John Hemingway

New interview from the Globe and Mail

2011-11-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview/article on me and the play "Dans l'ombre d'Hemingway" that came out today in the Toronto daily The Globe and Mail.

Last Waltz

2011-10-31T05:50:00.000-07:00

Here's another new poem from John Lyons

Last Waltz

What will be the first of the last things

The first word of the last words

The first day of the last days

The first kiss of the last kisses;

What will be the first breath

Of the last breaths, the first sigh

And the first of the long goodbyes?

Here in Buenos Aires the streets

Are haunted by those who have

Gone before, by those who have walked

These noble streets that fell in recent years

Upon such hard times, a sad dreary elegance

Now clinging to so many crumbling façades.

This clear blue sky and crisp ocean air

Known to Borges, known to Cortázar,

Which weathers the skin in the daily bounty

Of those who survive. This may be the first

Of the last memories, the first taste

Of the last tastes to tantalize my palate

The first of the last loves to be made

In the first of the last beds. And as I wake

And dress in the first of the last clothes

Put on the shoes that may be blessed

To take the first of the last steps,

I recall Emily’s supercilious valley-licking train,

A vector of sound in the long speechless distance

A vector of thought, a rugged nugget of words

Condensed around an ecstasy of emotion:

From distance, the sensation of intimacy,

From a silence broken, the tactile meaning of words

Of love, the first of the last words of love,

The first of the last brushes of skin against skin,

Of lip against lip. This is, and always was a merry

macabre dance, whether upon a lush city stage,

A retarded Calvary or in the empty heart of the pampas:

Our steps are numbered, even as the band is poised

To strike up the very first chords of our very last waltz.

John Lyons

Buenos Aires 31 October 2011

Gloria

2011-10-22T05:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a short story of mine that came out in Provincetown Arts last July.

Gloria

Gerry lay awake in his cot looking at the Plexiglas windows and the heavy steal door in front of him. The windows were at least an inch thick and made him think of decompression and of drowning. It was three in the morning on September 30^th and even if someone had been awake to call him from the other side he wouldn’t have heard them. There was no sound in his cell except for the beating of his heart.

He wanted to call his son, right then, the one who lived in Italy, and ask him if Venice was on the Adriatic or facing France, and he wanted to do this after a few beers. He was still on a manic high and his mind was racing through memories, a slipstream of images and words, and only beer could stem the flow for a minute or two.

“If I could just hear Peter speak, I’d let him know . . . .” And then Gerry remembered that later on that morning the judge was going to see him and that after five days he’d be free. They’d march him into the chamber in his orange jumpsuit with the other prisoners from the women’s correctional facility, and this was good, because he had a dinner date with the cop who’d arrested him for indecent exposure on the beach after a party in the evening where he’d seriously impressed in a black Trussardi gown and stilettos.

That was perhaps his true talent, straddling the gender divide. He could hunt like a Bushman or dress like a fashion model and he had two Florida driver licenses to prove it. One for the African and the other for the debutante, Gerry and Gloria. Born a man he’d endured his inherited ambiguity for sixty-two years, cross-dressing as a teen and then letting his hair grow long and white when he’d retired from medicine.

The sex change was actually a complicated procedure, a series of five operations spread out over six months. A kind of root canal done on his groin, creating a cavity where none had existed before. Which isn’t to say that he didn’t have second thoughts about losing the family jewels. While there were many days when being a woman, dressing like one and knowing that he had actually gone through with it, made him euphoric; there were others when he’d look at himself in a mirror and despair, blaming in equal parts his mother and his father for the clinical depression and his thoughts of suicide. It was then that he would think that he was nothing but a freak and that freaks deserved to endure whatever misfortune or psychotic moods assailed them, simply because they were freaks.

As a boy it had been easier. Things were relatively clear-cut and unobstructed. His father, Jake Morelli, had taught him how to use a rifle and a bow and they’d hunted quail, ducks, and grouse together and had tracked bighorn sheep in Montana and caribou in Alaska. Gerry was a good shot for his age and his father believed that he had inherited everything that was right and positive from the Morelli side of the family and none of what he often referred to as “the family degeneration.” The boy was lucky. Extremely bright, humorous and athletic, nothing would prevent him from becoming what the family wanted him to be. Of this his father was sure.

The peak of this enthusiasm, however, came early on. At the age of thirteen Gerry entered a national skeet-shooting contest in Cuba against adults, and won. His father was ecstatic and bragged to anyone who would listen of his son’s prowess as a hunter, saying that he was a chip off the old block, “a natural born killer.” It was the happiest that he had ever seen his old man. As if by winning the contest he’d finally put to rest any lingering, subliminal doubts that his father might have had. If he could shoot like that then obviously the confusion that Jake Morelli had fought his entire life was nothing but a fluke. The curse had been broken and to celebrate he organized a “fiesta” for Gerry at the local gun club. There were over a hundred people at the party, members of the club, Havana socialites, rich American expats and the Morellis, father and son.

It was the proverbial day when the boy becomes a man, or in his case when the boy became a trans. In retrospect, many things in his life might have been different had he not stolen that pair of nylons a week before. They belonged to his father’s girlfriend and he really couldn’t say why he’d taken them from her room, he just did, and from that time onward he was different. They filled a need and whenever he put them on he felt less alone. A psychologist would later write something about a fetish that “enabled him to negotiate moments of extreme stress,” but as a boy all he knew was that they felt good and that he’d worn them the day he’d won the contest.

“It’s simple,” said his father as they drove over the dirt road to Havana, “you were the best there, the best on this island, and probably the best in the Caribbean and in all of South America. You blew ’em away, Gerry, you blew ’em away.”

“I just did exactly what you told me to do, the way you taught me to do it, always giving the target enough of a lead.”

“Lead time is important, Gerry, but Jesus I’ve never seen anyone shoot as good as you did today.”

“Never?”

“Never,” he repeated, “and let me tell you why. It wasn’t just your aim or concentration. No, it’s much more than that. Do you know what I’m getting at?”

“No,” he admitted, he didn’t. And Jake Morelli said that watching him during the contest had made him think of his father and that something had been passed down and that he had been the conduit of this talent.

“You inherited it from your grandfather,” he almost whispered, “which is exactly how it should be, from one generation to the next.”

But then his father was always saying things like that, comparing him to an uncle or his grandfather or to some other relative who he’d never heard of and who was probably long since dead, and then taking it all back because he was confused or drunk and wanted to get the story right even if he knew there had never been a story. The truth was that there was no family resemblance, no inheritance to speak of. There were just the two of them, the dark side of the clan, the Morelli misfits. It had begun with his father and would end with him. Of this he was sure.

At the party his father announced to everyone there that because of his proven shooting ability, his son was now a man and could order whatever he wanted from the bar. Most of the guests were drinking martinis or mojitos but Gerry wanted a Bloody Mary because he knew that the bartender used Tabasco sauce, black pepper, celery, and carrots. His father claimed that the vegetables made it healthy while the vodka would blur his senses and incipient panic. A band was playing popular songs from the period and many of the young socialites asked him to dance. Most of them were bigger than he was and during the slow dances when they held him close his face would brush their necks or rest with the exceptionally tall ones between their breasts. Each of these women was unique, the texture of their skin, the perfume they wore, the color of their eyes, and he found himself both wanting and identifying with his partners. After the first dance he had a hard-on and while he did his best to keep it pointing straight up and inconspicuous his penis had an agenda of its own and would fall to the left or the right and inflate the loose trousers of his suit like the center pole of a circus tent. The socialites pulled him closer when this happened and his father and the men who surrounded him would laugh and order more drinks from the bar.

As soon as he could, Gerry excused himself from the ladies and wandered away from the party in search of a men’s room. He had the pair of nylons that he’d stolen in the flask pocket of his tux and thought that if he could just find a place where he could put them on he’d solve the problem of his undisciplined dick. A white door with the word “Caballeros” seemed a good place to start and opening it he saw that there was no one inside, which was even better. There were two urinals filled with ice at the far end of the room and a sink and a mirror near the entrance with soap and towels. He quickly slipped off his black leather shoes and dropped his pants and his boxer shorts. After that he took the nylons out, carefully stretching them over his thin legs and centering as best he could his unruly member. He took a few steps towards the center of the restroom so that he could see himself in the mirror. It was then, though, that his father decided to walk in and the surprise for both of them couldn’t have been greater. They looked at each other and his father’s expression was a mixture of shock and disgust, but also of recognition. Gerry expected the worst and stood there in his black jacket and nylons waiting for whatever his father thought he deserved, but his dad just back out of the bathroom without saying anything, as if none of this had ever happened.

A few days after he’d been outted his father approached him in the late afternoon when Gerry was sitting by the pool. They were alone and it was probably as good a time as any to say what he had to say. Since the incident at the club Gerry had convinced himself that he was living on borrowed time and that sooner rather than later the hammer would fall. Whenever he tried to picture his father, even there in his cell, a man who was at the same time strong, handsome, humorous, forgiving, and potentially explosive came to mind and none of this had anything to do with Gerry’s need for nylons or the calm that he felt when he wore them. His father was the ideal that any good man could reach if he wasn’t a freak and if he lived his life courageously.

“Gerry,” said the elder Morelli, who was holding a gin and tonic and wearing nothing but a pair of stained khaki trousers and flip-flops.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been meaning to have a word with you.”

“OK,” said Gerry and he waited for his father to take another sip from his drink. He was usually fairly plastered towards sunset, but although he had had at least five gin and tonics and a couple of beers his words were clear.

“I just wanted to say one thing,” he announced, standing there with the liquid that had slid from his glass glistening in droplets over his white beard.

“Shoot.”

“That you and I come from a very strange tribe,” he said, and Gerry was patient, fully expecting something else, something more from this man, his hero, but nothing else came. Just that one line and the knowledge that they shared a truth that no one would ever understand.

Yet, just because Jake Morelli understood his son didn’t mean that he approved of his behavior. Gerry’s cross-dressing was fine so long as he kept it under wraps. His father knew that they were similar but he didn’t want to be reminded of the fact any more than was absolutely necessary, and, for the most part, no one apart from his father and mother knew what he was up to. Gerry was discreet, using the nylons when he needed them. If he was lonely he put on a pair, and if he was nervous or feeling the beginning of a panic that might trigger a manic mood he wore them and sometimes it worked. He could take a step back from the volcano of his emotions and feel secure. But it never lasted long and what he didn’t understand was that his condition couldn’t be controlled. The only thing, in fact, that saved him from his manic depression was his youth and his ability to quickly bounce back after a crash.

His cross-dressing went public in 1951 when he was just twenty years old and taking premed courses at a community college in Van Nuys. It was a Friday evening and he’d told his wife that he had to drive downtown to meet one of his professors. It was a good excuse and he needed one because she was pregnant and close to term. He promised that he would be home by eleven and he put the bag that he’d packed with his outfit in the trunk. When he was far enough away from their house he started to look for a place where he could change. There was a Texaco station up ahead and he stopped there.

“Fill ’er up?” said the attendant. Gerry nodded and asked him where the toilet was.

“To your left. You can’t miss it.”

Once inside he took off his clothes and put on the dress, the nylons and the red wig that he’d packed. He’d chosen the dress, which was white with pink roses, to go with the wig and the effect as he stood in front of the mirror was pleasing. The ruby-red stiletto shoes were perhaps too fancy for the roses, but he was sure that he’d pass.

Outside the attendant saw him coming and stared. They were about the same age and when Gerry asked him what he owed him he looked confused.

“How much?” Gerry repeated as he settled himself behind the wheel and checked his lipstick in the rearview mirror.

“That’ll be two dollars.”

Gerry took five dollars out of his purse and told him to keep the change. The attendant half-smiled and waved as Gerry drove away.

A friend had recommended The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn and that was what he was going to see. He was curious because he’d never been to Africa and thought that now he’d finally understand what the big attraction had been for his father.

He bought a ticket and took a seat in a back row of the theater. In the dark no one looked at him but during the intermission he used the ladies bathroom and it was there that a woman screamed and then the police arrived and he was arrested for indecent exposure.

Technically at twenty Gerry was still a minor, so they called his mother who had to travel down from Santa Cruz to bail him out of jail. Jennifer Smith had been visiting her sister, and while taking the train to Los Angeles and dealing with the LAPD was far from enjoyable it was a cakewalk compared to the call she had to make to Gerry’s father in Havana.

Jake Morelli immediately accused her of ruining the boy. It was entirely her fault that he’d been arrested, he said. It was three in the afternoon in Cuba and he was drunk as he usually was at that time of the day but clear enough to tell her that if something had gone wrong, fundamentally, with their son then she was to blame. He was absolutely livid and secretly embarrassed, too, because of the shared genetic degeneration, and they argued for over an hour. A long-distance shouting match, which ended with Gerry’s mother in tears. Her ex-husband’s explosive anger and insults had shaken her badly and later that night she felt ill and had to be taken to a hospital. She was hemorrhaging massively and died in the early morning at two o’clock on September 30 as surgeons frantically tried to stop the bleeding.

At the funeral Gerry couldn’t stop himself from crying, missing his mother and blaming himself for the fact that she was gone. His father blamed him, too, reminding Gerry once at a bar in Cuba that his stunt in Los Angeles had killed her. But eventually he’d found out the truth. Gerry had written to the doctors at the hospital in LA years later as a medical student in Miami and discovered that his mother had had a rare form of pituitary cancer, one that in moments of extreme stress caused her blood pressure to rise to lethal levels.

Of course, someone else with this information might have let it slide. After all there was nothing he could have done. She was dead, and finding out about her cancer wasn’t going to bring her back. But in the years that followed Gerry’s manic periods often coincided with the anniversary of his mother’s death. His feelings of guilt were like a trigger, and for him September was a dangerous month, a period when he’d do whatever he could to make up for what had happened. He joined the paratroopers in 1955 on September 30 hoping that it would convince his father that he’d finally become a man and was cured. But on his first jump he panicked and wouldn’t go near the open door. The army gave him a psychiatric discharge, and two years after that, again on September 30, he wrote to Jake threatening to kill himself while on safari in Africa.

