SYMHC Classics: Leicester Hemingway

This 2020 episode about Leicester Hemingway reveals a life very much lived in the shadow of his famous brother. But after Ernest Hemingway’s death, Leicester made some bold and surprising moves. 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since the Guano Islands Act came up on
the show recently, we thought we would loop back to
our past episode on Lester Hemingway, which has a connection
to it. It also reminded Tracy a little bit of
our recent episode on Emily Sargent in that we know
so much about her brother and have so little detail
on her. It's kind of the scoop with Lester and Earnest. Yeah.

(00:23):
So this originally came out February twenty fourth, twenty twenty
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frye and I'm Tracy view Wilson. Tracy. Everybody's heard

(00:47):
the name Ernest Hemingway. I think most people have at
least heard of him. Yeah, they may not have read
his work, or maybe they did. And his life is
pretty well known and well documented because he was so
famous even in his own time. But his brother is
another story. But Lester, and that is spelled the same
way that the city in England is spelled, but it

(01:07):
is pronounced Lester similarly, much younger than his famous sibling,
has quite a story of his own and it is,
as you'll see, a life very much lived in relation
to his brother. In some ways, his identity growing up
was I'm Hemingway's little brother. We're going to talk about
the biography that he wrote about Ernest, and really anything

(01:27):
about himself is through the lens of how his brother
influenced him or how it related to his brother. It
really was not until after Ernest Hemingway's death that Lester
made his boldest moves in life. And we're going to
talk about all that as a heads up. As you
may or may not know, if you know any details
about Hemingway's life and the Hemingway family, there are going

(01:49):
to be several instances of suicide that we talk about
in today's show, not in great detail, but they do
come up as elements that happen along the way. So
when Lester was born on April first, nineteen fifteen, his
brother Ernest, who would become just wildly famous, was already
sixteen years old. The family was living in the Oak
Park suburb of Chicago at the time. The oldest of

(02:12):
the Hemingway siblings was their sister Marceline, who was born
a year before Ernest in eighteen ninety eight. They also
had two more sisters, Ursula born in nineteen oh two
and Madeleine, who was called Sonny, born in nineteen oh four.
Another daughter, Carol, came along in nineteen eleven, so Lester
was the baby of the family, also unplanned. His father

(02:34):
was Clarence Edmunds Hemingway and his mother was Grace Ernestine Hall.
The Hemingways were supporters of the arts and of missionary efforts,
and Clarence founded a local chapter of the Agasy Society,
which was focused on collecting and studying natural objects. They
were also very interested in science in the natural world.
Clarence was a doctor and he worked for several insurance

(02:55):
companies as their medical examiner while also leading the obstetrics
department at Oak Park Hospital. There's a moment in the
biography Lester wrote that he was also working for a
dairy as like their physical exam guy for their employees.
And Grace had been on the cusp of what could
have potentially been a pretty successful career as a singer

(03:16):
when she decided to give that up and instead mary
Clarence and start a family, and that is something that,
according to Lester, naged at her for the rest of
her life as she wondered what could have been. According
to Lester's biography of his brother, which we'll talk about
later in the episode, Ernest was very much a father
figure to his much younger sibling. Ernest did everything from

(03:38):
changing stapers to teaching him how to shoot and fish
and fight. He also gave his little brother one of
a lot of nicknames that he would use throughout their relationship.
That was the Baron. Grace was also assisted by a
number of nurses and servants. She was not particularly interested
in the more domestic aspects of family life. They were
able to afford help, sometimes hiring students on summer breaks

(04:00):
to assist to them. Yeah, Grace was not so interested
in cooking and housework. And I mean, if you can
afford help to do that and you don't like to
do it, go you. In his very young years, Lester
saw his older brother start his career as a writer,
taking his first job as a police reporter at the
Kansas City Star through a family connection, and then Ernest

