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THE FATHER’S SONS

The combined talents of Freud, Jung, and Dr. Phil couldn’t unsnarl Hemingway’s family life.

Ernest Hemingway had three sons: Jack (1923–2000) from Hadley, and Patrick (still alive at this writing), and Gregory or Gigi or “Gloria” (1932–2001) from Pauline. He loved Jack and Patrick unconditionally. But Gregory, the youngest, smallest, best athlete, keenest shot, and finest writer—the son most in his father’s image—bummed him out.

It’s always hazardous to try to deduce autobiographical clues from his short stories. But in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “Now I Lay Me,” “Ten Indians,” and “Fathers and Sons” we get a half-grasp of Ernest’s tangled feelings toward his father. There’s love, admiration, and gratitude (for teaching him how to shoot and hunt), and also hate (in “Fathers and Sons” Nick is hiding in a woodshed with a cocked gun ready to shoot Clarence for punishing him for lying), as well as waves of ambivalence, where Ernest blames his father for the unspecified crime of not being “man enough,” presumably because Clarence submitted too easily to Grace’s domination. And of course for the cowardly act (as Ernest saw it) of killing himself. Ernest publicly and often blamed his mother for causing his father’s suicide, promising himself that he would never make his father’s mistake of submission to a woman.

Another clue to Hemingway’s relationship to the three boys may be found in Jack’s genial book Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa and most poignantly, on full blast emotion, in Gregory’s Papa: A Memoir. Ultimately, the most vivid picture I get of Jack, Patrick, and Gig, admittedly from their father’s biased viewpoint, is in his unfinished novel Islands in the Stream (a not-bad movie starred George C. Scott).

In the three-part story of Islands in the Stream, set in Cuban waters, the youngest son Greg is named “Andrew,” whom the narrator, a painter named Thomas Hudson, describes as “a very attractive devil” but also “the meanest,” noting “… there was something about him that you could not trust.” The real-life eldest son, Jack, is “Tom,” who is a passive witness more than an active player. The plot hinges on Hudson piloting his fishing boat to hunt down Nazi submarines in the Gulf. But the most memorable part of the incomplete novel dramatizes the hours-long struggle under a blazing hot sun of the adolescent middle son, “David” (Patrick), to win the approval of his father by battling, with drag reel and pure endurance, a thousand-pound marlin from the deck of Thomas Hudson’s boat in the Gulf. While Andrew-Greg bitchily comments and Tom-Jack writhes in sympathy, David-Patrick refuses to give up even though his hands are rubbed raw bloody and his aching back is on fire. Depending on what kind of parent you are or want to be, Thomas Hudson is either a sadistic sonofabitch or a tough-love dad.

Even though real-life Gregory was most like his dad in practically every way, including writing well, the defining moment of his childhood occurred when Ernest intruded on the 10-year-old boy trying on third wife Martha Gellhorn’s nylons and dress at Vinca Figia. Neither father nor son got over it, mainly because it so upset Ernest. All sorts of analysts and critics have suggested that Greg was “acting out” his father’s secret fetishes related to androgyny. Maybe. There can be no doubt that as Greg grew into adulthood he packed into his athletic frame almost every sexual dilemma that can afflict and affect a man, any man.

I am incredibly touched by Gregory-Gigi-Mr. Gig-or-Gloria. Locked in his own shame and the Hemingway legacy of exaggerated male pride, according to Paul Hendrickson who interviewed him, Greg submitted to almost 100 electroshocks to “cure” himself of transvestism, transsexualism, booze, and dope. Like his big-game hunting brothers, Greg went looking for his Hemingway patrimony by shooting large numbers of elephants in Africa. The extraordinary thing is that he made it to medical school and became a respected, well-liked doctor out west. Along the way he married four times and had eight children.

Father Ernest and son Gregory had much in common though Hemingway would have died rather than admit it. They both suffered from lifelong insomnia. For Hemingway, tortured sleeplessness was a legacy from the Great War, as so many Iraq-Afghanistan veterans have painfully discovered. But for different reasons Gregory was possessed of a “beautiful nervousness.” One of his girlfriends reflected that he was “trying to be two ideas at once,” while his Irish ex-wife, Valerie Danby-Smith, wrote that Gregory “suffered more than anyone I have ever known,” his turmoil captured even in how he sometimes signed off letters to his children, “love, transvestite Dad” or “whatsit.”

Hemingway was always in denial about his he-man son who crossed over into forbidden territory. He called Greg’s love of women’s clothes “horrible mixed up feelings” though Greg himself was clear about wanting to lead a double life as a full-blooded man while also flaunting flashy “Gloria” or “Vanessa.” In his late teens Greg was arrested in drag in a Los Angeles movie house, and Hemingway called for his mother, Pauline, to come down from northern California and do something. By phone Pauline and Ernest quarreled bitterly, after which Pauline flew to Los Angeles, where she immediately collapsed and soon died on a hospital operating table from an unsuspected adrenal tumor. Greg always blamed his mother’s death on his father; they blamed each other.

Growing up as the products of two different mothers, amid divorces, split-ups, their dad’s affairs and on-again-off-again hyper-masculine love, the three boys were not especially close. Greg-Gloria died in woman’s clothes in a Florida jail cell after the guards refused, or neglected, to give him his hypertension medicine. After his death one of his daughters, Larian, said “He was a physician at heart.” His Montana patients loved him.

Jack Hemingway died at seventy. The father of actors Mariel and Margaux (who killed herself too), as a boy Jack was introduced to sex by Ernest who took him to a Havana whorehouse. Like all three sons he was privately educated. In World War II he bravely parachuted out of planes to help the French resistance and was wounded, captured, and imprisoned in a German POW camp. Ernest liked to show off Jack’s battle scars. In later life, Jack became a professional angler and Idaho conservationist, settling in Ketchum, and was the most open of the boys about the Hemingway legacy. He helped edit his dad’s A Moveable Feast. Patrick is still with us, managing his father’s estate and royalties. He went to Africa where he hunted and helped put together True at First Light, Ernest’s unfinished nonfiction book about Africa.

What can one say of Ernest as a father? A personal note: In my teens, I was informally adopted by an older GI buddy who was a passionate Hemingway aficionado and lived every moment of his life according to his version of “the code.” Channeling Hemingway, he tried teaching me how to impress women, how to tip waiters, and how to use a handgun and a blackjack in alley brawls (our version of marlin fishing). Demonstrable maleness was all that counted. Like Hemingway’s three sons, I strained every fiber to earn my adopted father’s love and approval. Eventually, even though I slavishly copied his southern drawl and prizefighter’s one-shoulder-down slouch, my need for independence was stronger than his need to define my manhood for me. But the experience helps me to understand a little of what it may have been like to be a Hemingway son. The trick was to survive his love. After all, what choice did they have?