What surprised him was how his father was always there to pick up the pieces. He’d drop whatever he was doing and come running, because there was never any question as to what his priorities were. He had to take care of his son, which meant setting him up in a good clinic, paying for the shock treatments, and then bringing him home when the doctors said he could go.

Thinking about it as he stared up at the Plexiglas, Gerry wondered how he could ever have written to his father “Vecchio bastardo, it wasn’t me who killed her but you and your fucking phone call.” In a few paragraphs he’d let his father know about the cancer and had essentially hastened Jake’s demise. According to those who were with him, when his old man first read the letter he was furious, but then he became quiet and kept to himself for the rest of the day. Obviously, there was some truth in what his son was saying and a few months later the clinical depression that would lead to his suicide set in.

Actions had consequences and when he looked at the clock on the wall he saw that it was five in the morning. In a few hours they’d take him to the judge and the judge would set him free. Rationally he realized that he couldn’t be blamed for what had happened to his family. But emotionally was another matter. Emotionally he’d locked it all away, never telling anyone, not even his son. It was a secret that had taken a heavy toll and when his heart started to beat faster at first he thought it was just nervousness, but then he couldn’t move. His legs and his arms went limp and all sensation disappeared from his hands and from his feet. His heart had gone into fibrillation, chaotically pumping blood that had better things to do or was tired of the fight. He wanted to shout out for help, wanted to say something to his son, but couldn’t speak and at exactly fifty years to the day, almost to the hour, of his mother’s death, he died.

Beauty comes at us

2011-06-03T06:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a new poem from John Lyons. In John's words "it's a meditation based on photos of Patti Smith taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and used in the Legacy Edition of her CD “Horses”. It was written to celebrate the 40th birthday of Alessandra Siedschlag".

Beauty comes at us

Beauty comes at us

At a tangent

Is slow in its revelation

An unfolding flower of light

In the eye of the beholder

There is no ugliness

Only shades of beauty

A well-appointed face

A rose aglow in the sunlight

Or a moon silhouette

Even a gesture or a word

Whispered within the soul

Beauty is a promise rather

Than an abnegation

The motive for peace

Rather than war

For rejoicing rather

Than the shedding of tears

The permanence of beauty

Is fleeting except in the memory

It is a singular victory

An emulsion of love

Coming from nowhere

And heading nowhere

At a tangent

In the shadow of the pyramids

Geometry schooled to perfection

It is what breaks the silence

To rescue us from the pointlessness

Of death. Caught in its infancy

Beauty will mature into the fine lines

Of experience etched

Upon ancient parchment

A tale to tell that uplifts the heart

And a shrine to our deepest dreams.

John Lyons

3 June 2011

ALL MAN!

2010-11-23T14:59:00.000-08:00

Many people still think of Ernest Hemingway in exaggerated terms. Fifty years after his death, he is the Lord Byron of the 20^th century, a hyper-macho, rum-drinking, war-mongering, pistol-packing literary giant who married four times, had countless lovers and defined what it was and in many cases still is to be an American male. It is a comfortable and well-worn portrait and, in part, how I imagined him myself growing up as boy in Miami during the 60s and 70s. The larger-than-life image and exploits of the man were certainly more exciting than what you had with many other writers. He was outrageously real, (“too macho to be true” as my dad used to say) in an over-the-top, Quentin Tarantino kind of way. Of course, years later when I wrote Strange Tribe I discovered that Ernest was not at all the person who I thought he was and that perhaps he had more in common with my father, his transsexual youngest son, than with the fishermen, soldiers and bullfighters he was friends with. But even with this knowledge and the publication of my book old ideas die hard. Myths are immortal, I'm inclined to believe, and the exaggerated role that Ernest played in post World War II American culture had a great deal to do with how “Papa” was packaged by the nation's pulp magazines.

This is the fascinating thesis of Professor David M. Earle's recent book, All Man, Hemingway, 1950's Men's Magazine's, and the Masculine Persona (The Kent State University Press, 2009). Reading it, I have to say, answered many of the questions that I've always had about my grandfather and his fame. I knew that Ernest from the 1920's onward was very proactive in molding his image as a sportsman, hunter and connoisseur of wine, women and bulls. He was an ambitious writer, someone who actively sought fame and success. But what Earle does is to show us that not only was Ernest a competent manipulator of the nascent media industry in the US but that he was far from being adverse to publicity, especially from pulp magazines. Ernest started out as a pulp writer, wanted to earn a living writing for them, and while it is true, as most Hemingway aficionados know, that Hemingway submitted many of his short stories to the Saturday Evening Post (all of which were rejected), he was at the same time submitting these pieces to the pulps. Aiming high, but always having a back-up publication for your work, Earle explains, was a common characteristic of pulp writers in the post WWI period.

In Europe, Ernest's writing tackled themes that were decidedly more ambiguous than the stories he'd submitted to the pulp magazines. His portraits of male dysfunctionality and homosexuality such as A Sea Change and A Simple Inquiry are considered some of the best ever written in the English language. Yet, in spite of these works and the view that they provide of my grandfather's complex personality his image as a clear-cut man's man has continued to grow. To a large extent it was his own fault. As Earle shows in All Man, my grandfather “both fought and nurtured his image as a larger-than-life character. In 1930 he made Grosset and Dunlap destroy dust jackets that claimed he had joined the Arditi in the First World War; later he had his editor, Maxwell Perkins, send a letter to correct this information in Paramount studios' press about him for the upcoming A Farewell to Arms. Yet thirty years later these myths were still appearing in interviews and profiles of the author...the image that he put forward in interviews with his quips about meeting international whores and making love until age eighty-five were just as extreme – not so much masculine as a character of hyper-masculine proportions.” In All Man Ernest is just about everywhere in the in the 1950s. Gracing the covers of literally hundreds of magazines, from Focus, which voted him one of the sexiest men in America, to Show, which featured the Hungarian starlet Zsa Zsa Gabor and her list of the ten most “sexciting men” of 1957, Hemingway was hard to ignore. As Zsa Zsa put it “Hemingway's such an outdoor man! So different in every way from women...”.

What was ironic, for me at least, reading the book was to see how Ernest went from being a representative of the Lost Generation and its anti-militarist, anti-conformist themes to someone whose image was used by corporate America to help returning WWII war veterans conform to their roles as suburban husbands and fathers in a conservative, aggressively capitalist nation. Indeed, the alpha-male portrayals of Hemingway filled a cultural need, says Earle, to reaffirm the country's masculinity in an era of “deep-rooted crisis of gender”. Woman had changed during the war, taking on the jobs that their men used to do, and would never again be as submissive as they'd once been. Ernest's past as a wounded veteran and his glamorous lifestyle in Cuba fishing and womanizing could thus be used as a role model and a means of social control. His short stories of WWI soldiers dealing with shell-shock were enormously appealing to a whole new generation of veterans still struggling with their own nightmares, while the sexually ambiguity and relative strength of women in many of his earlier works was conveniently ignored. Ernest certainly hadn't given up writing about male dysfunctionality or his personal search for a more African sexuality “beyond all tribal law” (the Garden of Eden, was written during the 1950s), but he does seem to have understood that he could no longer find a market for the gender bending games of Garden.

Earle's All Man shows us the enormous shadow that Ernest cast over post-war America and at the same time gives us an idea of the intense pressure that he must have experienced living life in the fish bowl of celebrity culture and how this could have only compounded the depression and paranoia that he suffered from in his final years. It is an extremely well-written, and beautifully illustrated book and an important addition to Hemingway scholarship.

Revista Caras

2010-10-02T05:03:00.000-07:00

For any readers who can speak Spanish, an interview of me done by Mauricio Hernandez just came out in Revista Caras (Mexico).

Here are the pages:

Norman, Ernest and Greg

2010-08-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

Here's an article that will soon appear in the 2010 edition of the Norman Mailer Review.

Norman, Ernest and Greg

While most scholars believe that the failure of George Plimpton’s plan to bring Norman Mailer and my grandfather together ended any possibility of a meeting, they may have been in close proximity to each other at least once. From what I’ve been told (and I admit that I can’t prove this), Norman did see my grandfather at a gathering in New York City, just after the publication of The Naked And The Dead, but it wasn’t much of a meeting. I don’t think they even said anything to each other. Or rather, Norman had the chance to approach Ernest but he didn’t. At the time, Mailer was the new sensation of American literature but Ernest was reigning champ in his category and he either pretended that Norman wasn’t there or was too busy dealing with all the other writers and journalists who invariably surrounded him at events of this sort. Without a doubt he knew who Norman Mailer was. Ernest knew who all the very good writers were. He was a voracious reader and liked to stay abreast of what was new and interesting in fiction.

Norman was young enough to be grandfather’s son. He was as old as my Uncle Jack, but in spite of the age difference between the two men he and Ernest had a lot in common. Both of them were war veterans and wrote hugely successful novels based upon their experiences. They were literary celebrities and were in the news as much for their excessive drinking, swearing and politics as they were for their stories. They loved women but never seemed to stay with any of them for too long, marrying many times (Norman 6 and Ernest 4), and they were both roundly criticized by feminists for their perceived “mysogynistic behavior”. They were passionate about boxing and wrote about it (or filmed it as Norman did with Mohammed Ali) and at times seemed to train as much as any pro boxer might, preparing for the ‘big fight’. They were also famous for hitting people who annoyed them (or butting heads).

Norman was more of a radical, politically speaking, than my grandfather was. The founder of the Village Voice was an acute observer of the 1960s, writing about the violence and the protests at the conventions in Miami and Chicago and the demonstrations in Washington against the Vietnam War. Ernest, of course, supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War but he never let his leftist leanings get in the way of his visiting Spain in the 1950’s when the fascists were firmly in control of the country. Democracy was important to Ernest, but Corrida and the world of bullfighting and matadors were even more so.

Still, as a Hemingway, what comes to mind most when I think of Norman Mailer are not the many similarities with Ernest but his friendship with my father, Gregory Hemingway. When I was a boy I spent a year with my father and his wife Valerie in their two-bedroom apartment on East 87^th street and what I remember most about that place, apart from the fact that it was very cramped with 5 kids and 2 adults, was this enormous mounted tuna head in the dining room. It was from a 750 lb tuna that my father had caught off the coast of Cape Cod. Being 9 years old I was, of course, full of questions about the fish and my father told me that it had taken him 7 hours to bring it in and he showed me a picture of the tuna that was almost as long as the boat itself. Needless to say, I was seriously impressed, but what he didn’t tell me, and what I found out from a good friend of my father’s years later, what that Norman had been with him that day out in the ocean. He was a witness to my father’s day-long battle with the monster tuna and I have to say that I envy him that. I wish that I could have been there myself to see my dad as happy as he looked standing next to the near record-breaking tuna on the dock in Provincetown. It was certainly one of the better days in my father’s often troubled life and Norman was there.

The other thing that I remember when I think of their friendship is the beautiful preface that Norman wrote for my father’s memoir “Papa”. The book was published in 1976 and whenever I come across a copy I ask myself just how well Norman knew Greg. “Papa”, in reality, says little about my father’s endless flirtation with cross-dressing or about what some scholars at the time were just beginning to discover about EMH’s not exactly 100% macho proclivities. Still, I have to believe that Norman as a great writer and artist was a perceptive man, too, and that something of my grandfather and father’s search for what Ernest defined as a “more African sensuality, beyond all tribal law” must have come to his attention. Would Norman have been intrigued by this dark side to the Hemingways, perhaps smiling and ultimately chalking it up as a clear case of ‘different strokes for different folks’? Or was it something that might have upset him, contrasting as it did with the usual image of Ernest? I’m sure that I’ll never know the answer to this question, but I can’t help but wonder.

New interview at the Hemingway Project

2010-08-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

For any fans of my grandfather there is a new interview of me at The Hemingway Project where I answer questions about Ernest, my book and my family.

BP Oil disaster stalls Gulf Loop Current

2010-08-04T04:09:00.000-07:00

Recently when I was in Bimini I asked a few people if there had been any signs of the infamous BP tar balls that have been washing up on beaches throughout the Gulf. I was worried that Bimini, sooner or later, was due to get its unfair share of the toxic gobs due to its proximity to the Loop Current and to the Gulf Stream. Fortunately, I didn't see any, but one of the reasons for this might be the report from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (National Institute of Nuclear Physics) of Fascati Italy. According to Gianluigi Zangari, a theoretical physicist and complex and chaotic systems analyst at the Italian research center, the Gulf Loop Current, as of 28 July, has effectively stalled because of the BP oil disaster. According to Zangari this could have catastrophic ramifications on the planet's ecosystem as early as 2011, resulting in widespread droughts, floods and crop failures. The Loop Current is considered one of the major "motors" of the Gulf Stream, which in turn is responsible for keeping a good part of New England and Western Europe temperate during the winter. Zangari is now looking for evidence that the Loop Current is reestablishing itself.

A new start for Bimini

2010-08-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

What a difference five years can make. In 2005 I flew to Bimini from Ft. Lauderdale on a Grumman Albatross and spent one of my nights on the island at the Compleat Angler hotel. Now, of course, the seaplanes are gone, as is the Compleat Angler. The fatal crash in December of 2005 put an end to the over 80 years of Chalk’s relatively accident free service, just as a fire, barely a month later, would destroy the historic inn. The NTSB investigation into the plane crash discovered that the airline had “failed to properly repair the fatigue cracks” in the Albatross’s fuselage while no one really knows how the blaze at the Compleat Angler started. Walking down King’s Highway (one of two roads on the island) you can still see the foundation and the concrete chimney of the hotel’s fireplace. Nothing has changed since then and as far as I know there are no plans to rebuild the inn, which had become a kind of unofficial museum for the island and a shrine to my grandfather with an autographed copy of one of his novels and many photographs of his fishing exploits.

