Hemingway friend donates memorabilia to D.C. library

WASHINGTON -- Unpublished material by Ernest Hemingway -- stories, articles, photos, letters, home movies, recordings and a longer version of his last bullfight book -- are going to the Library of Congress, the gift of his friend A.E. Hotchner.

A major item is a typewritten copy of "The Dangerous Summer," published as a 228-page book in 1985, nearly a quarter-century after Hemingway's suicide. It's the story of an afternoon contest between two of Spain's best-known matadors: Luis Miguel Dominguin and his brother-in-law, Antonio Ordonez.William Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize novelist himself, praised it in Hemingwayesque language: "(It) became a book, truly, and is here with us now, and is good," he wrote in a review for The New York Times.

Hotchner worked intensively with Hemingway to shorten the text, which once covered 688 typed pages.

It's the first large collection of Hemingway material to go to the library.

There are seven unpublished letters to Hotchner, a friend during the author's last 14 years who has written two books about Hemingway and adapted some of his major work for television. There are six unpublished articles and stories and several poems, including one "To Mary" -- his fourth and last wife -- recited by Hemingway.

Generally, Hemingway hated to record his image or voice. But there are 15 spools of magnetized wire recordings -- technology of half-century ago. Hemingway talks of Spain during the 1936-39 Civil War, when his Madrid hotel came under shellfire from the forces of Gen. Francisco Franco, and he rolled up his manuscripts in a mattress to protect them.

The home movies include three reels of silent 16mm color film, showing Hemingway in the 1950s fishing for marlin from his boat, Pilar, playing with his dog and cats, talking with Mary in front of their Cuban home, the Finca Vigia, and later at a snow-covered house, apparently the one in Ketchum, Idaho, where he killed himself in 1961.

Hotchner is also giving 300 photos, one which shows himself in a matador's glistening "suit of lights," which Hemingway got him to don in an actual bullfight. They also illustrate their visit together to other Spanish sites, including some described in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," Hemingway's novel of the Civil War.

The gift commemorates the author's 100th birthday this year and the library's 200th in 2000.

"This personal collection provides an intimate insight into the life and mind of one of the 20th century's great literary figures," said James Billington, the librarian of Congress.

John Hemingway, the author's eldest son, is also making a gift to the library -- the "first copy" of this father's first book, "Three Stories and Ten Poems," published in Paris in 1923 and inscribed to his first wife, Hadley.