I am sorry that Miss Gellhorn is having trouble with her memory: something that can happen at our age, with which one can only sympathize. However, she should not exploit her oblivion for the purpose of calling me a liar (“apocriphiar”).

Perhaps it may jog her memory, if I remind her that the luncheon of Hemingway, herself, Inez (my first wife) and myself at the Paris brasserie which she denies ever having taken place started off with much banter between Hemingway and her in the style of dialogue in Hemingway’s early novels, in which she addressed him sometimes as “Hem” and at other times as “Hemingstein.”1 To judge from her letter, stylistically she has never got out of this manner.

She might also remember that, whether before this, or on the same day, or soon after, Hemingway and I gave a joint reading at Shakespeare & Co., Sylvia Beach’s bookshop in the Rue de l’Odéon. From behind a battery of drinks, Hemingway read extracts from his as yet unpublished novel To Have and Have Not, and I read, from the manuscript, some far from heroic poems about Spain. James Joyce was in the audience (this was the only occasion on which I met him). My first wife, whose existence Miss Gellhorn is unaware of (and probably considers apocryphal), was also present.