Chalk's Grumman Albatross landing in Bimini

For my father there was never any question about staying at the Compleat Angler so long as Helen Duncombe owned the hotel. She and her husband Henry had built the inn in 1935 and while other places might have had swimming pools, or marinas or fancy restaurants, nothing could compete with my father’s childhood memories. Whenever possible he took me to the same room where he and his father had slept. It was up on the second floor and had a view of the Blue Water Marina across the street. It was small by today’s standards, with two single beds and an ancient, wood burning stove in the center. The stove was there for heating, as it could get cold in the winter. When I was eight I remember asking my dad about the stove and he said that I should never touch it during a storm. Years back, when he was a year or two younger than I was then he’d been sitting on my bed and my grandfather was on the other side of the room near the door. There was thunder outside and heavy rain and my father had made the mistake of walking to the stove and touching it to see how hot it could get when a lightening bolt connected with the hotel and threw him back against the wall. It knocked him unconscious and he said that Ernest had picked him up and carried him out in to the rain to find a doctor.

The Compleat Angler before the blaze

My father also told me about the boxing matches that Ernest organized on the island. He was passionate about fighting and in 2005 I asked Yama Bahama (William H. Butler, Jr.), a native of Bimini and one of the greatest welterweight fighters of the 1950s, if it was true what they said about my grandfather, that he’s set up a ring where the seaplanes used to land and that young men would come from all over the Bahamas to knock him out, but that none of them ever did. Yama told me that while he had never seen Ernest fight his older brother had and that in his opinion Ernest always won for the simple reason that none of his challengers had any professional training. Many of them were big, really big, and incredibly strong but Ernest had technique and that made all the difference.

Ernest boxing in Bimini, 1936

“He used his head,” said Yama, “and while he’d sometimes get beat up pretty bad he knew a thing or two about fighting, see? And those guys never had a chance.”

The Bimini Big Game Club is right across the road from where I spoke with Yama. Like a lot of things on the island it had seen its better days. In 2008 it shut down due to the economic crisis and its effect on tourism. But the fact that it’s now reopened can definitely be seen as a turning point for Bimini. After an extended period of mala suerte, starting with the Chalk’s crash and continuing with the destruction of the Compleat Angler, its new owners are optimistic about the future. It’s now a “Guy Harvey Outpost”, the first in a series of resorts that will mix Caribbean pleasures with Mr. Harvey’s renowned passion for Blue Marlins, the sea, research and conservation. I have to say that I was impressed by what I saw there last July. The hotel looks great, the food is excellent and the staff very friendly and helpful. With any luck at all the reopening of the Big Game and its marina will put Bimini back on the tourism and big game fishing map where it belongs and that other good things for the island will follow.

The Bimini Big Game Club marina at dawn

Brylcreem Man

2010-04-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a short story of mine that was published in the Spring 2010 edition of Saw Palm, the Florida Literature and Art journal of the University of South Florida.

Miami Sunrise

Brylcreem Man

When he looked at himself in the mirror his long, black, wiry hair was as it had been the night before, disheveled and with a sheen that could have been mistaken for Brylcreem. His eyesight had never been that good and when he found his glasses he noticed the white roots and made a mental note to pick up a box of hair color. His girlfriend was still in bed and if he could find a pharmacy that was open he’d have everything done before she got up, but he was tired and feeling stressed and went for a walk on the beach instead.

What he really needed was a vacation and not just a break from the city. Flying down to Miami and staying at the hotel where he and his mother had always stayed when she was alive helped, but it couldn’t make up for the lack of sleep nor the state of his career. Mentiroso was now a has-been in the world of avant-garde theater. He had come to a dead end, and for the past six months he’d been forced to pay his bills either in cash or with his girlfriend’s credit card. Times were bad but this lack of work was something that he had never experienced before. It was positively plebian, lower class and demeaning, and he wondered how much longer he would have to hand deliver the $2,000 of his monthly rent in crisp $100 dollar bills.

“Was any of this my fault?” he asked himself rhetorically as he stepped out of the elevator and walked towards the pool and the beach beyond it. Could he be blamed for stating the truth about that hotel in Rome? Should he have said nothing of the raw sewage smell from the toilet?

“Was that my fucking fault?!” he said out loud as he brushed past a Guatemalan maid and a Venezuelan pool cleaner. He hadn’t planned on broadcasting the filth of his lodgings to the rest of Italy but how was he supposed to know that one of the journalists that he’d spoken to would actually print what he had to say?

That was where he’d screwed himself. The paper published his “defamatory statements” and the next thing he knew the hotel was suing him. “Mentiroso dice che la sua stanza fa schifo” (Mentiroso says that his room sucks) was the title that the newspaper ran and it was more than enough. He had a reputation for trash talk and over the years he’d made many enemies on both sides of the Atlantic, but in spite of everything his talent (which was real) had always protected him. He’d been sued before, but this time it was different. After the stock market crash people weren’t as forgiving as they used to be. If in the past a judge might have seen him as a kind of clown and let him off with a slap on the wrist, tolerance was now a rare commodity and you had to be careful. For the hotel owners he was an easy mark and the lawyer’s fees and the fine wiped out the million in stocks and gold that he’d saved.

When he opened the gate to the beach he took his shoes off so that he could feel the sand on his feet. In New England there was a foot of snow on the ground but here it never got cold. His mother liked to compare it to the town in southern Italy where she’d been raised. “Feel how fine the sand is,” she would say, “and look at the clear blue of the water and you’ll know what it was like for me when I was your age.” The water, of course, was still blue but it had never revealed much to him about his mother’s upbringing. She had serious issues with the truth and could invent the most outrageous stories. When he was a boy she would often tell him that his father was a black American G.I. who she’d met after the war and that that was the reason for his kinky hair, or that the Mentirosos were Italian nobility but that they’d lost everything during the Fascist years. None of it was true, or perhaps all of it was, who could really say? When someone was lying to you twenty-four hours a day any ideas they might have about reality were sketchy at best. He understood that it was wrong but what could he do? She was his mother and while he tried to resist her, in the end he accepted her behavior as his own, even though officially he still disagreed with the lies.

When he was seventeen he either left her, or was kicked out of the house. There were two versions of this coming of age, but the one which most people recognize as true, and which was posted on his Wikipedia site, said that his mother had been living with two Mexican brothers near the border in Arizona and that her lovers had convinced her to give him the boot. Many saw this as the inspiration for one of his more scandalous and critically acclaimed pieces “Non scopare quei uomini Mama! (Don’t fuck those men, Mother)” This seminal work finishes tragically for the protagonist who is not only spurned by his mother, but also killed and barbecued by a group of famished Chicanos.

Moving to New York he financed his studies and living expenses selling LSD and pimping himself to wealthy lawyers and stockbrokers. It was a period that he looked back upon with a certain nostalgia and he could talk enthusiastically for hours about all the writers and musicians he knew or the time when he and a group of friends had hitchhiked up to Woodstock to see the concert.

He had lived through a lot and to be honest he thought that there wasn’t much that he hadn’t experienced that was worth knowing. He was a great artist and had been a part of the golden age in avant-garde theater of the 1980s and 90s. Of course, now that all of that had come to an inglorious end he realized that he needed to quickly write a book (and secure a movie deal) about his life. For this reason he was in near constant contact with his agent.

With a book, but especially with a movie deal, he wouldn’t have to worry about the unpaid bills that had kept him awake at night or the consistently bad reviews that his latest works had garnered or even sticking with his girlfriend. Daniela was pretty, and gifted in a commercial/pop/soap-opera kind of way, but he absolutely needed to avoid becoming any more dependent upon her than he already was. Just last night when they were eating at one of his favorite steak houses near the beach she’d asked him again if he really loved her and when he said that he did she upped the ante with “Well, don’t you think it’s time then that we got married?”

“What?!” he managed to blurt out as he almost choked on an exquisite piece of aged New York sirloin.

“Don’t you think it’s time?” she repeated with a knowing smile on her lips that he would have found attractive on any other woman but that on her filled him with a sense of panic and dread.

“I think there’s time for everything,” he told her after he’d swallowed his meat, “but we’ve only been together, for what?, three years? Why rush it? I love you and you love me and we’re fairly clear on that and there really isn’t any reason that I can see to over-emphasize this issue.”

“Then you don’t love me?”

“Not at all.” He said (which was the truth).

“What??”

“I mean that we shouldn’t jump into to this.”

“But I want to jump in, Gianni, and I want you to jump in with me.” And he knew that he was not going to get out of this one easily and in fact just about everything he said to her that night as they ate was not what she wanted to hear. It was as if his genius for spin and molding the truth of anything to his needs had abandoned him and all he could do was state, in as many different ways, that fundamentally he wasn’t all that fond of Daniela. Of course, he didn’t say that, but he wasn’t telling her what he knew she wanted to hear and this inability to lie troubled him. He wasn’t sure but he suspected that the combined stress of his financial and artistic situations was inhibiting his manipulative gifts and that if he didn’t find some kind of relief there was no telling where it might lead.

Fortunately, not all was wrong with his world. America had a new president and everything about the man was inspirational and led him to believe that change was indeed possible. An Afro-American in the White House had altered the political and social landscape of his country and he felt a special kinship to this politician in part because of his mother’s tale of his black, G.I. dad and in part because of the baby boy he’d secretly fathered with a woman from Harlem. In many ways, he’d come full circle and had, before anyone else knew about Obama, created his own personalized version of the man; a “mini-me” who embodied the best of the U.S. (racially speaking) and who, like his father, would some day see the necessity of alien relocation and language integrity.

“And if he doesn’t want to throw the Spics into the sea then he’s no son of mine.” He reminded himself as he skipped a flat rock into the Gulf Stream.

The illegals were a pestilence on the land. This was obvious to him. They were a diseased and unsanitary army that needed a good kicking in the butt. Having sucked greedily and for years at the nation’s vital juices they were sapping America of its strength and will to survive. Of course, as a patriot, and an artist, he knew what he had to do. He was way ahead of the curve and was just waiting for the movie deal to gel and take its final form.

“But shouldn’t he be calling me instead of me always having to call him?” he wondered. The man had an apartment in Manhattan but he was never there. In fact, Mentiroso couldn’t remember the last time that the two of them were physically together. They kept in touch text messaging and with quick conversations that the agent managed to squeeze in on his way to see other clients in LA or London.

The phone rang and rang and Mentiroso grew impatient. He paced back and forth with his Blackberry in the sand. The sun was coming up over the horizon and the sky in the distance had shades of lavender and light blue. There were three container ships steaming towards the port and seagulls kept watch atop the concrete pilings of a pier.

“Where the fuck is he?” said Mentiroso. “15% of everything I make goes to this clown and so, goddamnit, when I call he’s suppose to pick up the fracking phone.” But there was no answer. He obviously wasn’t on the agent’s list of priority clients.

A few hours later when he was sitting by himself at the hotel bar his agent finally acknowledged his existence with a short text message that read: “Gianni, no film deals with Warner/Universal. Try Disney?? Baci, Bernie.”

It certainly wasn’t what he wanted to hear but he had to admit that there were reasons. Not only was his agent incompetent, the studios were even worse. He felt surrounded by a sea of philistines and degenerates. No one could understand his art. It was beyond them. They were like ants, tiny little insignificant specs of societal sewage and frankly he had had enough of trying to educate them, of getting them to the point where they could see what he had always known.

“To hell with them,” he said as he downed his fourth shot of Grappa and ordered another. The bar had TVs set up in every corner and looking at the one in front of him there was a pudgy, balding journalist who in a deep, booming sort of voice was asking America again how much longer it could afford to support the illegal aliens in its midst.

“Damn right!” said Mentiroso. There were a few other people in the bar, but no one seemed to pay him any attention. The journalist was commenting on the latest I.C.E raid in Ohio. Immigration officers had surrounded a textile factory, shutting it down and arresting anyone who couldn’t prove their US citizenship. The operation was massive and well planned, targeting the thriving Latino community that for the most part worked in the factory.

As news of the raid spread throughout the community panicky parents rushed to pull their children out of the local school and hide them from the government agents. The journalist noted with a mix of solemnity and badly cloaked glee that over 200 illegal aliens had been apprehended and were at this very moment being processed for deportation.

“This,” he assured his audience, “is what I would call a good example of how our tax money should be spent and how it rarely ever is. A fresh start for America.”

“Indeed!” said Mentiroso as the bartender brought him his fifth round. He was pissed off at his agent and his mother, tired and somewhat disgusted with his girlfriend but more than anything else he felt positively sick at the thought of what the illegals were doing to America. He wanted them out and was ready to take whatever action was needed. After five shots of Grappa he was furious and had come to the conclusion that they were at the root of everything that was destroying his career. The journalist was right, better to deal with the problem before it got out of hand.

“Gimme a drink!” he said and the bartender handed him another shot. The pudgy-faced man was wrapping up his philippic and reminding Mentiroso that enforcing the law of the land was nothing to be ashamed of.

“I get plenty of emails accusing me of being anti-immigrant,” said the journalist, “but nothing could be further from the truth. All I want is for the laws of this great country of ours to be respected! And I ask you, is that too much to expect? Have we given up on the idea of America, on the idea of a land where Freedom, Justice and Liberty for all still mean something? I say not. The constitution still holds and anyone, and I mean women and children included, who enter this country illegally have to and will be forcefully removed, if necessary!”

“That’s the way you do it!” agreed Mentiroso. The shear stress of having to deal with these illegals was killing America’s mojo. It prevented the country from spinning its image abroad. It had conquered a world with its vision of wealth and individualism. It was sexy and cinematographic and casting his gaze about the bar he wondered if anyone else was as enthusiastic as he was about the immigration raid. There was a businessman near the entrance who was talking to a client on his cell phone, a couple in the corner holding hands and a group of young Cubans who pretended not to see him when he looked their way.

Not in a mood to be ignored he suddenly stood up and shouted in their direction “Tu puta madre (your mother’s a whore)!” He didn’t really speak Spanish but he knew enough to know that this was a bad insult.

“You talking to me, old man?” one of Cubans asked.

“Yeah, I’m talking to you!”

