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“I had always run as an adjusted person though various
tinhorn biographers had attempted to prove otherwise.”
—Hemingway, “The Christmas Gift”, 1954
In 1934, Kubie was commissioned by Henry Seidel Canby, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, to write psychoanalytic interpretations of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre, William Faulkner's Sanctuary, and of the books published by Hemingway between 1924 and 1933. The first two essays appeared in the fall of 1934, but the Hemingway paper was suppressed and has hitherto not been published. The complicated story about the suppression—not even mentioned in Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway— involves Kubie's extensive and, at the end, acrimonious correspondence with Canby, his lawyers, with Hemingway's editor Max Perkins and with Hemingway himself. Nearly thirty years later, Kubie returned to this dispute in letters to his lawyer and to Hemingway's publisher Charles Scribner Jr. These letters show that Kubie was betrayed by Canby, warned by Perkins and silenced by Hemingway. Kubie, who was analyzing Hemingway's suicidal mistress while writing the essay, was both naive and imperceptive in thinking that