Hemingway, Ernest

In Our Time. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931

12mo. Publisher's black cloth, gold printed labels to spine and upper panel; small abrasion to spine label, abrasion to upper panel label removing “AY” and a portion of “W” from the author’s name. Blue pictorial dust-jacket printed in black and gold; spine very mildly darkened, extremities nicked, residue from sticker removal the size of a dime to the upper panel, else a very handsome copy. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.

Hanneman A3b (second printing)

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A presentation copy, inscribed by Hemingway to his later wife Martha Gellhorn, the woman who courted Hemingway away from his second wife Pauline. On the front endpaper, in ink: "For Martha Gellhorn with admiration and affection (for her works) from her friend Ernest Hemingway."  Hemingway left a conspicuous white space between the words “her friend.” He wrote a second inscription, years later, in pencil, beneath: "PS—1939 I love you Bongie." “Bongie” was one of several nicknames he used with and for Gellhorn. With her name and address blind-stamped above the inscription.

In 1939 Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls, far and away the most successful of his books till then; he dedicated it to Martha, whom he married on November 21, 1940—scarcely three weeks after his divorce from Pauline was final.

The relationship between Hemingway and his third wife matured during his third war—both were correspondents sympathetic to the Spanish loyalists during the Spanish Civil War—and ended during his fourth, with their divorce and his remarriage to Mary Welsh during World War II. Martha, a beautiful sophisticate like Pauline, was unquestionably the most intelligent of Hemingway’s wives, the most ambitious and the most successful. Though she had published two books before meeting Hemingway, after that he tutored her and his influence on her writing did not go unnoticed. This caused Martha less concern than her financial success caused Hemingway, who was bitterly conscious of the fact that her war correspondence was based on far less brutal first-hand experience than was his. Unfortunately, neither Hemingway nor Martha thrived on competition and the marriage ended badly. Hemingway wrote in December of 1944: “…we want some straight work, not to be alone and not have to go to war to see one’s wife and then have wife want to be in different war theatre in order that stories do not compete. Going to get me somebody who wants to stick around with me and let me be the writer of the family…” (qtd. by Meyers, p. 412). The tone of this letter and of others from this time period reflects how deeply Hemingway was hurt by the experience, and suggests that the pain was much more acute than the guilt he had felt about dissolving his two previous marriages.

The decision to reprint Hemingway’s first book came after demand for his early work dramatically increased due to the popularity of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. No less a celebrated critic than Edmund Wilson offered to write the introduction to this edition of In Our Time, calling it “a key to Hemingway’s later and more ambitious books.” The famous introduction confirmed Hemingway’s importance to American literature, ratifying the belief that the best American writing was occurring overseas in a struggling community of expatriates. Wilson, whose own reputation was augmented by this introduction, offers this noted observation of Hemingway’s thematics: “suffering and making suffer, and their relation to the sensual enjoyment of life, are the subject of them all – though the evenness, the prose perfection, of the surface in these books seems sometimes to have concealed from their readers the conflicts which it covers but which it has been stretched so taut precisely to convey.”