“Sit down, viejo, y cállate (shut up).”

“Stuff it, spics!” said Mentiroso and at that point even the businessman put down his phone. This was Miami after all and everyone in that room was Latino. The bartender came around to where Mentiroso was standing and calmly told him that it was time to take a deep breath and then leave. It was the sensible thing to do and in retrospect not only would it have saved him a lot of grief but his two front teeth as well. Instead, taking aim for the first time in his life, he threw his shot glass at the Cuban, hitting him squarely in the face. The reaction of the victim was immediate and soon he and his friends were pummeling Mentiroso. They were enraged and Mentiroso didn’t do anything to lessen their anger continuing as he did to insult their mothers, their girlfriends and whoever else he could think of. The more they beat him, in fact, the more he spewed out his stream of venom and race-hatred. His face had turned puffy and blue under their blows, his glasses were shattered, but he didn’t care. He was finally fighting the good fight, sacrificing himself for his art and his country on the altar of his many lies.

The bartender tried to pull him out but the Cubans wouldn’t stop. They wanted him dead, but before he passed out he reminded his assailants of one last thing: “I’m in charge,’ he said, “and that’s the truth.”

Art from Tucson

2010-04-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt, one of the best things about traveling is the people you meet along the way. Last March when I was in Tucson I had the enormous good fortune of running into Chris Andrews. Chris is an extraordinary artist who moved to the Southwest soon after he finished art school in Michigan in 1974. My first impact with one of his works was a mural he'd painted of a lush tropical landscape in Son's Bakery Café. Son, the owner of the café, is from Vietnam and Chris wanted to do something that reminded him of home.

And this is where I sat, right below the Cockadoo and the deep green of his Asian forest.
But in my opinion the best of his work is seen in his depictions of desert landscape and native American spirituality. One of the more striking works is "The Last Laugh". I love the color of the flowers, the mountain range and the sunset that frame the death of this Indian chief.

Another amazing work is his "Raven Wants The Moon". I've looked at it so many times that now whenever I see a Raven here in Montreal I can't help but think of the desert and Tucson and the significance of this singular painting.

Two other favorites of mine are "Medicine Hat" and "The Talking Stick"

But, of course, there are many places where you can admire Chris' work out in the open in Tucson. To the right of this cathedral, for example, there is a band stand decorated with thousands of flowers. Chris did the flowers.

The cathedral

The bandstand

A close-up of the flowers

I think that anyone in Tucson or anyone planning on going there in the near future should check out Chris' work. You won't be disappointed.

Chris can be reached at: chrisandrews2@cox.net

Strange Tribe at the Tucson Festival of Books

2010-03-13T04:54:00.000-08:00

For anyone in the Tucson area, I'll be speaking about Strange Tribe this morning at 10 am in the University of Arizona bookstore, at the Tucson Festival of Books. The Festival is being held this weekend with over 400 different authors from the USA and abroad.

John Hemingway at The Windy City Story Slam

2010-02-06T11:13:00.000-08:00

Windy City Story Slam

Here’s a heads-up for anyone in the Chicago area. I’ll be speaking and doing a book signing at the Hemingway House in Oak Park on Thursday the 25th and on the 26th I’ve been invited to take part in the Windy City Story Slam. It’ll be my first time at the Hemingway House and after this I’ll have seen all of his homes except for the Finca Vigía outside of Havana (which for a US citizen like myself is just a tad more difficult to visit). Eventually, however, I’m sure that I’ll make it to Cuba, too. The government down there, in collaboration with the American Finca Vigía Foundation, has been doing a lot of important work in saving my grandfather’s island hideaway from the ravages of Cuba’s humidity, termites and tropical storms.

Chance encounters are everything in life and if I hadn’t met Bill Hillmann in a bar during the Fiesta of Pamplona last year I probably wouldn’t be speaking in Chicago at the end of this month. Bill, unlike my grandfather, actually runs with the bulls during San Fermin. Ernest was very good at popularizing and reporting on what he saw during his visits to Spain but he was smart enough to steer clear of the Toro Bravos, the fighting bulls that race through the streets of Pamplona. Having already had his brush with death on the Italian front during the First World War when he was hit by an Austrian shell, he probably didn’t feel the need to risk it all again and again as runners like my friend Bill do every year during the Fiesta. Bill, a talented writer in his own right, is a native of Chicago, and I think it only fitting that I should be invited by him to his home town to speak and to reconnect with a city that perhaps more than any other created the man whose works have influenced generations of writers. If a sense of place is, as they say, at the core of any great author, then what could be more important than the town where Ernest was born and raised?

Strange Tribe at the Miami Book Fair

2009-10-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

I'll be presenting my memoir, Strange Tribe, at the Miami Book Fair on Sunday, November the 15th, at 2:00 in the afternoon. A good part of Strange Tribe takes place in Miami and I'm really looking forward to finally being able to speak about it in my hometown.

San Fermin

2009-07-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

This article was published today in the Madrid daily "El Mundo"

It was only when I first visited Pamplona in July of 2008 that I finally understood the impact that the Fiesta of San Fermin must have had on my grandfather’s work. Of course, I had read The Sun Also Rises (1926) and had heard various accounts of the Sanfermines from family members who had been there, but the reality of the Fiesta far surpasses any description of it. The explosion of color and energy that starts with the Txupinazo and continues with the beauty and the pathos of the encierros and corridas is certainly unique in Europe and, as far as I know, in the rest of the world.

Ernest came to the Fiesta nine times and most of these years were in what I would call the prime of his writing career, from 1923 to 1931. It’s true that he wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 and The Old Man And The Sea in 1952, but most Hemingway scholars consider his best work to be the short stories that he wrote in the 1920’s and that of the novels he published in that period The Sun Also Rises or Fiesta, stands apart from the others in terms of style and theme. Indeed, like many of his short stories, The Sun Also Rises is subtly subversive. Things are not always what they seem. On one level we have a hero (Jake Barnes) and a heroine (Lady Brett Ashley) who seem to reaffirm the classic stereotypes of men and women, but in reality it is Brett who acts like a man, who is aggressive sexually and who can drink with the best of them. Jake is a wounded war veteran and was sexually emasculated in a plane crash on the Italian front. He is the submissive personality in the story, the feminine foil for Brett as she seduces all the men she encounters.

As stories go it is not exactly what you’d expect from my grandfather, given his image as a womanizer and all-around macho-man, but then Ernest was much more complicated than most people give him credit for. Like any true artist he did his best to express the stories that were inside him, to give form and texture to the emotions and events that he experienced and I can’t help but think that the Fiesta de San Fermin was fundamental to his art in that it provided the perfect mix of contradictions, of good and bad, ugly and beautiful, comic and tragic.

While the Fiesta is, in fact, the celebration of a saint, San Fermin, most foreigners are aware of Pamplona because of the running of the bulls. Every year television crews from around the world film the encierros and even if you’ve never read Fiesta or Michener’s The Drifters you will probably have seen at least once in your life a video of this crazy run in a small town in northern Spain where supposedly sane men decide to risk their lives racing in front of a pack of fighting bulls, each of which weighs upwards of 500 kilos.

Many young Americans, Canadians, Brits and Australians see their participation in the running of the bulls as a kind of right of passage to manhood. Indeed, while I’ve never run myself, I’ve spoken to many at the fiesta who have and this year I was even asked to console a young, slightly drunk, US Marine who was on leave from Iraq and who had come to Pamplona like many other men his age to test his courage against the bulls but who in that crucial moment had found his courage lacking. He was packed in with hundreds of other runners near Mercaderes when six Toros Bravos came thundering through the square on their way to the Curva at Estafeta and he had found himself at a kind of crossroads in his relatively short life. He could stay in the square and probably get hit by a bull that was about to over-run him or dive under the barrier and save his own skin. He chose the latter and when I saw him in the afternoon at a bar just to the left of La Perla hotel he still couldn’t reconcile himself to his perceived défaillance.

He was about six feet tall, well built and with the typical crew cut of an American soldier. I introduced myself and told him that no matter what the outcome of his run had been, just by deciding to put himself in harm’s way he had already been through something that my grandfather had never experienced. Contrary to what most people might think, Ernest never ran with the bulls. There are photos of him playing with the cows in the plaza after the encierro, but he was not a runner.

The soldier was surprised to hear this from me, yet he still could not get over the fact that he had been afraid when he should have been courageous. I told him that there was nothing to be ashamed of and asked him what he would have done if a large truck was about to run him over on a road? Would he stand his ground and get killed or would he step aside?

“I’d step aside.” He said.

“Obviously, because you don’t want to die.” And as I finished the sentence it occurred to me that everything about this conversation was highly surreal. There I was counseling this 23-year-old Marine whose day job consisted in dodging IED’s (improvised explosive devices) and in general policing a people, the Iraqis, who at best wanted to have nothing to do with him and his army and at worst wished him dead. How could someone, I thought, who did this for a living be afraid of the bulls? But afraid he’d been and ashamed he remained until I reminded him that tomorrow was another day and that the bulls would run again that if he really felt he needed to prove something then he’d have his chance.

Of course, as the events of this year has shown, if ever a reminder was needed, running with the bulls is an extremely dangerous activity and should never be taken likely. Even the most experienced runners can have a bad day and end up in the hospital. A Scottish friend of mine who has been running for over twenty years fell down and banged his head and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance for CAT scan. It was the first time that he’d run the Curva at Estafeta in 137 runs and the first time that he’d ever fallen.

The young man from Madrid who died was also an experienced runner and was from a family where his father and his grandfather, natives of Navarra, had also been runners. From what I’ve been told he carefully prepared every encierro that he ever did. He would go to bed early the night before, would never dream of showing up on the course drunk and at 27 was in his prime. Still, the encierro is such that all it takes is one moment of bad luck and all the experience and agility of a young man means nothing.

After his death and the other serious injuries in this year’s Fiesta, some have suggested that the encierros be restricted to those who know what they are doing and who run with the bulls having properly prepared themselves for the task. In short that it be restricted to “professional runners”. I, however, think that the encierro should be left as it is, i.e. open to any sober adult who wants to run it.

Those who participate are volunteers. No one is forcing them to do this, just as no one forces a boxer to enter the ring with an opponent who could, in theory at least, kill him. And what of skydiving, or even surfing, or road cycling? In Italy I practiced amateurial level road racing and occasionally there were riders who would fall off their bikes on steep descents in the Italian Alps and die. It was a always a rare event but you knew that there was a risk and tried to race as safely as possible, still life is full of surprises and bad luck does happen. I remember that I cycled because I loved the sport and loved the feeling of rushing down a mountain at 70 kilometers an hour on two very thin tires.

I didn’t want to get hurt but at the same time whenever I heard about people who had fallen badly I never thought about quitting. It was just a part of my sport and I imagine that those who run in the encierro feel the same way about theirs.

I remember once asking a bullfighter why he kept going back to fight, in spite of his many serious injuries and he told me, “John, death is all around us, and we are going to die no matter what we do eventually. The important, though, thing is how we live our lives.” Now perhaps I’m wrong but I think that this is also the essence of the Fiesta, how you live your life. My grandfather understood this when he went there for the first time in 1923 and it is something that I was able to see with my own eyes 85 years later.

El Txupinazo!

2009-07-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

El Txupinazo

Just a little over 12 hours left to the Txupinazo and the official beginning to the mother of all parties, la Fiesta de San Fermín.

I'm in Pamplona, Spain and this year, because it's the fiftieth anniversary of the last time my grandfather was here for the famous "running of the bulls", I've been invited to see the opening ceremony from one of the balconies of the town's City Hall. Last year I didn't see anything of the rocket they launch, because I was standing in front of the Ayuntamiento and wedged in between a zillion other people and trying (without much luck) not to get soaked with the wine and champagne that was being sprayed in industrial quantities.

This time I'm sure that the view will be better, but not the energy and the excitement that I'll feel. That's guaranteed for everyone.

The Saturday Evening Post

2009-06-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

A word to all you short fiction fans out there, The Saturday Evening Post is publishing "Uncle Gus", a story I wrote for the inaugural edition of their newly revamped magazine. After many years this historic publication, founded by Benjamin Franklin, has decided to reintroduce the short story to its format.
It should be in newsstands now, for those of you in North America, but you'll also be able to read it on their website.

Pastime

2009-05-17T17:15:00.000-07:00

The great Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti died today in Montevideo at the age of 88. Below is one of his poems and my translation of it.

Pasatiempo

Cuando éramos niños
los viejos tenían como treinta
un charco era un océano
la muerte lisa y llana
no existía.

Luego cuando muchachos
los viejos eran gente de cuarenta
un estanque un océano
la muerte solamente
una palabra.

Ya cuando nos casamos
los ancianos estaban en cincuenta
un lago era un océano
la muerte era la muerte
de los otros.

Ahora veteranos
ya le dimos alcance a la verdad
el océano es por fin el océano
pero la muerte empieza a ser
la nuestra.

Pastime

When we were very young
old people were thirty
a puddle was an ocean
death, smooth and plain
didn’t exist.

Later as children
old people were forty
a pond was an ocean
death but
a word.

Already when we married
the elderly were fifty
a lake was an ocean
and death was the death
of others.

Now as old hands
we are within reach of the truth
the ocean is finally the ocean
but death has started to resemble
our own.

Les, Marty and Ernie

2009-05-16T06:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a photo from 1940 of my great-uncle, Leicester Hemingway, standing with a beer in his hand on his schooner in Havana with Ernest and my grandfather's third wife Martha Gellhorn.

Happy Hour in Havana

Strange Tribe review from OSU

2009-02-19T06:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a review of Strange Tribe that came out on the Ohio State University newspaper, the Lantern, the day before my lecture.

Hemingway's grandson to bring troubled family tree to Wex through his memoir

Amanda Bishop

Issue date: 2/16/09 Section: Arts

Page 1 of 1

For John Hemingway, having a famous last name wasn't so much a gift as a package deal. Along with that name came a schizophrenic mother, a transvestite father, and a grandfather who, though a brilliant wordsmith, was also a manic-depressive who killed himself.

