One True Podcast
One True Podcast explores all things related to Hemingway, his work, and his world. The show is hosted by Mark Cirino and produced by Michael Von Cannon. Join us in conversation with scholars, artists, political leaders, and other luminaries. For more, follow us on Twitter @1truepod. You can also email us at 1truepod@gmail.com.
One True Podcast
A Tribute to Patrick Hemingway with Sandra Spanier
At One True Podcast we were sad to hear of the death of Patrick Hemingway, the middle son of Ernest, who died on September 2, 2025. Patrick Hemingway (1928-2025) lived a life that was truly Hemingwayesque: traveling like his father, living much of his life in Africa, hunting and fishing, and determined to maintain the legacy of his father’s literary work.
We invited Sandra Spanier, General Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, to share her memories of Patrick, including his contributions to the Letters Project, her visits with him, and a poignant interview with Patrick that was conducted just a few months ago. Our episode closes with a soundbite from that June 2025 interview.
We hope you enjoy this immediate reaction to the sad news of Patrick’s passing.
Welcome to One True Podcast, everybody. I'm Mark Ciorino. And I'm Michael Von Cannon. At One True Podcast, we discuss Hemingway's life, work, and world. And it's great of all of you to join us. We're here for a special episode to pay tribute to the passing of Hemingway's second son, Patrick Hemingway, who passed away on September 2nd, 2025 at the age of 97. Patrick is somebody, Michael, we always would have loved to have on the show He was in ill health in the last few years, so we weren't able to make that happen. Michael, I have to say, I never met him, never ran into him at a conference, and never had occasion to speak with him. Did you ever meet him?
SPEAKER_00:No, I never met him at a conference either. Never saw him. But I will say, you know, working on the final letters, volumes, I mean, you get to know, of course, anyone Hemingway's writing about or writing to. I kind of want to make that blanket statement. At the same time, Patrick Hemingway was someone who, helped us immensely through Valerie Hemingway. We had a lot of questions about letters to Patrick. He's a key correspondent, of course, in the 1957 to 61 letters. And we had a lot of questions about what is going on at any given moment in a letter from Hemingway to you. And she took down questions that we had, added her own questions. And when she would go over and visit him, she'd sit down for hours sometimes and go over some of those questions. He was invaluable to the work that we were doing and really gracious offering his time and insights, you know, going back those decades thinking about, oh, what is that reference to?
SPEAKER_03:What a living repository of information and a unique perspective. We're going to invite Sandy Spanier on in just a few minutes, who obviously dealt with him for years about the Hemingway Letters Project. And I know that she believes the Hemingway Letters Project would not have been possible without Patrick's go-ahead and his continued assistance.
SPEAKER_00:Kind of the popularity of the writer and his work ongoing. I mean, Patrick Hemingway is at the center of that conversation, certainly. So we are excited to see what she has to say.
SPEAKER_03:Although we've never done a show with Patrick Hemingway, he was never able to come on for an episode. I think we need to have an episode about the book of letters called Dear Papa, which is edited by Brendan Hemingway and Stephen Adams, the book of correspondence between Patrick and Ernest and also One True Podcast has done a pitiful job in talking about True at First Light which is the fictional memoir that Patrick Hemingway worked so hard to bring to publication in 1999 well
SPEAKER_00:we've only been doing this for six years so but I you know I think the point is there are so many different ways you can go with Hemingway and I think every year we're like oh my goodness this is an amazing Well, with
SPEAKER_03:Patrick's passing, it did remind me that True at First Light is a fascinating book to talk about. And Michael, I'll just say, for me, maybe the lasting impression I have of Patrick is his voice in the Ken Burns-Linovic documentary, where he was one of the talking heads. His voice was really welcome and fascinating and And it was always enjoyable whenever he popped on to share his memories.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's one of the lasting impressions. And for me, it's the many letters from father to son and how oftentimes just warm those letters are in the final volumes. So, I mean, just from that perspective of someone working on the volumes, I'm excited about the research we're doing. And when they come out down the road, excited when those letters are going to be shared.
SPEAKER_03:So he remains... prominent presence in those later years.
SPEAKER_00:As a correspondent and as someone Hemingway likes to talk to other people about, you can tell that Hemingway's proud to be talking about Patrick and he's proud of what Patrick is doing.
