway’s short stories and novels, and Meeker was able to read all the writer’s collected works. “I’d always been into reading good fiction and I had an interest in writing,” Meeker recalls. “But I guess what did it for me about Hemingway was the intensity of his dedication to writing well.”

Soon, Meeker felt “a fire” to try to write himself. After returning to the United States, Meeker wanted to set off for Europe, pen in hand. But his then wife was pregnant and the couple spent the next 22 months living in Thousand Oaks and saving up so they could move to that most Hemingwayesque country, Spain.

Settled in Barcelona

Although Hemingway had written extensively about the bulls of Pamplona, and the matadors of Ronda, Meeker chose to settle in Barcelona only “because it was cheap,” he explains.

But he wasn’t making any money, his child fell ill and by 1971, Meeker made the hardest decision of his life: He gave up his dream of writing to finish his law degree at the Western State College of Law in San Diego. “It seemed the appropriate thing to do.”

After a stint practicing criminal law in San Diego and working for the legislature in Sacramento, Meeker has worked as an administrative law judge for the state of California for the past seven years. His job mostly involves hearing cases on unemployment insurance, disability payments and tax matters--”dry stuff,” he allows.

But Hemingway became an antidote to the grayness of the law. And, after a friend bought him a first-edition copy of Hemingway’s 1967 “Death in the Afternoon” (“Without a dust jacket,” the collector sniffs), Meeker began hanging around rare book stores and getting to know more and more about Hemingway and his first editions--”and I was off,” he says.

Today, Meeker owns first editions of virtually all of Hemingway’s works, from his novels and magazine pieces down to even the forewords and prefaces he wrote for other books. The collection has taken Meeker all over the country and to Europe in constant search for new material.

“Hemingway is probably the most collected writer in the United States, and most book dealers are able to sell it as soon as they get it and for more money than anything else they have,” Meeker notes. And unlike those museums and private individuals with unlimited funds, Meeker has done the bulk of his collecting on a state employee’s salary.

“It’s somewhat easier now but in the beginning I had to impoverish myself in every way,” he explains. “There were times when I’d buy a book and it would take some real juggling to make sure that everything else worked out.”

Slowly, he built up a reputation as a serious collector until the point where now he receives 150 catalogues a year from rare book dealers advertising Hemingway memorabilia. And so it was that 2 1/2 years ago, the owner of a used bookshop in Florida (he won’t identify which one) notified him of a “very interesting” Hemingway treasure trove from papers collected by Phyllis Armstrong Gardner and her mother and stepfather--Jane Armstrong, who worked in the Havana office of the U.S. Consulate General, and Richard Armstrong, who headed the International News Bureau in Havana.

A Drinking Buddy

Hemingway was staying just outside Havana when the three met around 1934. And while Richard Armstrong, himself a collector of manuscripts and first editions, became Hemingway’s favorite drinking buddy, his wife began typing Hemingway’s manuscripts. By the late 1930s, however, the typing job was handed down to daughter Phyllis.

Just as her mother had typed “Green Hills of Africa” in exchange for a typescript, so Gardner typed “For Whom the Bell Tolls”--only she asked for 20 cents a page, big money in those days. Hemingway’s expression of gratitude at the time was touching.

“Thanks for the beautiful job. There wasn’t a correction to be made,” Hemingway wrote to Jane Armstrong. “I know how difficult I am to type and that nobody but you and your well-trained offspring can do it properly.”

When Jane Armstrong died in 1960, her Hemingway memorabilia passed to her daughter, and Phyllis Gardner promptly stored it away and forgot about it. Then, while packing up to move from Florida to North Carolina, she found the cache in a closet, where it had been undisturbed for 55 years.

Gardner, 65, gave half of the materials to her son, Alan, and half to her daughter, Lynne. It was Alan who first decided to sell his share and brought it to the Florida dealer who quickly contacted Meeker. “This book dealer sent Xerox copies of two pages of typing with handwritten corrections and asked me, ‘Is this really Hemingway?’ ” Meeker recalls.

Meeker did some research and found that the Xeroxes were the start of the typescript for a Hemingway short story published in Esquire in 1936 under the title “The Horns of the Bull,” and then reissued in book form in 1938 under the title, “The Capital of the World.”

“Is there more and is it for sale?” Meeker responded almost immediately.

After months of negotiations and a flight to Florida, Meeker had purchased the typescript of the short story as well as six more items signed by Hemingway. Then, one day last June, the collector called Gardner and asked where the short story had been found.

“Oh, it was stuck between the typescript of ‘Green Hills of Africa,’ she told me. And my mouth dropped open on the phone,” Meeker says.

Typescript and Letters

It turned out that Gardner had given the “Green Hills” typescript to her daughter as well as nine letters from Hemingway, 20 letters from Martha Gellhorn, who had been Hemingway’s lover in Key West and Cuba before becoming his third wife in 1940, and cablegrams from “all sorts of people,” Meeker says, including some that Pauline Hemingway in Key West sent to her husband in Cuba about the time he was having the affair with Gellhorn.

The author’s letters and notes to Dick and Jane Armstrong are “especially warm,” Meeker notes. For instance, Hemingway acknowledges Jane Armstrong’s unique contribution to his short story, “Nobody Ever Dies,” which appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1939 and begins by mentioning an upper porch with a panoramic view of the Havana Harbor.

“Dear Jane, Thanks for the loan of your upper porch for this story,” Hemingway inscribed.

And it is also in the letters that Hemingway’s vulnerability comes out. For example, he can’t help asking the Armstrongs what they think of the “Green Hills” manuscript which Jane has just typed. When they reply favorably, Hemingway seems relieved.

“Max Perkins (his editor at Scribners) and (friend and author John) Dos Passos have read it and like it very much and I am beginning to feel better about it,” Hemingway writes. “I was so damned pleased that you both liked it, but was afraid maybe Jane liked it because she likes Africa and that Dick liked it because he likes or liked to drink.”

In another letter, Hemingway asks Richard Armstrong to provide him with some details about Cuban politics in the early 1930s contained in “contemporary newspaper eyewitness accounts that I can re-write or steal for this damned book I’m working on,” Hemingway writes.

Says Meeker: “He was going to combine the short stories ‘One Trip Across’ and ‘A Trademan’s Return’ with some other short stories, and he needed some background about Havana. Armstrong replied with 13 typed pages, and much of this material comes up in ‘To Have and Have Not’ almost unchanged.”

Hemingway penned his missives to the Armstrongs from Cooke City, Mont., Sun Valley, Ida., Key West, Fla., and even from the Ambros Mundos Hotel in Cuba where he wrote some of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which almost from the outset he knew to be a winner.

His ‘Best’ Book

“I’ve written to Page 281 on ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and I’m so excited about it,” he tells Jane Armstrong. “I’m sure it’s the best book I’ve ever written.”

But he also warns the mother that “some of the language may be too strong for your daughter. If you don’t think she should read it, well, forget the whole thing and I’ll carry it in an armored car until it’s completed.”

In another letter also about “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” dated 1939 and written from Sun Valley where he was living with Gellhorn, Hemingway hints at the frustration he felt about his deteriorating marriage to Pauline. “I’m writing the best book of my life,” he told Jane Armstrong, “and my wife is trying to sabotage the effort.”

Meeker, meanwhile, has been moonlighting as a “neophyte” rare book dealer. Of course, he specializes in Hemingway though “I still don’t part with a lot of the stuff I’ve acquired over the years.”

But the name of his company shows that he’s as hooked on Hemingway as ever.

“It’s Nick Adams & Co. for the Hemingway Assn. because, whenever he wrote a story that was autobiographical, he called himself Nick Adams.”