(04:24):
moved quickly on to joining the American Red Cross Field
Service to join the war effort during World War One.
Ernest had actually wanted to go straight into the war
from school, but their father forbade it. It is very
clear through all of this, and really the entire biography
that he wrote, that Lester idolized his big brother. Ernest
was injured by a mortar shell while distributing cigarettes and

(04:47):
chocolate to the men on the front lines in Italy
during the war. He managed to carry an injured soldier
on his back to the aid station before he passed out,
and that was a feat that was made even more
impressive because he was hit by two bullets from a
machine gun along the way. His legs had also taken
most of the blast from the mortar. For years, this

(05:07):
incident grew in its telling in public circles, and it
was something that Ernest seemed to even encourage in not
correcting any of them. But Lester, in writing about it,
set the record straight that his brother had not taken
hundreds of bullets to the groin or had any kind
of mental or emotional breakdown as a result of this incident.
Ernest later referenced and kind of fueled this rumor that

(05:28):
his genitalia had been irreversibly injured in the writing of
his character Jake in his novel The Sun also rises,
so he definitely kind of enjoyed the oversized versions of
this story that went around. Ernest was seriously injured and
he required several months to recover, but he did return home.
He was hailed as a war hero, and Lester would
later write of it, quote, it was pretty glorious stuff

(05:50):
being kid brother to the guy who had personally helped
make the world safe for democracy. When Ernest and his
first wife, Hadley Richardson traveled to Europe, Less wrote him
what he described as fan mail that struck me as
so interesting that he calls it that, but clearly very
adoring of his brother. In the fall of nineteen twenty six,

(06:13):
Lester's grandfather on the Hemingway side passed away, and it
was the first of many events that culminated in a
depression for their father, Clarence. Soon after, Ernest wrote to
tell the family that he and his wife were separated
amicably and they were getting a divorce. This was something
Clarence was very upset by. He told Lester, who was
just a little over eleven years old at the time, quote,

(06:34):
you know, of course that your brother has brought great
shame on the family by divorcing Hadley don't you. Ernest's
rapid second marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer, who became pregnant soon
after the wedding, was another blow. Even though the Hemingways
loved Pauline and were happy to welcome a new grandchild,
Ernest sort of insulted his father, who, as we said earlier,

(06:55):
was an obstetrician, by asking kind of pointed questions about
the quality of the hospital where he was working as
he and Pauline try to decide where they were going
to have the baby. Yeah, it's interesting. There is a
letter in this biography that Lester publishes. He doesn't publish
any of his brother's letters, which we'll talk about in
a moment, but the letter that Clarence wrote back to

(07:17):
him is very polite and he kind of is like, oh, yeah,
the hospital's here might not do for you. Maybe you'd
be better off having the baby elsewhere. And it sounds
very polite and not upset. But Lester is very clear
that his father was really injured and heartbroken that the
quality of the care that he was part of was

(07:38):
questioned in this way. Additionally, there was some ongoing strife
between Ernest and Clarence, even though his eldest son was
making a name for himself as a writer and was
lauded as one of the great literary voices of the time.
By this point, Clarence and Grace just didn't understand Ernest's work,
and they often did not like it when they read it. That,
coupled with their ongoing dismay earnest life choices, had really

(08:02):
put a strain on the father son relationship. Then, as
nineteen twenty eight played out, Clarence had to run of
bad luck. He had invested in property in Florida, planning
it as a retirement destination, but then the bottom dropped
out of the real estate market in Florida. The property
was significantly devalued, the heavyways owed a lot more on
it than it was worth, and Clarence was not going

(08:24):
to be able to set up a retirement practice there.
Several months later, Clarence was diagnosed with diabetes. This was
something he had suspected for a while, but he had
put off getting tested. It's one of those the cobblers
children have no shoe situation. He is one of those
doctors that did not want to go to the doctor.
These events all accumulated, and Lester described in his writing,

(08:45):
Clarence having a quote serious loss of morale, and it
was something he also called an emotional illness. On the
morning of December sixth, nineteen twenty eight, Clarence burned a
few of his personal items and papers, and then he
retired to an upstairs bedroom and he shot himself in
the midst of the household's grief and turmoil. Ernest had
traveled in to manage the funeral arrangements and some other business.