SPEAKER_03:On the occasion of Patrick Hemingway's passing, we offer this tribute episode. And now we welcome Sandra Spanier, who has had great personal dealings with Patrick. Sandra Spanier, welcome back to One True Podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. It's nice to be here.
SPEAKER_03:Sandy, it's so nice to have you on, and we really appreciate you joining us to share some thoughts about Patrick Hemingway. First, you worked with him, I believe, extensively. He was involved in the Hemingway Letters Project. Is that where you first met him, or had you known him?
SPEAKER_01:That is why I know him, and those were the occasions on which we got together over the years. I actually first saw Patrick in 1999. at the Hemingway Conference in Oak Park, Illinois, where all three brothers were present, but I didn't have a personal conversation with him. I saw him across a crowded room, but it was really a thrill to see Patrick and Jack and Gregory all together, and Milton Wolfe, the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, were all there in Oak Park in 1999. It was Patrick who conceived of the Hemingway Letters Project. He wanted his father's complete collection letters to be published in a scholarly edition, footnotes, all the apparatus. He wanted his father's legacy to be treated the same way as other major writers, historical figures. So he really conceived of this. This was a project that involved the cooperation of the Hemingway family and the Hemingway Foundation and society, because for convoluted reasons, The copyrights to Hemingway's letters are actually divided so that the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Society, which was established by Mary Hemingway, owns the U.S. copyrights to the letters. And the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust, which is the Hemingway estate, the family estate, owns the international rights to the letters. So for this project to get off the ground, it required both of these entities to want it to happen and to cooperate. on a publication agreement. And in 2002, I was selected by the Foundation Society to become the general editor of this project. And at that time, it was an idea. The letters are not all in one place. They're scattered over 250 different places, institutional repositories, libraries, and lots of private collections. Auction catalogs sometimes are the only record we have of a letter. So just gathering the letters was a huge undertaking, figuring out how to organize a project like this, finding a publisher. All of this took years to accomplish and to the point where we know we're never going to find every Hemingway letter, but we had what we thought was as big a master archive as we're going to get at that time. And we were fortunate to have a publication contract with Cambridge University Press, which is doing a wonderful job. And they have a century old history of doing scholarly editions. So Patrick was very pleased by the fact that Cambridge took this on. This was in 2002. In 2004, I traveled to Bozeman, Montana to meet Patrick and Carol Hemingway. And they very graciously picked me up from my motel and took me to their country club for dinner and back to their home where they had some very impressive African animal heads on the walls that I could not personally identify. But it was a very Hemingway-esque setting and lovely people, just lovely, very gracious and pledging Patrick his support to make this successful. And he encouraged family members, friends, acquaintances, kind of put out the word that he wanted people to cooperate with this project.
SPEAKER_03:Was Patrick hands-on or did he take a step back and just let you do what you had to do?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, he was very much available. to help in terms of answering questions about the letters. He was not in any way involved in administrative aspects.
SPEAKER_03:He did provide introductions, right, to the letters?
SPEAKER_01:When Cambridge University Press took this on, the first volume was published in 2011, and they wanted to make a very big splash with this. It's kind of a scholarly edition that has a far broader audience than most, so it's actually being produced as trade books. They're priced the way a book would be priced in a bookstore in the market, not the way a lot of academic books are priced at, unfortunately, more than$100 a volume, for example. This is excessively priced. They even had a book party to launch this at the Explorers Club in New York and invited Patrick and Carol, Sean Hemingway, the nephew, and his wife Colette were there. People came over from Cambridge, England. It was quite an event, quite Quite a launch. Very exciting. And so that was another time I saw him early on. And he also, Cambridge made a video with him and they wanted me to come out to Bozeman also with them and the film crew. So it had quite an interesting beginning in terms of his involvement. I counted up on, I think, 17 different occasions he and I met, take a recorder and a big fat stack of letters that were marked with sticky notes and big lists of questions and took advantage of the opportunity to ask Patrick, who is the only person in the world who could have answered many of these questions about what certain things meant in the letters and were generally what his father was like as a letter writer, memories he had. I'm very, very, feel very, very fortunate that I was able to have a conversation with him this summer in June. And it was a very special conversation, although the more so now that I know it's the last one we will have. But he was so game to answer every question. He had his hearty laugh. I would read certain passages of letters and he would find them very amusing and then tell me more about them. For example, in volume seven, which we're researching right now, there's a long cross-country trip that Ernest and Pauline take with Patrick and Jack from Florida out to the El Bart ranch in Wyoming. And there's this remark that we've got white mice trouble. And it's like, what does that mean? We've got white mice trouble. And it turns out that Patrick had pet white mice and they made the trip from Florida to Wyoming and they were running all over the car. And that's, you know, that's the kind of thing you would never know if you couldn't talk to the person who was there. I also mentioned to him about, I've heard that the six-toed cat at the Key West home are sort of more apocryphal than real. And he said, oh yes, we had no cats. They would have made very short work of the mice.
