Jun 17, 2021 - Sale 2573

Sale 2573 - Lot 140

Price Realized: $ 1,690
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
SELDES'S CLAIM OF BEING ATTACKED: "IT ALL SOUNDS LIKE BALL ROOM BANANAS TO ME" HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. Autograph Letter Signed, "Ernest," to writer and critic Gilbert Seldes ("Dear Gilbert"), denying having made any direct references to him in a New Yorker article by [Dorothy] Parker. 1 page, 4 3/4x9 inches, "Palace Hotel Sanatorium" stationery; irregular lower edge touching one word of text (without loss), few short tears with minor loss along right edge, folds, paper clip stain at upper left; matted with a portrait and framed. Montana [Switzerland], 30 December [1929]
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"What would you want from me more convincing than your published denials, Gilbert? What's it all about? You send me the denial but not the accusations. I've never made any. I read D. Parker's piece in N. Yorker and saw no reference or cracks at you. I don't carry the piece with me but it mentioned the editor of some now defunct magazine of culture. Why should that be you? Aren't all the magazines of culture now defunct? It all sounds like ball room bananas to me."
Published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (Ernest Hemingway Foundation, Inc.,1959), 318.
In late 1929, Hemingway--along with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker and others--visited the tubercular child of Gerald and Sara Murphy at a sanatorium in Montana-Vermala, Switzerland. During his visit, Hemingway wrote to Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial magazine (which had recently closed down permanently), responding to charges concerning Parker's article, "The Artist's Reward," profiling Hemingway in the November 30 issue of the New Yorker. In the article, Parker writes of an unnamed "gentleman who once occupied the editorial chair of a now defunct magazine of culture . . . [who] was shown some of Hemingway's work . . . refused it, and pronounced, 'I hear he has been a reporter--tell him to go on reporting and not try to write'."