Hemingway’s Briefcase

Papa's bag fetched more than a typical first novel

CAIL, if you must, with his writing, but the man’s taste in leather goods was impeccable.

His briefcase approached the ideal: brown leather, supple yet beefy; gilt initials in small block letters, distinctive and dignified; sealed only with a rasping zipper that ran around three sides so that, unzipped, the case would fall open easily with a mild slap on the table. The briefcase had traveled, had flown and cruised; it bore stamps from Venice, Paris, London, Idaho. Inside, among the case’s leaved compartments—with specks of crumbling leather cracking off burgundy buckram—were a number of life fragments of the sort fictional detectives are inordinately fond of: a Christmas card from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; a Patient’s Guide to the Mayo Clinic; a magazine clipping announcing that the briefcase’s owner, Ernest Miller Hemingway, had been selected one of “the most attractive men in the world.”

But now, in May 1984, the briefcase, complete with stickers and contents, was up for grabs. It was being auctioned off at Sotheby’s, Lot 622, in a sale of books and manuscripts. It had gone the way of the objet.

The auction room was as tense as a high-school dance, with far too much unspoken lust packed into far too small a place. Assistants worked ranks of telephones, taking bids from those who weren’t there in person. The bidding for Papa’s bag opened at $1,500 and skittered upward with the ominous celerity of the deficit. Would-be buyers dropped out till only two were left—telephone bidders whose contacts were stationed on either side of the auctioneer, so that the latter’s eyes flicked spasmodically back and forth, as in the cartoon image of rapt spectators ^t a tennis match. The briefcase, finally, fetched $5,100 from a gentleman named H.E.J. Michael Kiesser, buying from poolside at his Bermuda estate. Kiesser develops hotels in the Caribbean and spruces up palaces for the King and Queen of Jordan.

The auction’s next item, by the way, was Hemingway’s Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. Kiesser bought that too, for $3,100. Auctioneer David Redden seemed not quite to approve . He is a bookman, and this was a literary sale; why all the fuss over tchotchkes? “Maybe,” said Redden, off to the side, just barely within the pickup range of his microphone, “we should open a luggage department after all. ”

Laurence Shames