Hemingway, a writer and translator who lives in Montreal with his wife and two children, will appear at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 17 at the Wexner Center Film and Video Center to talk about his aptly-named memoir, "Strange Tribe." The appearance and book-signing, sponsored by the Department of English and the Sexuality Studies program, is free and open to the public.

John Hemingway
The memoir represents a son's effort to forgive, to deal with ghosts of his own and help people to understand the troubles and secrets that sifted down through generations of the Ernest Hemingway clan.

"The hardest thing was seeing what happened to them. I wanted to help them, but there was nothing I could do," said Hemingway, in a telephone interview. "It's difficult when you have all that pain wrapped up. How are you going to deal with that? I was thinking, 'I've had enough of that. It's not my problem.' But it is."

His father, Gregory Hemingway, was the youngest of Ernest Hemingway's three sons. The other two boys were blond; Gregory had the dark hair of his mother, Hemingway's second wife, Pauline. Ernest called him by a nickname, "Gigi," took him out shooting, and was proud of his marksmanship.

PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN HEMINGWAY
From Left: Patrick, Jack, Ernest and Gregory Hemingway pose together. Ernest' grandson, John Hemingway will appear at the Wexner Film and Video Center on Feb. 17 to discuss his recent memoir, 'Strange Tribe.'
But like Ernest, Gregory would suffer from both bi-polar disorder and a drinking problem. He also had a fixation with cross-dressing that began in boyhood. Gregory underwent a series of sexual reassignment surgeries as a man, and eventually took the name of "Gloria."

Gregory Hemingway had too many issues of his own to be a reliable father, so John, who did not inherit his father's manic depression, spent much of his childhood living in Miami with Ernest's brother, Leicester. For years, John alternated between anger at his father and a longing to reconnect with him. He decided to write the memoir after his father's death in Miami in 2001 at the age of 69.

One of the most poignant passages in the memoir is John's recollection about going to the movies with his father. It was a tradition he enjoyed, one of the rare father-son bonding experiences salvaged from a sporadic relationship. Near the end of one of the films, the two of them watched as a troubled character on the screen sat in an office with a gun, put it to his head and pulled the trigger.

At the sound of the shot, Gregory crumpled in his seat, rocking, moaning: "No, no, oh, no." John knew immediately why his father was reacting so strongly: in 1961, Ernest Hemingway, paranoid, depressed, unable to write and in failing health, had committed suicide in similar fashion.

Four Hemingway family members, besides Ernest, committed suicide - his father, sister, brother, and a granddaughter.

In researching the memoir, poring through old family letters and consulting with a new wave of Hemingway biographers, John Hemingway was struck by the similarities between Ernest and Gregory.

"Both were very witty and funny. They could also hold grudges. If you got on their bad side it would take you awhile to get back on their good side," he said. "Both of them were bipolar, and had a lifelong battle to achieve a balance between male and female."

That balancing act, on Ernest Hemingway's part, has been a hot topic among Hemingway scholars since the publication, in 1986, of an unfinished Hemingway manuscript that was stitched into a novel entitled "The Garden of Eden."

In the novel, the main characters, David and Catherine, engaged in sexual role playing in which they get identical haircuts and reverse gender roles in bed: At one point Catherine tells David "Now kiss me and be my girl." Hemingway scholars such as Carl Eby at the University of South Carolina and Debra Moddlemog of Ohio State have written extensively about the roots of Hemingway's fascination with such experimentation, which may reflect a little-known side of the two-fisted writer and macho adventurer.

John Hemingway theorizes that Ernest Hemingway's fascination with his own feminine side softened his attitude toward his gender-bending son. As evidence, he offered a story Gregory told him. It is a story that would ultimately give John Hemingway two gifts: a title for his memoir, and a heightened understanding of the relationship between his troubled father and his world-famous grandfather.

"I think that my dad was around 11 or 12, and he had put on a pair of his mother's nylons," John remembered. "Ernest walked into the room, stared at him for a moment, shocked, then walked out again without saying a word. But a few days later, he looked at Gregory and said: 'Gigi, you and I come from a strange tribe.' "

Any man's death diminishes me

2009-01-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

While Ernest Hemingway’s short stories are without a doubt some of the finest in American literature and perhaps the best of what he had to offer, his message in For Whom the Bell Tolls is what I like to think of when I think of my grandfather. When he quotes from John Donne’s Meditation XVII, “No man is an Island, entire of itself." Ernest evokes at the same time the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and the reality of the human condition. None of us, in spite of what we may believe, or have been told, is ever alone.

We are all in this together, or as Donne put it “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." Still in hard times like these you can’t help but wonder if the mayor of Bay City, a small town in Michigan, ever had the time to read Donne or my grandfather’s novel and what he was thinking when he found out that he had allowed a 93 year old man to freeze to death in his home.

The Bay City house where Marvin E. Shur froze to death

Marvin E. Shur owed over a thousand dollars to the Bay City utility company and the company had put a “limiter”, a kind of automatic circuit breaker on Mr. Shur’s electricity meter. Over a period of ten days the limiter was designed to encourage the “client” to pay up, by slowly reducing the electricity that he could use. If, at any point, the 93 year old had decided to turn up the heating in his house (quite probable given the frigid artic temperatures outside, -23C/-10F) the limiter would have automatically shut off his power. The utility company says that Mr. Shur could have easily switched the power back on, but that would have meant going outside into the cold to flick a switch on the limiter and no one had bothered to contact the old man to tell him that he could do this, or to verify that he was physically capable of venturing outside.

Mr. Shur was a widower with no children and the city coroner estimates that he finally died of hypothermia two days after the limiter was installed on the 13th of January. On the 17th, his body was found by neighbors who noticed that the windows of his home had frosted over. Shur had tried to dress as warmly as he could with two pairs of pajamas, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The news of the death of this retied factory worker and World War II veteran, couldn’t perhaps compete with the torrent of corporate media hype surrounding Obama’s impending inauguration but it certainly had a lot to do with the country that the Prince of Hope was about to lead and the degeneration of America’s sense of solidarity and humanity.

Utility companies in many areas of the Midwest and Northeast of the US have been steadily increasing their rates, and for the poor, the unemployed and the elderly this is an enormous hardship. Often they are forced to decide between food or heating their homes. The mayor of Bay City, Charles Brunner (a democrat who later flew to Washington for Obama’s lavish inauguration festivities), has shown little remorse for what he has done. In fact, on the same day that Shur’s death was reported nationally the mayor voted with the town council to increase the town’s utility rates by 3%.

“We’ve gotten very creative in the ways we purchase power, but it’s a very complicated market and it’s an expensive market,” Brunner said after the meeting. “and we have to pass the costs on.”

Lecture at Ohio State University

2009-01-28T14:37:00.000-08:00

For those of you in the Columbus, Ohio area, I'll be talking about my memoir, Strange Tribe, and all things Ernest at OSU's Wexner Center Film/Video Theatre on February 17th at 7:00 pm.

Boxing Day!

2008-12-26T07:24:00.000-08:00

Seeing as how it's Boxing Day here in Canada I thought that I'd post a music video "Give Me Your Heart" (just click on the link) from The BoxCarBoys, a new group from Brazil.

Love out of mind

2008-12-14T12:12:00.000-08:00

Mind

Not that the mind
Is out there all alone
Attempting to make
Sense of it!
No.
The mind is many-limbed
It can run and jump,
It can turn a diamond
Slowly in its hands
And hold it to the light
Just as it can peel the pith
Of an orange or smudge
A taut canvas with its blood.
Animal mind that pounces
At philosophy, that tears beliefs
Down to their bare bones,
That longs to be free from the bars
That bind it to all that is rational,
To all that will one day die.
And the mind has ears and eyes
And roams the world
In search of clues as to the guilt
Or innocence of those who speak
Of systems that would betray
The body and forever damn
The soul. Truth is no common soap
And honesty no detergent and the loss
Of one’s good name is nothing compared
To a loss of mind, for within that universe
Unlimited and detailed distances
Unfold, so that in such a river
On such a day in such a summer
Two lovers bathed and exchanged
Vows that had been seeded
In the stars that Dante once observed
From the hills above the doomed city.
All cities are doomed, only
Love will outlive their destruction
In time out of mind.

John Lyons

14 December 2008

The Ten Fingers

2008-11-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a meditation on heat and love from John Lyons

Sofía

The ten fingers
Of a seven-year old
Holding a semi-transparent
Pebble up to the light
As she tells her father
That she has found
A diamond, a rather
Coarsely polished
Stone picked from
The obscurity
Of the path
We are walking,
A chip of once
Molten rock
That has the hue
Of lightly cooked
Salmon - all nature,
All life being
About heat
And the loss of heat,
And what we
Carelessly take
To be incandescence.
It is close to sunset
And two woodpeckers
Sit idly on the condominium
Wall, wondering perhaps
Whether to call it a day,
To head home
As we all do,
At the end of a long day.
All out of the same
Cosmic soup, the spiral
Of life, the green parrots
With the bright red patch
Beneath their wings,
And their endless
Endless chatter,
The owls lazing
In the palm shade,
The convection of clouds
Gathering in the distance,
The unceasing transfer
Of energy from liquid
To gas, to liquid, and love
Precious love
In all its simplicity
Passing back and forth
between parent and child,
as tactile and as real
as the sample mineral
held in the hand and yet
of a beauty that could
put any flower
by any other name
to shame.

18 November 2008

Waldir

2008-11-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

Here is another beautiful poem written by John Lyons on the day of his father-in-law's death.

Waldir

There are names
And there are names,
Drenched in emotion
But free from tears
Names that sail
Freely along the coast
Of Ilhabela
Names that dwell
On the tip of the tongue
Names that are in essence
A kiss
Or a warm embrace
Names that love
The laughter of life
And scoff at death’s
Dismal victory,
names that purr after dark
just as Carol
is purring still
on the stairs
in São Carlos;
there are names
soaked to the core
in honour
in dignity
in respect,
names with a fierce
tenderness,
names that are
essential to the smooth
running of life
and that cause us to stand
to attention
as they pass us by
or as they pause
to spend a few years
with us, names
that charge the memory
with indelible moments,
names that bear
testimony to the stubbornness
of love, to the fact
pure and simple
that love outlives
pedestrian life that ultimately
cannot keep pace, cannot go the distance, life
that empty misnomer!
What’s in a name?
That uncommon denominator
That we carry from
The date of our birth
Up to and beyond
The moment of complete
Release, no longer
The wounded bird
Held in delicate hands,
But a name that soars
In the beating heart,
For ever and ever.

John Lyons

November 2nd 2008

Imperfections

2008-10-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

More poetry today from John Lyons:-)

On nature

The patience of three birds
Sitting on the garden wall
Surveying their prospects
For the day, their feathers
Ruffled by a gusting wind;
There is preening
and a conversation of sorts,
The contents of which
Do not bear speculation;
Flight is one of nature’s
Boldest gifts and a permanent
Lesson in humility to all
Who are bound to tread
The lowly turf. These birds
Who possess the most
Sophisticated navigation
Systems and an uncanny
Grasp of the mysteries
Attached to human mathematics
As they flock in groups
Of ten or twelve or four
Or three or seven, remnants
Of an age of angels.
There may exist a place
In which nothing is unknown,
In which everything is
Effortlessly explained
But surely wouldn’t we
Soon tire of such ease
Of ignorance? There is
More to the not knowing
That any mere answer
Can supply. Nature
In its wisdom produces
Flaws, imperfections
As though to round
out its genius, the eye
that does not focus
the hand afflicted by
the tremor of self-doubt,
the silence that no word
of genuine love ever filled.

30 October 2008

Timeless beauty

2008-10-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem that John Lyons let me read and that I asked him if I could post because it reminds me a lot of my own little girl.

Chiara on her grandfather's birthday

Beauty has its own melody
speaks with honesty
and spontaneity
has a clear eye
for what is good,
for what is better
for what is best
in human nature;
beauty loves the truth,
always,
and swears
by the power of love;
beauty
glows under the skin
and sets the lips
alight with a smile;
beauty is that child
on the road
to adolescent innocence,
never bored with
clumsy perfections,
never eager
to find fault but
content to stretch
the moment shared
into infinity;
beauty is the authentic
kiss of life, number
personified, intuitive
peace lived beyond
the wildest stretch
of the imagination.

7-10-2008

John Lyons

Radiation

2008-09-25T05:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a piece from a very good friend of mine, the Irish poet John Lyons, inspired by Louis Zukofsky.

Louis Zukofsky

Radiation he said
We are consumers of radiation
Of varying wavelengths
But radiation nonetheless
Energy that vibrates
That travels
through space and time
as we too
are bound by those coordinates
for all eternity
unless the mass of the universe
is to disappear:
nitrogen and carbon
omega 3,
and the simplicity
of the title he gave
to his life’s work
A
A poem
A vitamin
An assault
On the first letter
On the mathematics
of meaning
So much depends
We are told
Upon the creation
Of Henry Adams
And Adam Smith
Upon random specifics
Upon a throw
Of nature’s dice
An emphatically
Musical note
Sounding throughout
The pages
Literate
In every sense
Truth enfabled
The tortoise
And the hare
No sop to the cultured
Borges pre-imagined
In the myriad infinities
Of the alphabet
Though it takes objects
To people oblivion
Workers in the vineyard
That most literary
Of parables.
Radiation
He said
As though he were
Composing pages
Of uranium,
Poetry
To blow the mind.

John Lyons

Socialism for the rich!

2008-09-18T05:51:00.000-07:00

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." Ernest Hemingway, (September 1932)

Is this the big one? The financial meltdown that many have been predicting for the last two years? Well, I'm not an expert but when the US government shells out 85 billion dollars to essentially nationalize the world's largest insurance company (A.I.G.) then you know that fundamental changes are afoot. The purveyors of "shock and awe" capitalism, the conquerors of Baghdad, the destroyers of New Orleans and the conduit to the Almighty himself (through W, God speaks to him) have embraced socialism! At least for the rich.