(09:09):
He told Lester, who at this point was thirteen, that
a he should not cry. That the Hemingways did not cry.
It was just kind of a horrible emotional burden to
give a kid, and b that he wanted Lester to
get the gun that their father had used to end
his life from the police and have it shipped to him.
Ernest Hemingway wanted that weapon. So you might think that

(09:30):
something like that would sour the younger brother's admiration for
his older sibling, but this was not the case at all.
A few years later, as the movie adaptation of The
Sun Also Rises was coming out, Lester visited his big
brother in Piggott, Arkansas, where Pauline's family lived. It went
and saw the movie and reported back about it to
Ernest and then went hunting with him. And this whole

(09:52):
trip in Lester's account, reads as though Ernest was keenly
aware that his brother needed somebody to step into the
shoes of their like father, and the two of them
talked about their family. Ernest made sure that Lester had
enough money. Yeah, it's interesting. Ernest did not want to
go see the movie, but he didn't want to hear
if it was okay, So that's why he sent his brother.

(10:14):
And this relationship, to be clear, was also something that
benefited Ernest. He really liked having someone in his life
that looked up to him. Lester later wrote, quote, Ernest
was never very content with life unless he had a
spiritual kid brother nearby. He needed someone he could show
off to as well as teach. He needed uncritical admiration.

(10:35):
If the kid brother could show a little worshipful awe,
that was a distinct aid in the relationship. I made
a good kid brother when I was around, but I
couldn't be around regularly. We'll talk more about the relationship
between the Hemingway brothers as Lester grew into adulthood after
we take a quick sponsor break. As the years went on,

(11:04):
Lester and Ernest remained close, although other friends filled that
kid brother roll for the writer when Lester was busy
with school. The younger brother joined his brother on the
sea in Key West when the novelist took delivery of
his famous fishing boat Pillar in nineteen thirty four, and
during their trips out on the water, they continued their
long talks. This was something that they would do for

(11:25):
years and years. It was a bored pillar that they
discussed the fact that Lester also wanted to be a
professional writer, just like his older brother, and the shared
knowledge that anything the younger Hemingway wrote would be compared
to Ernest's work. Everything you do, Ernest told his brother,
they'll say you're writing on my reputation. You know that,
don't you. Ultimately, Ernest was supportive of Lester's desire to

(11:48):
write and told him he could give him some advice,
but he did not want to help him in any
way beyond that. Over the years, he offered up some
tips like, if you can't make up stories, you shouldn't
try to write a real one remembered as always sort
of flat compared to a made up one. Yeah, perfectly
happy to do all that advice, but he didn't want

(12:08):
anybody to be able to say that Lester hadn't earned
his place as a writer. He also advised that Lester
should do what he had done, which was start out
in newspapers. He felt like that was a really good
way to develop your own voice and also to basically
get in the habit of having to write all the time,
whether you felt like it or not. And that was
precisely what the younger Hemingway brother did. In nineteen thirty five,

(12:30):
Lester started working for the Chicago Daily News, writing regional
news and fielding questions from his coworkers about his famous brother.
In nineteen fifty three, almost twenty years after the two
brothers had started talking about Lester becoming a writer, he
published his first novel, The Sound of the Trumpet, and
that was based on his experiences in Europe during the
Second World War. It was compared in the press to

(12:54):
Ernest's work and often was deemed derivative and heavily inflat
winced by Ernest Hemingway. Lester wrote several other books that
also existed but went unpublished. We didn't mention that he
went to Europe during the Second World War. And there's
a reason, which is that Lester's life is not documented
in any way as well as his brothers. It kind

(13:16):
of comes up in these these things. Oh yes, of
course I went to Europe. It was in my book.
But he's so busy always capturing his brother's life that
he never really seemed to record a lot about his own. Lester,
for example, married twice. I couldn't tell you the dates
because I could not find them, despite looking around very