SPEAKER_03:Is that why they called him Mouse?
SPEAKER_01:Actually, no. I'm sure that the nickname came before the pet
SPEAKER_03:mouse. Predated that. Sandy, do you think given the responsibility of his father's legacy that Patrick was wary about entrusting you to all these letters to you and beginning all this project because we know how famously Hemingway said, I want all my letters destroyed. I don't want them published after my death. Did Patrick wear that burden heavily or was he completely confident in his judgment?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Well, I've asked him about that and because Hemingway made it very clear he didn't want them to be published and his view was he must have known they were going to be published if they He said his mother, Pauline, had made very explicit instructions that her letters be destroyed upon her death. And I think he was, it told it was some regret. He was only 23 years old at the time, but he complied with her wishes and had them destroyed. His father said it, but he kept everything. So I think he felt after a certain amount of time had passed that maybe the interests of history maybe outweighed that belief. since his father did keep everything. In terms of the edition itself, at first, this was very, very strictly going to be a print-only edition. And it was after the fifth volume, he was so pleased with how it was going, with the scholarship and with the rigor that was going into it, that at that point he decided that they should also be published electronically. So that was a really huge milestone after the fifth volume. So the fifth volume was published simultaneously in print and electronic form, and then retroactively. Previous volumes had been, and then from here on out, every other one will be. So I was very honored to have his confidence, which he freely expressed.
SPEAKER_03:When you were talking earlier about meeting up with Patrick, you said you were having a very Hemingway-esque experience. Well, reading over his obituary and considering the life that he led, it seems like all the place that he went are Hemingway places and a lot of the activities that he did were Hemingway activities. Do you see that sort of paralleling his father?
SPEAKER_01:He said he shared a lot of interests with his father and especially I'd asked him back in June what were some of his fondest and happiest memories of his father and he said the times that we were hunting and fishing together and he said wherever they were that happened whether it was in Wyoming or Bimini or Key West, they would do these outdoor things together. And that was a really shared bond. And then he talked about why he went to Africa as an adult. Patrick spent much of his adult life in Africa, and he credits that to Green Hills of Africa, which was published when he was only seven years old, but also to living in a house with these mounted African animal trophies on the walls. And So I think he really did follow in his father's footsteps that way. And I didn't sense the slightest bit of sort of resentment at having to follow in the footsteps of such a famous father. I think their relationship was very genuine, very person to person, very loving. And so I didn't sense any kind of competition, certainly on Patrick's part. And Hemingway, too, in his own life, letters says things. In the book that Patrick put together with the assistance of his nephew, Brendan Hemingway, and his grandson, Stephen Hemingway Adams, he says in one of the letters that you were the only brother I had among my sons. He loved all three of his sons, but he really felt a special affinity and closeness with Patrick.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that volume is Dear Papa, the letters of Patrick and Ernest Hemingway. And so you are obviously, that's a great idea to think about, which is the number of letters over the years that Ernest and Patrick shared. Does that relationship come through in their correspondence, the kind of affection and affinity that they have for one another? Oh,
SPEAKER_01:absolutely. The letters that Hemingway writes to Patrick are very funny. And talking a about him also to other people. He's very funny. He's very proud, for example, of Patrick's intellect. And there's a letter that he writes to his mother-in-law, to Patrick's grandmother, Mary Pfeiffer, from Key West in February of 1939. And he says, and would make a fine lawyer for the Holy Rota Romana by present showing. He's 11 years old. And I read that to Patrick in June, and he just roared with laughter. And he also, this is followed up by another comment in a letter from Hemingway to Thomas Shevlin in April of 1939, where he said, Patrick got 100 in so many subjects at school that we've decided it must be a This is a parochial school in Key West where Patrick also mentioned he was about the only non-Cuban student there. And he said that his childhood friends were Cubans with whom he spoke Spanish in Key West. Hemingway also has another letter. These are fresh in my mind because they're from volume