A soup kitchen for the poor during the Great Depression of the 1930's

In fact, far from being a total idiot in finance, I think that John McCain was correct when he said that the economy is essentially sound. Our system of banks, brokers and insurance firms works to protect those in power. It is owned by and run for the elite of the country (the Fed is not a public bank). It's a self-correcting system wherein profits (when times are good and the latest bubble is growing) are privatized, while losses are socialized. US taxpayers and not the Wall Street "players" who caused the meltdown in the first place will foot the bill. We and our children and grandchildren will be paying for this latest fiasco for generations. Which means: no more money for education, or health care, or for rebuilding our decaying cities or for anything that might improve our lives.

Now that is what the elite would call a sweet deal.

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

2008-09-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace

Everyone has their limits. This is what I say whenever I’m asked about the suicides of my grandfather, or of Margaux or Leicester or any of the others in my family. When the pain, be it existential or physical, gets to be too much you can’t really blame a person for what they do.

David Foster Wallace’s death is a tragedy. He took his own life and one of the greatest writers of my generation is gone.

The Magic Kingdom

2008-09-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy in Miami my teachers used to say that anyone could grow up to be President of the United States. Ours, they would tell us, was a democracy where all men were created equal and where even the poorest boy or girl could some day aspire to the nation’s highest office. That was the official propaganda and from time to time this message has been renewed with candidates chosen to make us all believe that it’s still true.

The latest reincarnations of this “rags to riches” myth are Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Obama is the mixed-race son of an African immigrant, while Palin is the “hockey mom” with barely 19 months experience as governor of Alaska. Both are tangible proof that with just a little luck and determination you can do anything. America, like Disneyland, is sill the place “where dreams come true.”

Disney's Magic Kingdom

The road to the palace in the “Magic Kingdom”, however, is fraught with peril. The campaign is long, sometimes lasting two years or more and the vetting process is severe. The corporate media asks probing and sometimes difficult questions regarding a candidate’s views on abortion and terrorism and taxes, and then there are also the religious questions. A presidential candidate in the US must believe in God and not just any god will do. As a nation at war with Muslim infidels an aspiring President or Vice-President has to show that his god has what it takes to protect America and defeat the forces that would do us harm.

Obama and Wright

Senator Obama’s god almost failed us on this last point. His one time friend and close confident, his minister for over twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preached an ecumenical Christianity that was not afraid of delving into the darkest chapters of America’s history in race relations. An ex-Marine, Wright showed how America’s enslavement of Africans and near extermination of its native tribes was not the exception but the rule when it came to defining the country’s murderous soul. Like the old Romans our policy has always been divide et impera, and Wright feels that only by facing this fact and understanding it can we really change as a nation. This, of course, is sacrilege to the elite who run America. Seeing the truth of our history stridently conflicts with the disneyesque fantasy of the US as a peace-loving, multi-racial melting pot where everyone is a winner. Obama would clearly have to atone for his sins of his pastor, and a campaign was mounted in the corporate media to denounce Wright and demand that the senator from Illinois disassociate himself from his old friend. Which of course he did to keep his quest for the White House alive.

Sarah Palin’s god, on the other hand, is much more in tune with the times, and as a result has received scant coverage by the corporate media. She has spent more than twenty-five years of her life as a member of church in Wasilla Alaska, which is part of a fanatical Christian cult that is sweeping across America. The Governor, in fact, hails from the most radical stream of US Born-Again Evangelism known as “Joel’s Army,” an offshoot of “Dominionism” or what is sometimes also referred to as the “Latter Rain” cult or the “Manifest Sons of God”. These committed soldiers of Joel’s Army (including Sarah Palin) have pledged their lives to Jesus and to the fight against evil in what they call the “end times” (the period before Judgment Day when the Lord will slug it out with the Devil to see who wins). As Joel's Army's Canadian leader, Todd Bentley, explains, “An end-time army has one common purpose -- to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion…The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel's Army. ... Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God's kingdom on earth.”

Joel's Army "General", right-wing evangelist Todd Bently

An army of mobilized religious fanatics, exactly what’s needed if your country’s end goal is the total domination of the world’s dwindling natural resources. Think of all the oil rich nations that have yet to be subdued! Indeed, America’s corporate rulers couldn’t have asked for a better representative than Sarah Palin, and none of them will ever ask her the difficult questions that were put to Obama or his pastor. It’s best to keep that kind of information under wraps, lest anyone discover the truth before its too late.

Castles made of sand

2008-08-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually” Jimi Hendrix

Saturday morning I met a man who makes sand castles for a living. His name was Mark and I saw him when he was setting up the perimeter of his latest creation on Huntington Beach. He’d been hired by the hotel that we were staying at, and he told me that in the summer he was out there almost every weekend. He asked if we were from California and when I told him that we weren’t, that we were visiting from Montreal, he said that we could help him if we wanted. He gave both my daughter and my son a plastic chisel and he put them to work carving a passageway into one of the four towers of the perimeter.

Sand castle

Mark was very serious about his job but extremely patient and gentle when it came to explaining the finer points of his art. We were the first people there that morning and he said that he liked the way my kids worked. “You know,” he told me, “with the economic problems we’re having now we get a lot more foreign tourists than Americans at the hotel and I’ve noticed that the foreign kids are more independent and not as aggressive as the Americans.”

I tried to make light of the situation and told him that my children were far from being little angels, but he insisted and said “I don’t know, maybe we’re doing something wrong.”

I didn’t know what to tell him. I could only speak for my own children. I hadn’t lived in the U.S. since 1985, but I suspected that he was probably right. Aggression has become an American trademark. We are the hoodlums of the planet and I asked him what the people in Huntington Beach thought about the war in Iraq. He said that he and his friends were against it and looking at him I could tell that he felt the same way that I did. That we were both helpless to change anything, and that voting for one candidate or the other in the next election wouldn’t stop the war or our country’s imperial arrogance. The system was rigged and anyone in favor of peace and creating a different world would never get close to the presidency. It was a fact and you didn’t have to be a genius to see how far our democracy had deteriorated. With our “war on terror” and the hundreds of thousands that we’ve killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had permanently disgraced ourselves. The American Empire would have to fall, as all empires eventually do, before we could even begin to make up for the damage that we’d done.

The only consolation, I thought to myself, was that not everyone had fallen for the regime’s propaganda and that creative people like Mark would be there to pick up the pieces when the time came.

Grazie

2008-08-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

Twenty-three years ago today my girlfriend and I arrived in San Diego with very little money and a stolen red Subaru that belonged to my father. We’d left Missoula two days before and after having driven through the Mojave Desert in the middle of August we were hot, sunburned and happy to have finally made it to the west coast. We stayed at my friend’s house on Crown Point Drive and now that I’m back in California again, this time with my family, I just wanted to thank Henry for his incredible generosity and kindness. A truer friend would be hard to find.

Chalk's

2008-08-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot to be said for flying on a new airplane. Generally they’re more fuel efficient and quieter, more comfortable, and excluding acts of God and pilot error, a guarantee that you will get to where you’re going in one piece. Still, being fresh off the assembly line isn’t everything.

Up until recently, anyone who wanted to fly the old-fashioned way, with lots of noise, popping ears and serious jolts when the weather got bad, could take a Chalk’s seaplane from Miami to Bimini in the Bahamas. These were vintage Grummans, most of them built in 1947, and they took off and landed in the shipping channel of the city. Chalk’s had been around forever and when I first climbed aboard one in the early 1960’s the airline had already been in service for over thirty years. The owner and founder, Arthur “Pappy” Chalk, was an ex-aviator from the First World War and when I was a boy he was almost always at the ticket counter in the hut next to the water that doubled as a terminal for the tiny airline. My father, Gregory, knew him well, as did my great-uncle Les, and whenever we went to Bimini for a weekend of fishing Pappy would help us with our bags and close the rear door of the Grumman when we were all on board.

My grandmother Pauline and father Gregory leaving a Chalk's seaplane in Bimini harbor, 1930's

I don’t know how many times I flew to Bimini, hundreds perhaps, but I never got tired of it. There was nothing quite like the sensation of being in a plane that could float into a channel, turn to the left and then soar out over the Gulf Stream. In some of the earlier Grummans there were only seven or eight seats and I remember the view from the small windows, that were actually more like the portholes of a boat, turning white for a minute or two with all the water from the wind and the speed and wondering if we would ever make it.

My father had learned to fly when he lived in Africa in the 1950’s and sometimes when we were airborne and had reached our cruising altitude the co-pilot would let him sit in his seat and take the controls of the plane for a couple of minutes. It was the kind of thing that you weren’t supposed to do and that in today’s post 9/11 world would definitely cost a pilot his job, or worse, but that back then was possible. My dad knew everyone who worked for Chalk’s and even though he had his own fishing boat that he took from Miami to Alice Town on North Bimini he liked to fly and liked the Grumman Mallards in particular.

These planes were incredibly sturdy and would fly in almost any kind of weather. Once in December of 1973, when my parents were divorced and my father had taken the three of us to the island for the weekend, we were getting ready to go back to Miami but a bad storm was approaching and we didn’t know if the plane that was scheduled to land would make it. I remember that it seemed to bounce over the heavy chop in the bay between the north and the south island and when it was still in the shipping channel and where it would have to turn ramp next to the customs house the wind was so strong that the tip of the right wing was under water and one of the engines was flaming from the strain. In the end it made it up the ramp and the pilot didn’t seem to think that it was anything unusual. My dad asked him if he was still going to fly back to Miami that afternoon and he told us that it wouldn't be a problem.

A Grumman leaving Bimini a few days before the December 2005 crash

So, we climbed up the stairs and took our seats and once airborne we found out that there would be another, unscheduled, stop at a Cat Kay, an island to the south of Bimini. The landing there was smooth enough, but the take off was hellish. The Grumman was heading straight into the wind and the waves were enormous. We smashed into about ten crests until finally we were airborne, and even my father was impressed by the pilot’s ability and the plane’s strength.

That was the kind of outfit that Pappy Chalk ran, but nothing lasts forever and when he sold the airline in 1975 it passed from one financial group to another. The old Grummans continued to fly in the thirty years that followed but in this age of deregulation and cost cutting, maintenance is often overlooked, sometimes with tragic consequences. On December 19th, 2005 one of the Mallards crashed just off the coast of Miami Beach when its right wing separated from the fuselage due to metal fatigue. All 20 people aboard perished. It was Chalk’s first and only fatal crash.

Yoshi

2008-08-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

Yoshi Nagasaka is a talented artist and a good friend of mine, and I thought that today, as a way of introducing him, I’d reprint the piece that I wrote in 2005 for the catalog of one of his exhibitions.

Nagasaka and Hemingway

I met Yoshi in the summer of 2001. He was living in the center of Milan not too far from the Duomo in a two-bedroom apartment that was literally packed with his paintings.

An uncle of mine had 'discovered' him while vacationing on Lago Maggiore. He was so impressed with the work of this Japanese expatriate that he gave me his number and said that I should scout him out in Milan and find out if he would be interested in doing the poster for the Ernest Hemingway Society's bi-annual meeting in Stresa. He was convinced that Yoshi's minimalist portrayals of the landscape surrounding the lake and the own of Stresa would be perfect.

Lago Maggiore Isola Bella nel blu, Yoshi Nagasaka

And indeed they were. They captured perfectly the romanticism and essential beauty of an area that my grandfather had once defined as one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

In one painting you could almost imagine Frederick Henry rowing silently across the waters towards Switzerland. In the twilight of a summer evening the mist was obscuring the mountain range in the distance beyond Isola Bella.

Tarda Primavera al Parco Sempione Milano, Yoshi Nagasaka

Many other paintings were of Milan. People sitting on the steps of the Duomo or passing through the Galleria not far from the hospital where shrapnel was removed from my grandfather's legs. Intimate views of a city that Yoshi knew well and that had been fundamental in Ernest's life.

After leaving his house I kept thinking how amazing it was to find this kind of talent hidden so carefully in a run-down building in the center of postindustrial Milan. The Milanese, it's true, have a habit of thinking of their city as the cultural capital of the country and yet here was a jewel in the midst that they'd virtually ignored. An ignorance, I was sure, that wouldn't last forever.

Photograph from 1924 Encierro in Pamplona

2008-07-30T09:19:00.000-07:00

Here’s the photo that inspired the film being made about my grandfather by Sergio Oksman and Carlos Muguiro.

The photograph, as I mention in my post El Doble, was taken on the 13th of July, 1924 in Calle Estafeta in Pamplona, just a few moments before Estaban Domeño was mortally wounded, the first ever recorded death in an encierro. The man lying on the corner of the street, Pablo Guerendiain, was also wounded by one of the bulls. My grandfather would have been on the opposite side of the street, further ahead, looking down at the dying and injured runners from the balcony of his room at the Hotel La Perla.

Special thanks to Sergio Muguiro for sending me this photograph!

Solidarity for Ronaldo and Hemingway

2008-07-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

Living in Milan for as many years as I did, I learned a lot about “Ronaldo” or The Phenomenon as he is commonly referred to in Europe and in Brazil. Soccer is religion in Italy and when one of the two professional teams in the city, F.C. Internazionale Milano (Inter, for short), bought the Brazilian player in the summer of 1997 from F.C Barcelona the media barrage that covered the trade, and thereafter everything about Ronaldo’s life on and off the field, was intense.

Ronaldo

Yet, as famous as Ronaldo was, and continues to be, I never thought I’d see the day when he would be compared to my grandfather. Then in May a friend suggested that I have a look at a column on the Folha de Sao Paulo. The article, “Solidarity for Ronaldo and Hemingway”, was written by Contardo Calligaris, an Italian psychoanalyst and novelist. Calligaris (who lives in Brazil) said that he was surprised to see a message spray-painted at the entrance to a tunnel near a favela in Rio, Ronaldo’s hometown. Some of the soccer player’s fans had written that they “believed in his innocence” and that he would always remain their “phenomenon.” At the time, Ronaldo was at the center of a scandal involving three transvestite prostitutes who had spent a night with him in a hotel. He claimed that he had been tricked and that he had no idea that they were men. They retorted that he was just trying to get out of paying them.