(13:37):
energetically about it. His first wife was Patricia Shed. The
couple had two sons together, Peter and Jacob, who went
by Jake, although that marriage did not last. He next
married Doris May Dunning, a marriage which produced two daughters,
ann in Hillary, and he was married to Doris for
the rest of his life. So documenting Ernest Hemingway's life
was something that Lester said was his brother's idea. Ernest

(13:59):
wanted quote somebody who really knew me to write a
book about me, and Lester took up that challenge, writing
about his brother's quote absolute integrity, both emotional and esthetic.
But the famous Hemingway did not want a biography to
be published about him while he was still alive. So Lester,
who worked on the project for some time, just held

(14:19):
onto that manuscript. On July second, nineteen sixty one, Ernest
Hemingway was found dead in the foyer of the home
in Idaho that he shared with his fourth wife Mary.
The obituary, which ran in the New York Times, printed
Mary's statement, quote, mister Hemingway accidentally killed himself while cleaning
a gun this morning at seven thirty am. No time
has been set for the funeral services, which will be private.

(14:42):
But the obituary also noted that Ernest had been treated
at the Mayo Clinic in recent months, and quoted a
friend of the authors from the police force as saying
that friends had relayed that in the time leading up
to his death, Hemingway quote looked thinner and acted depressed.
The coroner also gave a quot quote in this obituary
story that stated quote, I can only say at this

(15:04):
stage that the wound was self inflicted. The wound was
in the head. I couldn't say it was accidental, and
I couldn't say it was suicide. There wasn't anybody there.
Lester's book was published eight months after Ernest's death, titled
Simply My brother, Ernest Hemingway, and it was dedicated to
his wife Doris. The opening of the book offers so
much insight into the reverence for Ernest that his brother had.

(15:28):
It reads quote. The conversations recorded in this biography are
as accurate as I could make them. I did not
have a tape recorder, and I do not possess total recall,
but my own notes, ship's log and memory enabled me
to reproduce many conversations. In writing dialogue, Ernest polished, edited,
and was the supreme master of this art. In presenting

(15:49):
Ernest's conversations, I have been mindful of the obligations of
a brother, a friend, and a biographer. Ernest did not
favor the publication of his letters, so they have not
been reproduced here. He regarded all biographies as unlucky during
the subject's lifetime, Yet at the end of the last
letter I had from him, he wished me luck with
this book. Lester acknowledged the version of his brother's death

(16:13):
that Ernest's wife Mary had shared with the press, that
it may have been an accident rather than an intentional
effort to end his own life. But Lester also attributes
full intention to his brother's actions. He wrote really candidly
about his brother's depression, his sadness at having lost several friends,
and during that time at the Mayo Clinic, he was
undergoing electroshock treatments. He also notes in the text that

(16:36):
Ernest was, unlike any author before him, mourned globally as
though he had been a statesman rather than a writer.
Lester's biography of his brother was well received, and it
is still read today by Hemingway enthusiasts. And it is
definitely an adoring picture of the man. And it is
filled with a lot of stories about them hunting and
fishing together, a lot of details regarding all of that,

(16:59):
not the best for people who might be squeamish about
the details of such activities. Okay, so we're going to
go ahead and stop for a sponsor break, because after
his brother's iconic life had ended, Lester made some really
bold decisions of his own. We will get to that
right after a sponsor break. Okay, this is gonna sound

(17:26):
like we edited two different episodes together because it's a
little bit of a track jump. But we have to
pause for a moment here in the story of Lester
Hemingway's life. We did not edit two episodes together accidentally
to discuss bird poop. Before synthetic fertilizers were commercially produced
in any kind of cost effective way, the name of

(17:47):
the game in soil fertilization was guano. All kinds of
natural fertilizers had been used since the beginning of time. Manure, compost,
and river silt have all been used to enrich soil
to produce crops for centuries. We talked about some of
this in our episode on the discovery of phosphorus, yeah
and guano. In this case, seabird excrements rather than bats,