seven, which is what we're working on right now. Hemingway is writing to, again, his mother-in-law, Mary Pfeiffer, Patrick's grandmother. And Hemingway says it's been or will be almost a year since you've seen the boys. A year is a long time with Gregory. Patrick is always about the same, the best companion that I know. And you always get these comments about Patrick being such a wonderful companion. The letters in the Dear Papa book are very sweet because they show them joking around, for one thing. And yet at the same time, there's this fatherly tone of care that Hemingway expresses toward Patrick. So there's an instance in the fall of 1942 where there's some questions to whether the school is going to be canceling the Thanksgiving vacation. And Patrick is unhappy about that. And Hemingway is extremely unhappy about that. And he asked Patrick to please get the measurements of the Holy Father's derriere. This is actually from a letter here from 1942. If you can get a good rubbing from the head's chair showing the size of derriere. I will know what size of iron reinforced boot to wear when I call on the good doctor to pay my respects. So he's really jokingly taking Patrick's side in this that he's going to beat up on the principal. But at the same time, Patrick is complaining to some extent about schoolwork and how hard French grammar is. And here's Hemingway, the wise father, saying It's school. And one thing we learn in this world is that you have to eat a ton of it, and you might as well start now with school. So buck up and study. And then in terms of French grammar, he says, French grammar is as irritating as any of them. It'll be good for your old being to work it through, though. We have to work out all we're weak in to always compensate what we are strong in. And that's a frameable piece of That's great.
SPEAKER_03:Thomas Hudson was to the middle son, despite the kind of awkwardness in the family unit. But he was sort of, I thought it was very sensitively drawn up.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it's a beautiful passage about the three sons and about the middle son. And he describes him as looking sleek as an otter. And he's wise, like, actually, I have it handy here. The middle boy always reminded Thomas Hudson of an otter. He had the same color hair as an otter's fur and had almost the same texture as that of an underwater animal and he browned all over in a strange dark gold tan. He always reminded his father of the sort of animal that has a sound and humorous life by itself. Otters and bears are the animals that joke most and bears of course are very close to men. This boy would never be wide enough and strong enough to be a bear and he would never be an athlete nor did he want to be but he had a lovely small animal quality and he had a good mind and a life of his own he was affectionate and he had a sense of justice and was good company so you just sense the warmth there that's beautiful
SPEAKER_03:that's yeah that's beautiful sandy patrick's involvement with the hemingway letters project isn't the first involvement that he has with his father's writing and posthumous work there's also true at first light, which he did enormous work on, didn't he?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, absolutely. That was the Africa manuscript that was one of the big manuscripts left in the vault in Cuba that Mary Hemingway was able to bring out after Hemingway's death in August 1961. It was really the last big manuscript of Hemingway's that had not been published. And in 1999, for the centennial year, Scribner's did publish Patrick's edited version of that Africa manuscript as true at first light. So yes, he was very involved in that. And then he was also very involved in the Hemingway Library edition of several of the books that were brought out along with supplementary material from the manuscript collection at the Kennedy Library. So those are wonderful editions because you can read what was published in Hemingway's time and then also read some of the drafts and the lists of titles for A Farewell to Arms and Those are really rich resources.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. In fact, Green Hills of Africa is represented by Patrick Hemingway, which is, as you said earlier, a publication that he would have been particularly interested in.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER_03:Well, Sandy, thank you so much for joining us on the occasion of the passing of Patrick Hemingway. And we really appreciate you joining us to share your thoughts with us.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. He will be greatly missed by many people, and it was a privilege to know him to the extent that I did, and it's always a pleasure to be talking with you.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. Thank you, Sandy.
SPEAKER_02:The only thing is, when I finally went to Africa, I found a place that was better than Cuba. Well, you know... Certain things are true and if you're interested in hunting Africa is the place.