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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Bizarrely sexual Hemingway letter for sale

 So Hemingway was in love with femme fatale Marlene Dietrich ... and had sexual fantasies about her.

Even more interestingly, he wrote them down.  And the letter describing them is up for auction.

For at least $US54,000 in an upcoming auction, you could be the proud owner of a love letter from American author Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich.

Hemingway’s letter, dated Aug. 28, 1955, begins “Dearest Kraut” and goes on to picture a bawdy theatre act that includes her “foaming at the mouth,” while they “break into the Abortion Scene from ‘Lakmé’..."

“It would probably have something novel like having you shot onto the stage, drunk, from a self-propelled minnenwerfer [sic] which would advance in from the street rolling over the customers,” Hemingway imagined. “As you landed on the stage drunk and naked, I would advance from the rear, or your rear, wearing evening clothes and would hurriedly strip . . . to cover you revealing the physique of Burt Lancaster.”

Then turning more serious, Hemingway writes, “Marlene, darling, I write stories but I have no grace for [bleeping] them up for other mediums,” and, “I love you very much and I never wanted to get mixed in any business with you . . . neither of us has enough whore blood for that.”

“The duo reportedly met aboard a ship in 1934 and shared 30 flirty letters over the years, which were made public in 2007, and most are at the JFK ­Library in Boston,” according to The New York Post.

“But the passionate relationship was never consummated because, Hemingway had said before his 1961 suicide, that the starry duo had ‘unsynchronized passion.’”

Whatever that means.

If you feel inclined to read the letter in its entirety, hit the link embedded at the top.

2 comments:

David Malcolm shein said...

I've had a number of unsynchronized passions. It simply means that they had the kind of relationship where each felt passion for the other but at different moments in his and her respective lives. Elvis Costello has a great song called "Just About Glad" that refers to this type of thing. They both have an abiding passion and friendship for each other over many years but neither is free to act on it at the same time as the other.

World of the Written Word said...

You mean they don't feel hot at the same time? I imagine there are a lot of marriages with that problem! But it still seems to me that Hemingway was a very odd man. An amazingly good writer, but still very odd.