(18:12):
was used in the Andes and the Previing Coast, as
well as other areas to enrich the soil. It became
really coveted by a lot of countries in the nineteenth century,
and this was a significant part of several conflicts. The
First and Second Wars of the Pacific, which started in
eighteen sixty four and eighteen seventy nine, respectively, were fought
over occupation and exploitation of South American territories that were

(18:35):
rich in a lot of resources, one of them being guano.
But before either of those conflicts, in eighteen fifty six,
the US Congress passed the Guano Islands Act. Seabirds, particularly
in places where their colonies have been allowed to flourish
without humans getting in the way, produce a lot of
very rich fertilizer. The US and the eighteen fifties did

(18:57):
not have a whole lot of islands with productive sea
ee bird populations to fill this need, so this federal
law was intended to generate territory that would give them
access to this natural resource. The acts opening reads as follows. Quote,
Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit
of guano on any island, rock, or key not within

(19:17):
the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied
by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable
possession thereof and occupies the same such island, rock, or key, may,
at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining
to the United States. According to this Act, the discoverer
of such a spot is required to notify the Department

(19:38):
of State of the possession and provide proof that all
of the conditions of the law are met. If the
person who discovers the guano resource were to die before
all this paperwork and proof is taken care of. His
widow or heirs can follow through and they will get
credit for the discovery, as well as rights to live
there on this declared land and to harvest and sell

(19:59):
the guano there. The claimed land and guano shipment is
also to be protected by the US. And I am
using present tense language here because this federal law still stands.
We're going to get back to this bird poop, but
for a moment, we're going to go back to Lester Hemingway.
The publication of my brother Ernest Hemingway made a bit
of money for Lester, and he had some plans for

(20:21):
how to use it. He had gotten twenty five thousand
dollars from Playboy magazine to publish the story as a serial,
and the biography was really successful, eventually being translated into
eleven languages. Everyone, it seemed, wanted the inside story of
the Hemingway family and its most famous member. On July fourth,
nineteen sixty four, Lester Hemingway took all of the proceeds

(20:43):
from the book and made his own history by creating
his own country. He floated a raft made of bamboo.
It was also fortified. We'll talk about that in a
minute to a spot eight miles that's twelve point eight
kilometers to the southwest of Jamaica, making that international waters.
The raft, which was eight by thirty feet or two

(21:03):
point four by nine point one meters, was then anchored
with a Ford engine block. It was fortified with pipes
and steel, and Lester Hemingway declared that this raft was
an island. He further claimed that half of this island
was the brand new country of New Atlantis, but the
other half, he said, was claimed for the United States
under the Guano Islands Act, which at that point was

(21:25):
more than one hundred years old. The Guano Islands Act
made it possible for Lester to gain the protection of
the US government over his new country, simply because his
man made island was so small that there would be
no way to really coordinate off as two separate entities
in any sort of practical sense. So he wrote a
constitution for New Atlantis sort of. He actually just used

(21:48):
the exact wording of the US Constitution, but he subbed
in the name New Atlantis everywhere the original document had
said United States. Seven months after claiming this new territory,
which was a public Lester held elections the resident. Voters
of New Atlantis were Lester, his wife Doris, their two daughters,
pr specialist Edward K. Moss, and Julia Celini, who was

(22:11):
Moss's assistant. Lester was elected president in a unanimous vote,
and then all of this, the Declaration of New Atlantis,
the elections, Lester's constitution, all of that was covered in
the press. Lester gave quotes to reporters that his new
country was peaceful and had no intention of threatening its neighbors,
that he did not know of any laws forbidding starting

(22:31):
your own country. Yeah, I feel like we should also
note that two of the constituents who voted in that
presidential election, his daughters, were the little kids at the time,
so voting rights were converted at a very young age.
There was also currency for New Atlantis, which was, in
case you're wondering, named after the Francis Bacon idea. New

(22:53):
Atlantis commerce was done in scruples, which appeared to be
just items scavenged from the sea, such as fish hooks
and sharp teeth, et cetera. The joke there is that
Lester Hemingway thought that if you were rich, you should
have a lot of scruples. You could not gamble though
on New Atlantis that was for boten against the law.