Calligaris asked “but what kind of innocence are we talking about here?” Ronaldo hadn’t committed any crime and his status as a “phenomenon”, strictly speaking, was related to his performance on the playing field and not with anything he might have done in one of the city’s lesser-known hotels. Calligaris reasoned that for his fans Ronaldo wasn’t just a soccer player but also a “macho ideal” and that as such it was necessary for them to continue believing in his “innocence.”

He then said that he’d read my memoir, Strange Tribe, and pointed out to his readers that Ernest Hemingway, another macho ideal, was perhaps not entirely the man that everyone believed him to be and that he may have struggled as much as Ronaldo has recently in dealing with the contradictions between his public image and an infinitely more complex private reality.

Ernest in the 1950's

Of course, I hardly needed to be convinced. It was my book that he was talking about, but more than that I had seen what my father had gone through trying to live up to the macho image that Ernest had helped to create. Gregory had done all the things that people generally associate with being a Hemingway; hunting, fishing, drinking and womanizing, and there were times when he had even surpassed his father. At the age of eleven he tied for first place in a national skeet-shooting contest in Cuba, against adults. Gregory was an incredible shot and a chip off the old block, as far as Ernest was concerned. Any kid who could handle a gun that well had to be a real Hemingway. But there was more to being a member of this club of sharpshooters than met the eye. My grandfather and father shared a fascination with androgyny, or as Ernest had the protagonist of his posthumous novel the "Garden of Eden” put it, a search for “a more African sexuality, beyond all tribal law.” They were machos, but with a twist. Men more interested in finding a union of the sexes, than in living on just one side of the gender divide.

It was similarity that united them and which, at the same time, complicated their relationship tremendously. They were mirror images of each other, but being a real man has never been easy.

Calm After the Storm

2008-07-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

My friend Ed Steinhardt sent me this translation by Charles Guenther of Giacomo Leopardi’s poem “La quiete dopo la tempesta.” It’s being published next month in a collection of other translations by Guenther of Leopardi’s poetry. It is one of the Italian poet’s most famous works and I think that this translation captures perfectly the haunting, almost desperate quality of the original.

Calm After the Storm

The storm has passed.
I hear the birds singing, and the hen,
Gone on her way again,
Repeats her song. See the bright sky
Break through there from the west,
toward the mountain;
The countryside is clear
And the river sparkles brightly in the valley.
Each heart rejoices, everywhere
Sounds rise again,
The usual work resumes.
The craftsman comes to his door,
Singing with work in hand,
To look at the humid sky; with friends
A girl comes out to collect water
From the new-fallen rain;
And the vegetable vendor renews
His daily cry
From street to street.
Look, now the sun returns, see how it smiles
On hills and villages. Families open balconies,
Terraces and cascades:
And far away from the main stream we hear
Tinkling of bells, the screeching cart
Of the traveler who continues on his way.
Each heart rejoices.
When else, as now,
Is life so pleasant and so sweet?
When else does man
Turn to his studies with such love,
Or to his work or begin something new?
When does he remember his misfortune less?
Pleasure’s a child of anxiety:
A useless joy, the fruit
Of some past fear
Where he who abhorred life
Was induced to be afraid of death;
Where in long suffering,
Cold, silent, pale,
People sweated and trembled at the sight
Of lightning, clouds and wind.
O kindly nature,
These are your gifts.
These are the delights
You offer mortals. It’s a pleasure
For us to be relieved of pain,
You spread pain freely; grief
Rises spontaneously; and that bit of joy
Which by miracle and prodigy sometimes
Is born of anxiety, is a great gain. A human
Progeny dear to those eternal ones!
You’re lucky
Indeed if you can breathe again
After some grief: and blessed
If death heals every sorrow.

La quiete dopo la tempesta

Passata è la tempesta:
Odo augelli far festa, e la gallina,
Tornata in su la via,
Che ripete il suo verso. Ecco il sereno
Rompe là da ponente, alla montagna;
Sgombrasi la campagna,
E chiaro nella valle il fiume appare.
Ogni cor si rallegra, in ogni lato
Risorge il romorio
Torna il lavoro usato.
L’artigiano a mirar l’umido cielo,
Con l’opra in man, cantando,
Fassi in su l’uscio; a prova
Vien fuor la femminetta a còr dell’acqua
Della novella piova;
E l’erbaiuol rinnova
Di sentiero in sentiero
Il grido giornaliero.
Ecco il Sol che ritorna, ecco sorride
Per li poggi e le ville. Apre i balconi,
Apre terrazzi e logge la famiglia:
E, dalla via corrente, odi lontano
Tintinnio di sonagli; il carro stride
Del passegger che il suo cammin ripiglia.

Si rallegra ogni core.
Sì dolce, sì gradita
Quand’è, com’or, la vita?
Quando con tanto amore
L’uomo a’ suoi studi intende?
O torna all’opre? o cosa nova imprende?
Quando de’ mali suoi men si ricorda?
Piacer figlio d’affanno;
Gioia vana, ch’è frutto
Del passato timore, onde si scosse
E paventò la morte
Chi la vita abborria;
Onde in lungo tormento,
Fredde, tacite, smorte,
Sudàr le genti e palpitàr, vedendo
Mossi alle nostre offese
Folgori, nembi e vento.

O natura cortese,
Son questi i doni tuoi,
Questi i diletti sono
Che tu porgi ai mortali. Uscir di pena
È diletto fra noi.
Pene tu spargi a larga mano; il duolo
Spontaneo sorge: e di piacer, quel tanto
Che per mostro e miracolo talvolta
Nasce d’affanno, è gran guadagno. Umana
Prole cara agli eterni! assai felice
Se respirar ti lice
D’alcun dolor: beata

Se te d’ogni dolor morte risana

Charles Guenther, an American poet

2008-07-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

A great American poet and translator, Charles Guenther, has passed away. A good friend of mine, Ed Steinhardt, knew Charles well and wrote his obituary, which I’m posting below. I never met Charles, but as a writer and a translator myself I cannot feel anything but profound admiration for his many accomplishments.

Le mie condoglianze alla sua famiglia e a quelli che erano i suoi amici.

Poetry’s Prince of Poets, Charles Guenther, dies at 88

"It is the work, not the prize or the honor,
that matters most. The work endures."
—Charles Guenther

Charles Guenther, 88, who moved in the circles of E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov, Ezra Pound and many others, died Thursday in St. Louis of cancer. He is survived by his wife Esther, three children, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
His only son, Charles Guenther Jr., told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Friday that "Poetry and his family were his life." Richard Wilbur said Friday that "he had my esteem and admiration."

Guenther, a renowned American translator, poet and critic, was the author of some 10 books, including Moving the Seasons, Phrase/Paraphrase, The Hippopotamus: Selected Translations 1945-1985, The Complete Love Sonnets of Garcilaso de la Vega and the recent Three Faces of Autumn: A Charles Guenther Retrospective.

The St. Louis-born Guenther worked tirelessly to bring foreign poetry into the English language, while at the same time creating original work such as "Missouri Woods," "Snow Country" and "Union Station." He was also well-known for his personal encouragement of new and emerging writers, and was a frequent correspondent.

He was a prolific translator, almost unequaled in his field. The nation of Italy in 1973 bestowed upon Guenther its highest award, (Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, rank of Knight Commander) for his many translations of Italian poetry into English and his "long and valuable work permeating two cultures."

Other awards included election to the Academie d’Alsace, a several decades run as Regional (Midwest) Vice-president of the American Poetry Society (succeeding John G. Neihardt) and the 2002 Emmanuel Robles International Award in Poetry.

Guenther began writing poetry at age 15 while a student at Kirkwood High School in Missouri. In high school he began translating French and then Italian poetry, looking up the words in a dictionary and writing the definitions in the margins. "It’s hard to say why I started," Guenther recalled in 2006. "In a great poem, there is something magic, a haunting spirit. It’s so rare that you keep looking for it."

At age 17 he began work as a copy boy for the St. Louis Star-Times. By adulthood (and the emergence of World War II) Guenther had earned a college degree and went to work for what would become the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center in St. Louis. His translation duties there, while "not as interesting as translating poetry," were critical to the war effort and later flight safety.

Even though Guenther had vowed that he would stop translating by age 25, he wryly admitted he "never did stop." Evenings and weekends he began a relentless enterprise of translation, largely translating from "raw text" or work that had as of yet not been translated into English.

"In 1940, for instance," Guenther recalled, "I read that Superveille was considered the ‘greatest living French poet.’ "I wrote him for permission to translate ‘Les Amis inconnus.’ When he told me I had done a "polishing job" on his poems, I was elated. But I soon realized that one doesn’t "polish" Supervielle; his strength is in his simplicity."

Other luminaries who would become friends included Ezra Pound, who Guenther met in 1951. After sending one of his translations to Pound (while Pound was incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital) Guenther received back, "almost immediately, a postcard with this scrawled message, ‘I don’t write letters; I receive them.’ It was the start of a lively correspondence with this fascinating, obstinate poet who had put new vigor into American Literature."

By 1953 Guenther was putting his own vigor into something new: that of reviewing books for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "When that first review appeared," Guenther later recalled, "I considered reviewing a ‘civic honor. I still do."

Guenther’s reviews became a virtual Who’s Who of American Literature. Names such as Stafford, Jarrell, Lowell, Hughes, Van Duyn, Cummings and Eliot graced his newsprint. There were other names, too, like Pablo Neruda, Jean Wahl and Salvatore Quasimodo.

Guenther’s work as reviewer also dove-tailed with his own work as poet and translator. "The Post-Dispatch gave Guenther a wider readership than many poets have," said Jane Henderson, that paper’s book editor. By 2003, with his retirement from the Post-Dispatch, Guenther had amassed an unparalleled half-century of reviews.

Even in retirement, Guenther maintained a tireless regimen of work and an occasional review. His last book, Guardian of Grief, (selected translations of the 19th century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi) will be released in August. In characteristic Guenther-style, he expressed in his introduction to Guardian of Grief his ardent hope that "the poems may bring a renewed interest in, and appreciation of, Leopardi, his life, his times and his work."

"Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined," Walt Whitman wrote. "The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet."

For the work of poets he translated, living or dead, Guenther bestowed a certain element of immortality. "My own pratice," said Guenther, "When translating early poets is to place them in their own time, with a hint of antiquity, avoiding the grossly archaic language of their contemporaries." He summed up the process as, "My purpose is to make a poem from a poem."

A poem by Jose Agustin Goytisolo (entitled "The Difficult Poem"), which Guenther translated and is the last selection in The Hippopatamus, (1986) seems to sum-up the translation process.

The poem is inside
and doesn’t want to get out.

It pounds in my head
and doesn’t want to get out.

I shout, I tremble,
and it doesn’t want to get out.

I call it by name
and it doesn’t want to get out.

Later down the street
it stands before me.

Edward Steinhardt

Che ti dice la patria?

2008-07-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Hard times in “Il Bel Paese.” This morning I read an article in the Corriere della Sera, which said that the Italian government has now declared a national “State of Emergency” because of illegal immigration. The official communiqué from the Council of Ministers explains the decision as an attempt to deal with the “persistent and exceptional inflow of non-EU citizens”, most of whom have been washing up on the shores of southern Italian beaches, some alive but many of them dead.

Illegal immigrants in a boat off the Italian coast

Of course, without knowing anything about Italy or its present government a reader might think, “well, yes, that is a problem.” Every country has a right to its own immigration policy and rules are rules. You can’t just float up on a beach, half dead from the sun and the salt, and perhaps even after having seen your friends and family drown and expect to be welcomed by the local authorities. Bruttissima figura (very bad form) as the Italians would say.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

Order will be maintained and Silvio Berlusconi, being the savvy politician that he is, knows that in economically difficult times one of the best ways to distract voters and keep them in a state of fear is to persecute those who are different or disadvantaged. It works in the USA, where we’re building a reinforced concrete wall between ourselves and Mexico, and it’ll work in Italy, too. In fact, not only has the government decided to zero in on illegal immigration, they’ve also singled out the Rom or “gypsies” for special attention. Another government law, this one from the 11th of July, decreed that there would be a national census of all the Rom, children included, living in the outskirts of major Italian cities. This decree, according to the Berlusconi government would finally deal with the “gypsy question”, enhancing the security of all of Italy’s citizens.

The fact that at least a quarter of the Rom in Italy are Italian citizens, and have been for generations, and as such have the right to go wherever they please in the country doesn’t seem to bother anyone in the government. The equation, gypsy = thief (or worse) has been not so subtly reinforced in people’s minds and that’s all that matters. A convenient scapegoat has been found, and if the cost of living in Italy is sky high and families are finding it harder and harder to save or even make it to the end of the month, well, then at least they know that there’s someone below them in the social pecking order.

Having lived and worked in Italy for over twenty years, I am sad to see this happening, but it's not totally unexpected. Berlusconi’s pogrom against i diversi (the different) is a part of a worldwide trend, a planetary disease pitting the rich against the poor.

Of course, you could say that this isn’t the first time that the Italians have led the rest of the planet boldly into the future. Back in the 1920’s they were at the forefront of another social trend, but then history never repeats itself, right?

The passage of time

2008-07-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine from Milano, Vittorio Pisapia, read my last posting and told me that when he went to Pamplona in 2006 for the Fiesta he had two images of my grandfather in mind. The first was the one I used in “The Undefeated”, of Ernest as an old man in 1953 watching a bullfight with his wife Mary, while the second photo (below) is of a much younger and more vigorous man taken in 1927.

I told him that the fact that he had these two photographs of Ernest in mind reminded me of what I’d written in another posting “El Doble”, mirror images of the same man, distorted by time.

