"HAPPINESS IS A MOVEABLE FEAST, I KNOW": EXTRAORDINARY HEMINGWAY LOVE LETTER TO JIGEE VIERTEL, 1949

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. Typed Letter Signed as "Papa" with autograph closing and two autograph postscripts, each initialed "E.H." Nice: December 28, 1949. One page, measuring 8-1/4 by 10-1/2 inches, matted and framed with portrait. Entire piece measures 23 by 17 inches.

Superb Hemingway love letter, typed with autograph additions, signed as "Papa" and twice signed as "E. H." to Virginia "Jigee" Viertel.

In December 1949 Ernest and Mary Hemingway vacationed in the South of France with A. E. Hotchner of Cosmopolitan, writer Peter Viertel and Viertel's wife Virginia ("Jigee"). When the group reached Nice on December 27, the Viertels decided to return to Paris by train. Hotchner accompanied them, taking with him the final chapters of Across the River and into the Trees, which Jigee and Peter had helped edit, for publication in Cosmopolitan. Hotchner accidentally left the manuscript on the train, causing Hemingway great consternation, although it was eventually recovered.

Written the day after the Viertel's departure, Hemingway's letter (all autograph portions in bold type) reads: "Dear Jige: The day is no good and the fog is over all the roads so we stayed here and I did my business and duties. Now they're done. Maybe the north wind that is blowing will clear the fog it made when it met that south wind that gave us the happy light in Provence the second day. Anyway I'm glad you're not flying. When you went away I missed you so badly that better not talk, nor think, nor write it. I could write it but I was not going to go to the station and make it worse. Figured you understood. I hope you had a good trip and I hope you are happy. Happiness is a moveable feast, I know, but you are with good peoples and in a good town. This is no good letter except that it is from me to you and tells you no one could be happier than we were, given what we were give, and that I love you very much. Papa

Love to Peter. Love to ___(?)

P.S. I feel like people feel after big amputations. E.H.

Will write good long funny letter when have something funny to write about. E.H."

In Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, Peter Mellow records Mary Welsh Hemingway's reaction to Hemingway's various infidelities: "There were others, like Virginia 'Jigee' Viertel, wife of screenwriter Peter Viertel, who had accompanied Mary and Hemingway on their fall 1949 voyage to Paris on the Ile de France. At the Ritz, Mary complained to her diary, 'It is now one hour and a half since I left Jigee Viertel's room, #94, and Ernest said, 'I'll come in a minute.'" In a later memoir of his friendship with Hemingway, Peter Viertel writes that he had "questioned Jigee about her relationship with Papa… she admitted that Papa had suggested she marry him… I felt that I had been betrayed by both Hemingway and my wife." Commenting on Hemingway's infatuation with another woman, Viertel writes that Hemingway "had behaved the same way with Jigee, had made her the heroine of his daydreams, but had never made an overt physical advance."

Fine condition.