(23:13):
Lester's wife, Doris, stitched the country's flag, which featured a
gold equilateral triangle pointing down on a royal blue background.
It also had a circle of royal blue in the
center of the triangle. There were actually several of these flags,
because some had blown away in the wind and whatnot.
There is one remaining to this day. And then there
were the stamps. New Atlantis designed print and sold stamps

(23:35):
at five different values. President Lyndon B. Johnson was featured
on the one hundred cent stamp, which resulted in a
thank you note from the White House. And all of
this sounds a little bit silly. It is easy to
imagine that an eccentric with a bit of privilege and
some money was just mucking around with this idea of
starting a country, or that it was some sort of

(23:55):
publicity stunt for his writing. And he did admit that
he was motived by fun and the desire to see
if he could make money off of starting a new government,
But there was also a scientific goal for the fledgling
Republic of New Atlantis. Lester Hemingway wanted the island to
become home to the International Marine Research Society. They could

(24:16):
do science work there and for sales of stamps to
finance that endeavor, and he also wanted his country and
any money that they made out of stamp sales to
be used to protect nearby fishing resources. In the autumn
of nineteen sixty five, Lester worked with the librarian at
the University of Texas Humanities Research Center in Austin to
create an exhibit about his new country, including what may

(24:38):
be the only copy of the constitution, as well as
a number of other artifacts. This collection remains at the
University of Texas at Austin Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Yeah,
some of those pieces they have photographs of online. But
New Atlantis you may have noticed, you don't have to
memorize it in a list of countries, and that is
because it was a short lived price. Its demise was

(25:01):
not that the Universal Postal Union refused to acknowledge its stamps,
although that was a very real problem, But the culprit
here was nature itself. New Atlantis, which Lester had been
hoping to expand and further fortify, was destroyed in a
storm in nineteen sixty six before he could make improvements
on it. After the demise of his little country, Lester

(25:22):
continued to write. He started working as a freelance journalist,
writing about fishing and the outdoors activities he had learned
about from his brother. He wrote for various periodicals and
also started his own newsletter, the Bimini out Island News,
which he described as the smallest newspaper in the world. Yeah.
In one quote, he said something like, you would need
two copies to wrap a piece of fish, so very little.

(25:46):
As he aged, Lester also let his beard grow out,
and to a lot of people, he started to look
like the spitting image of his deceased brother. During this time.
In his mid sixties, Lester had a heart attack and
then was diagnosed with DIYBEA, which led to a number
of surgeries, including having artificial arteries put into his legs.
His health continued to decline, and his doctors, noting his

(26:08):
poor circulation, suggested that he have both of his legs amputated.
This was more than he was willing to consider, and
like his father and his brother before him, Lester Hemingway's
medical issues brought on depression, and at the age of
sixty seven, in September of nineteen eighty two, Lester Hemingway
ended his life via a self inflicted gunshot wound to
the head. I had not heard about Lester until fairly recently,

(26:31):
and I was immediately fascinated. Yeah, because it is a
story of someone who seems very I don't know if
contented is the right word, but comfortable living in the
shadow of a much more famous sibling, and even to
the point that they're willing to pursue the same career
knowing it will count against them in some ways. But

(26:53):
then once Ernest is gone, Lester does some really fascinating
things of his own. He's an interesting dude, and I
think a lot of people don't know about him. I
think people that are really into the Hemingways and their
family history and Earnest probably have an inkling of him.
But Lester gets a little bit lost in the historical record.

(27:16):
So that's what I wanted to talk about him, because
I love the story of an eccentric and I love
the idea of starting one's own country, even if it
does not go tremendously well, it is such a fun idea. Though.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday, since

(27:38):
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(27:59):
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