Hemingway's guns

[Grantham Forester]

Originally Posted by George Lander

Getting back to the subject of Hemingway and his guns,I have also been reading the book and as the book makes clear, Papa was a hunter and a shooter and not a collector. His guns, for the most part, were well used and well cared for. I did not find a reference to his owning a Parker although one picture in the book with him in the company of Gary Cooper it shows Cooper carrying a Parker (which could have been Papa's)

A great movie to watch is "Islands in the Stream" in which George C. Scott plays the role of Papa, although with a different name. David Hemmings plays the rummey friend who won a BAR in a poker game and uses it to kill a shark that was after one of Papa's sons.

Best Regards, George

--The same eulogy that Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1939 for his Idaho friend, who died in a duck hunting accident near Silver Creek, could as well have been his own in 1961. I was still in HS when he took his own life, we had read both "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Snows of Kilamanjaro" as part of English Lit. back then. He had a flair for picking great titles. I was editor of our HS paper my Senior year, and always respected his solid background as a reporter and a correspondent.

I have an older Model 12, as apparently he did, and this excerpt from the book "The Idaho Hemingway" by Tillie Arnold speaks to his views on guns as working tools for a hunter: "Ernest and Lloyd were opening up the gun cases, removing guns, and I saw Lloyd (Tillie Arnold's husband) pick up a Winchester Model 12 pump shotgun. As he did so, he told Ernest that he also owned one. But I could see that Lloyd was shocked when he opening and closed the breech.--' It rattled, it's action was loose, oil sprayed out of the action and the stock had a major split, so loose it almost fell off. ' Ernest noticed Lloyd's attention to the loose stock and said ' I'll bet your Model 12 isn't as beat up as mine. ' 'Ernest, this stock is a bit loose. ' Ernest replied ' Yeah, we gotta get her tightened up, Chief-- I can't operate without this old stopper."

This was in September 1939, a month or so before the tragic death of Gene Van Guilder. Going back to the Model 12 from an earlier 1933 occurance, the fire at the Pfeiffer (Hemingway's second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, heiress to the Richard Hudnut cosmetics wealth) farm in Piggott, AK-- and from his later published book about Africa- "True at First Light"-- pg. 240: "I had the old, well-loved, once burnt up, three times restocked, worn smooth old Winchester model 12 pump gun that was faster than a snake, and was from 35 years of us being together (1928-1953), almost as close a friend and companion with secrets shared and triumphs and disasters not revealed as the other friends a man has all his life"--

I find this quote reveals both Hemingway's credo that "Guns are to shoot, and to shoot with well" and also the same affection that a man would have with his hunting dogs.