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Letter to the editor

The Old Man and the seed

A new perspective on the Hemingways by a Hemingway traces three generations of creativity, dysfunction and rebirth.

By Phillip Sipiora, Special to the Times
Published July 8, 2007

Srange Tribe: A Family Memoir
By John Hemingway
Lyons Press, 224 pages, $24.95

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Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir is a courageous book by a deft prose stylist whose name happens to be Hemingway. This biography-autobiography is an unabashed, penetrating chronicle of a dysfunctional father and mother and a grandfather, Ernest, who remains one of the most popular writers in the world.

John Hemingway tells a complex story from the heart, unafraid to articulate in shocking detail his family's abnormal behavior and its numbing, yet ultimately regenerative effects on the author. Strange Tribe is primarily about John and his father, Gregory Hemingway, who died in 2001, and the ways in which the father's often bizarre, sometimes loving behavior brands his son's mind and spirit for life.

However, the invisible hand of Ernest is always there. The patriarch not only choreographs his immediate family, but continues to influence his extended family well beyond his suicide in 1961.

Ernest is the Papa of all Papas, continuing to generate immense wealth for his heirs through worldwide sales of his novels and stories, supplemented by an "Elvis industry" of Hemingway furniture, home furnishings, apparel and more.

Ernest and Greg are complex portraits of mental illness and irascibility, conditions interwoven in ways that defy simple clarification. John, unlike his father, is not a medical man and does not attempt explanations of disease or culture. He is an exploratory, interrogative writer, and his metaphors let us share his family and their travails. Whether by nature or nurture, the style is minimalist, not unlike Ernest's.

Anger and empathy

John describes his father as fallen into the abyss of gender confusion and melancholia. Greg was a manic-depressive cross-dresser whose mercurial behavior tormented his four wives and eight children for decades. In the 1950s and '60s, such conditions were not well understood, particularly transvestism.

Was there a heritable link to seed-bearer Ernest, an international macho figure? John implies such a connection as he chronicles Ernest's childhood gender-confused dressing and later hair-dyeing experiments with fourth wife, Mary. Ernest's interest in androgyny (without homosexual implications) is an inference reasonably drawn from scholarly research.

We learn that Ernest and Greg had a tempestuous relationship, agonizingly revealed in their letters. Yet it was not without love, somewhat akin to the relationship between Greg and John. This duality of perspective - anger and empathy - is a powerful motif informing the book. Ultimately it tells us more about John than about either the famous man or his infamous son.

Ernest and Greg experienced varying levels of gender confusion, probably from early childhood, when both boys were dressed as girls. Greg, like his father, married four women, although Greg wedded two women twice, fathering seven children and adopting one. He dressed often as a woman and for years had thought about a sex-change operation, finally taking the first step with a single breast implant.

A trail of traumas

In the late 1980s, after years of perseverance, Greg was finally accepted for gender reassignment. However, wife Ida threatened to divorce him if he proceeded, as had previous wife Valerie. The author painfully recalls his father's operations between 1994 and 1995. The memoirist was shocked, and John discloses a 10-year hiatus in contact, years that were intensely traumatic for father and son.

For the Hemingway clan, the bill always seems to come due. In 1998 John suffered a heart attack at age 38. Writer and reader wonder, reasonably, if there is an inescapable Hemingway curse.

The author clearly loves his father, accepts him for what he was and forgives him for what he did, to himself and to his family. John is not so forgiving in his portraits of widows Ida, who was Greg's last wife, and Mary, who was Ernest's. Ida is described as an "alcoholic, money-grubbing wife." Mary is depicted as scheming and avaricious: "When she'd had enough of his (Ernest's) depression and threats to kill himself, she cleared the path to his suicide by leaving the keys to his gun rack where she was sure he could get them."

This memoir is one of creation, struggle and rebirth. John has suffered greatly, yet he has gained knowledge from his suffering. From that pain emerges a better understanding of mental illness and dysfunctional behavior. Thus, possibly, a new generation of Hemingways.

Phillip Sipiora is professor of English and film studies at the University of South Florida.

[Last modified July 5, 2007, 10:35:16]