Secret Messages Throughout History For centuries, people have exchanged information in writing. Inside was Hemingway’s first known short story, about a fictional trip to Ireland, written when he was 10 years old. It was here, amid bullfighting tickets, checks, newspaper clippings and letters from his lawyer, family members and friends like the writer John Dos Passos and artists Joan Miró and Waldo Peirce, that they discovered a stained brown notebook. Years ago, Betty and Toby’s son, Benjamin Bruce (known as Dink) and a local historian, Brewster Chamberlin, began creating an inventory of the haul in consultation with the Hemingway scholar Sandra Spanier. The trove of materials spent decades uncataloged in cardboard boxes and ammo storage containers, surviving hurricanes and floods.
Toby Bruce was part of Hemingway’s inner circle for years, not only as his right-hand man, but also as his contractor, mechanic and sometime chauffeur. He never returned to collect them.Īfter Hemingway’s death, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, went through the material, packed up what she wanted, and gave the rest to longtime friends, Betty and Telly Otto Bruce, known to his friends as Toby. What they did know was that in 1939, after his second marriage crumbled, Hemingway, a notorious pack rat, left his belongings in the storeroom of Sloppy Joe’s Bar, his favorite watering hole in Key West, Fla. For years, most Hemingway scholars could only salivate about the Bruce collection, uncertain of its exact contents or even location.
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