A letter written by Ernest Hemingway recounting his harrowing injuries after surviving two successive plane crashes in two days has sold at auction for $237,055 (£187,751).
In the four-page letter to his lawyer Alfred Rice, the novelist also wrote of his experience shooting his first lion in Kenya using a gun that had to be held together with sticky tape.
On 23 January, 1954, Hemingway and his wife, Mary, were coming to the end of a safari when they embarked on a plane trip to photograph the Murchison Falls in Uganda. However, the Cessna crashed when the pilot attempted an emergency landing to avoid hitting a flock of ibises. They spent the night in the jungle, and news outlets reported that Hemingway was dead. The next day, they were picked up by a boat of tourists and boarded a second flight, which caught fire during takeoff, crashed and exploded. The pair sustained serious injuries, from which Hemingway never fully recovered.
In the letter – written 17 April, 1954 (misdated as 1953) – Hemingway explains that: “The trouble is inside where right kidney was ruptured and liver and spleen injured.” He added that he: “Couldn’t write letters much on acc’t of right arm which was burned to the bone 3rd degree and it would cramp up on me (still does a little but all burns OK). But fingers burned and left hand 3rd degree too, so couldn’t type.”
He also wrote that he was “weak from so much internal bleeding” and that he has “been a good boy and tried to rest”. Of his wife’s condition, he reported: “Mary had a big shock and her memory not too hot yet.” Yet, the writer insists: “Everything fine here.”
Composed on stationery from a hotel in Venice, the letter also features complaints about the shipping failures of Abercrombie & Fitch, the American fashion retailer that then sold shotguns. The company had sent Hemingway’s order to the incorrect Nairobi address, meaning he had to shoot his “first lion” with a borrowed gun which was “so old it would come apart in [his] hands and had to be held together with tape and Scotch tape”. The company’s “carelessness in shipping imperiled both my life and livelihood”, added the novelist.
The letter went under the hammer at Nate D Sanders Auctions on Thursday and attracted 12 bids. It was the centrepiece of a collection of nine letters; another letter containing Hemingway’s views on his novel To Have and Have Not went for $6,875.
