Ingrid Bergman’s flirty letter to Ernest Hemingway is flecked with fly droppings. The correspondence of Agnes von Kurowsky, upon whom Hemingway based Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms, needs saving from extensive mold, water and corrosive ink damage. Gary Cooper, Maxwell Perkins, Gertrude Stein? They’re all going to need some work done too.

Such is the task facing the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, MA, which is leading the efforts to restore the JFK Library’s collection of letters exchanged between Ernest Hemingway and thousands of artists, Hollywood icons, politicos and athletes over the course of his lifetime.

The Associated Press reports:

The center is a nonprofit that has also treated other parts of the Library’s Hemingway collection, as well as materials including Abraham Lincoln’s family Bible and documents George Washington wrote.

Walter Newman, the center’s paper conservation director, said the goal of the current Hemingway project is to slow down the different processes that are degrading the letters. Experts surveyed the damage about 18 months ago, and restoration work started on a recent afternoon when assistant conservator Claire Grund went to work on Bergman’s letter, among others.

“You can sort of pick them off,” Grund said, her scalpel targeting the insect excrement by the “Yours Ingrid” signoff in the letter Bergman addressed to “My dear Mister Papa.”

The JFK Library is home to roughly 7,500 Hemingway letters. They were donated by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, after Hemingway’s suicide and only after she was granted passage to Cuba to retrieve them. Fidel Castro allowed Mary to send the letters by shrimp boat back to the U.S. in exchange for Hemingway’s Havana villa, which was donated to the people of Cuba.

The restoration effort is a large one, and could take as long as three years to complete.

About half of the 7,500 letters in the incoming collection need restoration work. JFK Library’s Hemingway curator Susan Wrynn said most letters are worth around $5,000.

Wrynn estimates the preservation project will take two or three more years and cost at least $300,000. The JFK Foundation is working on raising funds to cover the price.

The letters started arriving in Boston in the mid-1960s, and were stored in a temperature-controlled vault. But because Hemingway was so prone to changing his address, and as the result of storing his letters for years in various substandard conditions, much of the trove is under assault from time’s passage, not to mention iron gall ink and rodent nibbles.

Again from the AP:

“His documents were kept in so many places over time. There are so many things that have happened to them,” Wrynn said. “The deterioration just continues, so if you don’t become proactive at some point, you have the potential to lose information.”

Among letters needing repair are some from the writer’s family, childhood cronies, and war and fishing buddies. Besides two of Bergman’s letters, correspondence from Hollywood stars Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper will undergo work, as well.

Also slated for restoration are letters from Max Perkins, Hemingway’s editor at Scribner’s, and correspondence from writers Gertrude Stein, Walter Winchell and Martha Gellhorn, the journalist who became the author’s third wife.

 
More coverage of Hemingway can be found in the MobyLives archives.
 

A letter and newspaper clipping sent to Ernest Hemingway from writer Paul Drus in 1938.