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HEMINGWAY WROTE THESE four newly discovered love letters to Jigee Viertel, wife of the novelist and screenwriter Peter Viertel, in December 1949 and January 1950. His infatuation had begun weeks earlier, when Jigee, Hemingway, and his fourth wife, Mary, crossed the Atlantic on the Ile de France. Peter joined them during their month's stay in France. When the Viertels left Nice and returned to Paris after Christmas, Hemingway felt desolate without Jigee. He had completed his Venetian novel, his first in ten years, Across the River and into the Trees ( 1950); and on the last day of the year he and Mary traveled by chauffeured car from Nice, across northern Italy, to Venice.
Jigee Viertel was small, vivacious, sexy, and promiscuous; vibrant, articulate, and well read; eighteen years younger than Hemingway and very competitive with all women. She was a literary groupie and had been married to the author Budd Schulberg. Though not a writer herself, she nourished other talents. Hemingway let her read his latest novel and listened attentively to her comments. Born Virginia Ray, of Irish descent, near Pittsburgh in 1915, she was six years older than her husband but, as Peter wrote in his memoir of Hemingway, Dangerous Friends, "looked younger than I did with her gleaming brown hair worn shoulder length and her pretty, heart-shaped face favored by smooth skin which required little rouge or powder."
The biographer of Irwin Shaw, one of Jigee's lovers, wrote that she was "sort of dazzling" and made men "feel extremely intelligent because [she always] agreed with them." She had "a flirtatious charm that was quite extraordinary. By die time a dinner party was over, it was later said, Jigee would have established a secret with every man at the table." One admirer recalled diat she "had very long dark hair, and very rosy cheeks .... She could string along a guy better than anyone I ever knew. She had a way of providing intimacy without sex."
Young and fresh, fascinated by the older writer's stories, she was a striking contrast to Mary, his wife of four years. In her memoir, How It Was, Mary described their stay at the Ritz Hotel in December 1949...