Hemingway’s love letters uncovered in Massachusetts

MARBLEHEAD, Mass. — Betsy Fermano had no idea she was sitting on treasure.

It wasn’t gold or silver or diamonds, it was letters. Old letters. Kind-of love letters. They were written to her grandmother, just about 100 years ago. And even now she isn’t sure why anyone would care.

“My grandmother wasn’t famous,” she says.

But grandmother Frances Elizabeth Coates, starting in high school, was pursued by someone who was and is famous — Ernest Hemingway.

Fermano shrugs and says, “I guess some people think he’s the greatest writer of the 20th century.”

The Nobel Prize-winning author of “The Old Man and the Sea,” “The Sun Also Rises,” and “A Farewell to Arms” seems to have fallen like a bull after the estocada (a sword thrust to the heart) when he encountered Coates at their Oak Park, Illinois, school.

It was a relationship so serious, Fermano concedes, that Hemingway’s sister later blamed Coates for driving her 19-year-old brother to join the Italian ambulance corps during World War I, where he was seriously wounded.

Coates married someone else, John Grace, another classmate. Yet she kept in touch with Hemingway and saved the letters he sent her. She also kept the pictures, including his framed yearbook photo, and the clippings she collected over the years, chronicling his fabulous success.

Some of the letters that Coates sent to Hemingway, filled with hometown gossip, are now at the John F. Kennedy Library, as part of the library’s collection of Hemingway papers.

Yes, he kept her letters. Nor is it a leap to speculate that their truncated relationship may have had a profound impact on his writing and his view of the world. Indeed, Coates’ name is found in some of his fiction.

Fermano began to get an idea of how important her grandmother’s letters were the day Robert K. Elder, a Hemingway scholar, arrived on her Marblehead doorstep. Elder is a co-author of “Hidden Hemingway,” a book on the author’s early years. He took Fermano to the Kennedy Library, where for the first time she learned that her grandmother’s letters are stored there.

How Elder found Fermano is a story in itself. He had heard of Hemingway’s apparent interest in a girl named Annette, says Fermano. But in the process of researching Annette, he stumbled across someone who told him he would do better to study the only girl the young Hemingway really wanted, Frances Coates.

Elder located Coates’ granddaughter, Betsy Fermano, in Marblehead, where she’d lived since 1987.

“Thank God for the internet,” Fermano laughs. On May 4 Elder published a summary of the Marblehead papers in The Paris Review.

For Fermano, that’s when the realization came that all sorts of people would likely pay a lot to have these letters. She’s been advised that they have value not only because Hemingway wrote them, but because of why he wrote them and to whom he wrote them.

“If there’s a story behind it,” she’s learned, “it adds to the value.”

Reading some of the letters aloud, Fermano notes how well-written they are, funny and sometimes wistful. Perhaps hoping to inspire a little jealousy in Coates, Hemingway describes three Italian daughters living nearby as ranging in beauty from “bellissima” to “she’s good to her parents.” Playfully, he mentions a “beloved” or is it “ex-beloved” or “near beloved.”

Growing up in Oklahoma City, Fermano attended Connecticut College. She moved to Boston after graduation, and married in 2000, at age 50, after meeting husband Paul, an architect complete with a Hyde Park accent.

Her mother was Frances Coates’ only child. Fermano knew her grandmother well into adulthood. She often visited her and her grandfather in Illinois. “I was her only grandchild,” she says. On rare occasions she even heard her grandmother speak of that long-ago suitor, Ernest Hemingway.

“She had his photo on her wall,” she recalls. “And I always wondered who that strange guy was.”

Mostly, however, she remembers her grandmother’s high spirits and her successes in the Chicago area as an actress and opera singer.

“She was quite good and sought-after.”

When Coates died in 1989, Fermano inherited her Hemingway letters, which she’s kept since in a trunk protected within a plastic sandwich bag.

Coates had been approached in the 1960s by Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker. Despite a preference for privacy, she sent a reply to Baker’s queries, stressing Hemingway’s seldom appreciated sensitivity. He made little use of it.

“But aren’t you the one to whom he was going to give his Italian officer’s cloak until his mother indignantly intervened?” Baker asked in a letter.

In response, Coates made a private notation on the letter, reading, “His mother would not only have given me the swash-buckling, full circle, Italian officer’s cape — but the boy inside it, who wore it so dramatically. She was always so nice to me.”

Both Hemingway’s mother and his sister were eager to unite him with Coates. There were dates to the theater and canoe trips. Just how close the couple grew no one can know. “I think she really cared for him,” Fermano says, but it was a relationship that led nowhere.

Judging by what she’s read and heard, says Fermano, her grandmother’s childhood home was a cheery, attractive place, with dancing and singing. There are also references to happy times at the Hemingway house, but she detects a darker atmosphere there. Hemingway’s father, a doctor, is referenced positively. In 1928, however, he committed suicide.

After running through four wives and an unknown number of liaisons, poor health caught up to Hemingway and he shot himself in 1961. Over time, a number of close relatives did the same, including his granddaughter, the actress and model Margaux Hemingway, in 1996.

Coates may have had an inkling of the troubles that haunted the Hemingways. In any case, she expressed no regrets over letting her adventurous suitor go, writing on an envelope, “Ernie’s pictures. And 25 years later ooh! Am I glad I married John!”

Burke writes for the Salem, Massachusetts News.

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