Sold by James Cummins Bookseller, ABAA, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Association Member:
Heritage Bookseller
AbeBooks Seller since May 29, 1998
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
4to and smaller. A wonderful collection of material by and about Taylor "Bear Track" Williams, the renowned sporting guide and close friend of Ernest Hemingway, centered on a seemingly unpublished and enlightening nine-page typescript by Williams about Hemingway, with photographs and letters related to both men. Hemingway first met Williams in September 1939 at Sun Valley Lodge near Ketchum, ID; Williams was working there as a hunting and fishing guide, and Hemingway had reserved suite 206 in order to finish writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. Said to be both well-read and easy-going as well as hard-drinking Williams' personality meshed harmoniously with Hemingway's, and the two hit it off immediately, so much so that Hemingway invited Williams to the Florida Keys and Cuba to fish the following spring; Williams arrived in April 1940, and remained there until the middle of June. Williams became a key part of Hemingway s "Idaho family," and they spent significant amounts of time together both in Idaho and Cuba over the course of the next twenty years. Hemingway noted that Williams' nickname "the Colonel" wasn't due to the fact he was from Kentucky, but that "everybody thinks he is a British colonel because he looks like one who has been in India too long and is also deaf," and he also included him in the first paragraph of his July 1951 story "The Shot," writing admiringly that Williams "…can kill you dead with a borrowed rifle at 300 yards!" The affection was mutual, as can be seen in Williams' original typescript about Hemingway (written with David Bramble). Titled "Papa Hemingway: Fresh-Water Fisherman," Williams states in the second paragraph that "Papa H is one of the finest men and one of the finest sportsmen I've ever known," and he closes on the last page with, "I know Papa's a great fisherman. I know he's a great hunter. I know he's a great writer and I'm impressed. But not half as impressed as I am with his simple, easy way of being a great man." Williams also recounts a number of his personal shooting and fishing experiences with Hemingway, among them his preference for Silver Creek over Big Wood River, his expertise with dry flies, and the beauty of his casting "Papa's an artist" as well as an amusing anecdote in which Hemingway helped Williams out with a couple who wanted to learn how to shoot skeet; after they gave him a dollar tip for his efforts, he exclaimed, "First damn tip I've had in my whole life!" However, Williams writes that his most trenchant and perhaps surprising sporting memory of Hemingway was this: "I've been on thousands of fishing excursions and they have a tendency to blur or blend but one thing stands out in all those exursions with Papa. His principal conerns was not to catch fish but ot be certain that all th other menmbers of the party were getting along all right, having a good time. It was no pose. It was absolutely genuine. Papa likes people and he likes to do things for people. I'm pretty sure he's more interested in people than anything else in the world." It appears three photographs were intended to be included with the essay, as Williams wrote captions for them; in the first he quotes Hemingway as saying, "I don't like this picture. I don't cast like this, backhand, unless the brush or the willows are bad and there's no brush here, no willows," only to have him later backtrack, declaring, "Yes, I do cast this way when the wind's wrong. I remember now. The wind was wrong." While the typescript is undated, Williams comments that he and Hemingway had "done all sorts of fishing and hunting together for the last eighteen years," so it can be placed around 1957. In addition to the typescript is an annotated photograph of Hemingway's sons, Gigi and Pat, bowling, along with one of Williams holding his inscribed bound set of galley sheets of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the creation of which he writes about in the typescript. (A photocopy of Hemingway's inscription to Williams in Th.
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