But Vittorio disagreed. “In my opinion it’s not quite the same thing, or better yet, there is a connection, it’s true. But while in “El Doble” you talk about the death of Pablo and of Ernest who probably was there while all of this was happening and who sees Pablo, the two photographs of Ernest speak of two different moments and of two different people, even if the person and the place are exactly the same. In between these two photos there’s an entire lifetime.”

The Undefeated

2008-07-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

Ernest Hemingway was a complicated man and so whenever someone asks me what I think of his enduring macho image or what he himself might have thought about the world today and its problems, I usually say that there were many different “Papas.” He was certainly a man’s man, un vero hombre, who liked to fish and to hunt and to womanize, but he was also the author of the gender bending posthumous novel “The Garden of Eden” and many other works where he examined his lifelong fascination with androgyny.

Likewise, it’s hard to pin him down politically. When a journalist in Pamplona asked me what I thought my grandfather would think about Guantanamo and its torture scandal, I said that these were crimes against humanity and that, obviously, Ernest, were he still alive, would speak out against them. My grandfather, I reminded the journalist, supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He was a democrat in the sense that he believed in democracy and the right of the Spanish people to have a Republic, if that was what they wanted.

Of course, his support wasn’t limited to his bylines or his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” In addition to raising money in the United States to buy ambulances for the Republican Army, he also did the narration for the Republican propaganda film “The Spanish Earth.” Without a doubt, what he experienced in Madrid during the war affected him deeply, and when the Fascists won he said that he would never return so long as they were in power.

It was a promise he kept until 1953 when he returned to Spain with his wife Mary. By that time, even though he was only 54, he was ageing fast and he wanted to see the corridas again before he died and to be a part of that world of toreros, bulls and muletas.

His return was widely criticized by many on the Left, who said that it was a betrayal of his ideals and everything that he had written about during the Civil War. Certainly, having the author of “The Sun Also Rises” back in Spain must have been a PR coup for the Franco regime. It was the kind of publicity that money could never buy, but Ernest had already fought his battle, and had lost, and there was nothing he could do about the political situation. Franco ruled the country with an iron fist and would outlive my grandfather by fourteen years.

The irony of all this is that while he was in Spain as a special guest of the regime his own government continued to spy on him. He had long been considered a leftist and a potential subversive by the FBI and its chief, J. Edgar Hoover (in part because of his support of the Spanish Republican cause), and the file that they kept on him grew and grew over the years until it numbered over 19,000 pages.

Yet, in spite of what anyone may say about him and his decision to return to Spain, perhaps Ernest wasn’t so wrong in having an ambivalent attitude towards politics. Looking over the political landscape of the USA today and the absolute disregard that both Republican and Democratic politicians have for the will of the people, I’d say that not much has changed since the 1950’s. We may have voted in 2006 to end the war in Iraq, but the political elite continues to do what it wants, to wage its wars and spy on us regardless of what we think. None of them can be trusted and perhaps the only thing that matters in the end is living your life as best you can. As my grandfather did, ignoring the bastards in power.

Encierro and Spanish TV interview

2008-07-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a video of the first encierro, the 7th of July, and a short interview that I did afterwards with a journalist from Canal Cuatro.

El Doble

2008-07-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the 84th anniversary of the first recorded death in an encierro during the Fiesta de San Fermin. Esteban Domeño was mortally wounded by a bull in Calle Estafeta and I know about this not because I’m any sort of historian of these tragic events but because of a chance encounter I had.

I was walking down Calle Estafeta towards the curve and had stopped to look at something in one of the stores when my friend, Josep Molina, tapped me on the shoulder and said that there were two filmmakers up ahead that I should meet. It was eleven o’clock and I had already done three interviews that morning but Josep promised me that this had nothing to do with the press or photo ops. They had an interesting idea, he said.

Sergio Oksman and Carlos Muguiro, in fact, were shooting a film about my grandfather and had been inspired by a photograph taken just moments before Domeño’s death in Calle Estafeta. In the photo another young man, Pablo Guerendiain, has been wounded by the bulls and is lying in a fetal position just in front of the store that his father owned. At the same time all this was happening, and just out of the picture, my grandfather was probably watching the bulls and the runners from the balcony of his room in the Hotel La Perla. It was where he stayed when he came to Pamplona and while no one can prove that he was actually there that morning, Ernest had a talent for always finding the best place to be, whatever the occasion, and you really couldn’t find a better observation post than a balcony on the second floor of the Hotel La Perla.

The film then explores the idea of the “double” or what normally lies beyond our field of vision and how often in life what we can’t see, the hidden part of our existence, is as interesting and important as what we do see. In this case we have two young men who compliment each other, Pablo Guerendiain, immobilized and looking at nothing as he prays that any remaining bulls will ignore him, and Ernest Hemingway looking at Pablo and taking in the rush of events that would leave another young man dead on the cobblestones.

Sergio and Carlos sent me a treatment of their story and as I read it and looked at the photograph that had inspired them I thought that it had a lot to do with Ernest’s theory of writing, i.e. that ninety percent of any tale lies just below of what you can see. It is the hidden element of our day to day existence, the unconscious undertow of emotions and events that pulls us along. It is something that we rarely see and when we do we are shocked to have it there in front of us, this shadow of ourselves, a true reflection of who we are.

My memoir, Strange Tribe, from this point of view is another examination of ones “doubles”. I needed to understand my father Gregory and what had gone on between him and my grandfather before I was born (outside of my field of vision), to see how their battle had impacted on my own life. I needed to see clearly the tragic story of two men who were so similar and who loved each other so much that they reached a point where communication was impossible. A family history that perhaps isn’t so different from many others, universal in its own way.

Interview with Basque television

2008-07-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

Another interview from Eitb24, the Basque television network in Pamplona, describing my visit to the city. In it I watch the Procesión de San Fermin from a balcony, and then pay a visit to the Casino above the Cafe Iruña where the artist/impresario Mikel Urmeneta welcomed me to Pamplona and offered me one of his new creations, a drink made with frozen wine, Coca Cola and carbonated candy poppers! The drink is called Kulumuchu and is served in a chilled lemon peel. Afterwards we paid our respects to my bronze abuelo in the bar El Rincón de Hemingway. It's a great likeness of Ernest (and a great bar, for that matter) and well worth investigating.

Photo by Jonathan Knowles

Entrevista en El País

2008-07-11T04:51:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview that I did with the Madrid daily "El País". The reporter (Quino Petit) and I talked about the morning's encierro, my impression of Pamplona and the Fiesta and about my book, Strange Tribe.

Ernest was not your grandmother!

2008-07-11T03:58:00.000-07:00

I did quite a few interviews while I was in Pamplona. Another fellow member of the Peña de los Gatos did the organizing, but after the first few on television started to come out everyone else, it seemed, wanted a piece of the action and my appointments at that point started to snowball.

One of the side effects of all this media attention was that towards the end of my stay people started to recognize me on the street, which for me was very unusual. Here in Montreal where I live my anonymity “es total”, but in Pamplona people would stop me on the street or in bars and want to shake my hand or offer me “un buen scotch como gustaba al abuelo”.

Me with a bronze statue of my grandfather Ernest at Cafe Iruna in Pamplona
Photo by Jonathan Knowl es

Then there were those who weren’t so convinced. One guy in particular, who had certainly had more than his fair share of gin and tonics, saw me while I was having a drink with some friends and told me point blank as he held his glass level with my nose “El Grande Ernest no era tu abuela!” (the great Ernest was not your grandmother). “Tienes razón” I told him (you’re right), “He was my grandfather.” At which point he started to laugh and gave me a big bear hug.

All of this reminds me that one of the most beautiful things about San Fermin is the people themselves. The warmth and general good cheer that you feel there is immense. And while nothing is perfect, I had heard of fights and two of my friends were pick-pocketed, on the whole it was a great experience.

Dos Mundos

2008-07-09T16:51:00.000-07:00

Photo by Jonathan Knowles

Even if you’re not into Corrida, the bullfights in Pamplona are a must. In fact, you don’t have to be an aficionado, or an expert in the use of the muleta or a partisan of the tremendistas, to understand what’s going on up in the stands. The Fiesta may be a party for everyone but that doesn’t mean that the political and social divisions of this beautiful town cease to exist for a week. On the contrary, in the Plaza de Toros the uneasy war of nerves between the left (mostly Basque) and the right continues in the cheap seats of the Sol Tenidas and the much more expensive areas in the shade, or Sombra. The well to do of Pamplona sit in the Sombra and many of them are serious fans of bullfighting, pious Catholics, and politically conservative. They believe in their King and a united Spain and if they were Americans they probably would have voted for Bush.

Those in the Sol seats wouldn’t have anyone to vote for this year in America, or any year, for that matter. They’re anarchists at heart and they love to mock, ridicule and/or disturb the powers that be whenever they get the chance. Most of them belong to a peña, a kind of social group, which during the Fiesta morphs into a serious partying machine with its own band, songs and subversive banners. The peñas are enormous, mobile entertainment brigades and when they go to the bullfights they bring their bands and food and wine and the area that they occupy becomes a vibrant sea of music and color.

Photo by Jonathan Knowles

They bitch at power, they play their music, sometimes all at the same time, each peña with its own song, and when they’re juiced up enough on sangria and beer, which is always, they have food fights and dump flour and then honey and eggs on anyone who is below them or within their firing range. They also chuck beer cans and stringers out into the arena, which no one in the sombra sections would ever dream of doing. The members of the penas actually like corrida and are discerning aficionados but after almost four decades of the Franco dictatorship, rebellion is in their DNA. If they feel like doing something they just do it. No questions, no guilt.

Fiesta is a time when everyone can truly express themselves and if that means creatively and, often times, humorously thumbing your nose at power and the people who oppressed your fathers and grandfathers, then you can do that in Pamplona, at least once a year, every year, in the second week of July.

El Encierro

2008-07-07T06:45:00.000-07:00

La Fiesta es un deporte por hombres valientes! Without a doubt La Fiesta is not for the faint of heart. Stamina, and industrial quantities of it are required. It just doesn’t stop and eventually the moment of truth, in this case “siesta” hits everyone. People fall asleep wherever they are and stay that way until their body has dealt with the liquor or fatigue and they pick up again where they left off as if nothing were.

This morning I watched the Encierro, or running with the bulls, from an apartment that had a great view of the Plaza Consistorial. From there I could see thousands of young men and women waiting for their collective appointment with destiny or even, perhaps, with death.

Every now and then a bull will kill a runner. It doesn’t happen that often, but I’m sure that the potential risk is one of the major attractions of this event. I don’t know if my grandfather ever actually ran in an Encierro, but whether or not he did, it’s certainly thanks to him and his novel, The Sun Also Rises, that so many runners still see it as a “must do.”

Gora San Fermin!!!

2008-07-06T04:49:00.000-07:00

Feliz San Fermines, or Gora San Fermini, as the Basques say! The Fiesta has begun and I have to say that it is a party like no other on the face of the Earth. I was lucky enough to stand just under the balcony of the beautiful baroque looking building where the mayor traditionally opens the Fiesta. It was a good vantage point in that, for the most part it was out of the firing zone of champagne and red wine that was dousing everyone in the plaza. The noise was deafening with choruses of Olé, Olé and a song in Spanish that went “Algo, algo (something, something) I think I’ve lost something, but I can’t remember what the hell it was!”

It’s a celebration that lasts an entire week, and I remember that at one point, as the crowd in the plaza seemed ready to explode, a few minutes before the mayor announced the beginning of the fiesta, a local man turned to me and said with a big grin on his face “and this is only the first day!”

Margaux

2008-07-03T05:42:00.000-07:00

I confess that I had to be reminded by a friend that yesterday was the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. Of course, July 2nd was also the day that my cousin Margaux died and while technically I was alive during the lifetimes of both of these people I never met my grandfather. I was 10 months old when he killed himself, whereas I knew Margaux.

In the summer of 1971 I spent a month out at my Uncle Jack’s house in Ketchum, Idaho. Margaux was 16, five years older than me, and very much a rebel. Someone who, if I’m to believe what her younger sister Mariel was telling me, liked to hang out at cowboy bars and open beer bottles with her teeth. She was tall and athletic, but not yet the stunning beauty that the world would find out about a few years later.

She liked to provoke people and to draw and I remember once that she showed me, in the presence of Mariel, some sketches she’d done of male nudes with all their family jewels “ben in vista” as the Italians say. It was the sort of thing that she knew would get little sister riled and Mariel went running upstairs screaming to her mother that “Margaux was showing those dirty pictures to John!”

Later on, when she became famous I think that I was more surprised than most people to see her face on the cover of magazines. I still had that rebellious image of her from when she was sixteen and the transformation from cowgirl to fashion goddess couldn’t have been more complete.

The last time I saw her was at the height of her career in 1977. I was in New York City staying with my father and his wife Valerie at their small apartment on East 95th street. My dad had just moved back from Fort Benton, Montana, having given up on his first attempt to start a practice in that state. He was clinically depressed and I was being sent to various Prep Schools around New England to see which, if any of them, would take me. While I was waiting to find out where I would go to school I ran into Margaux on a street corner. It was in the morning and I had gone down to a delicatessen to get something for breakfast and walking back to the apartment and waiting for a light to change I looked up and there she was.

“Margaux?”, I asked.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m your cousin John.” I told her, and she couldn’t believe that it was me. She remembered who I was, of course, but the last time she saw me I was 11 and now I was 17. She asked me what I was doing and why I was in New York and I told her and remember thinking how tall she was and pretty. The magazines didn’t exaggerate her beauty, not at all.

Then she asked me about my mother, if she was doing OK?, and no one ever in the family ever asked about Alice, because everyone knew that she wasn’t. She was paranoid schizophrenic and her frequent breakdowns and episodes where she’d start to hear her voices and they would tell her that we had to be given to the Catholic Church or abandoned or some other such fantasy was one of the major reasons why I was constantly being bounced from one relative to another during my teens. But Margaux asked and seemed genuinely concerned. I’m sure that she knew what everyone else knew about my mother, but she was the kind of person who can’t help but care about the fate of others.

She had a generous heart and I’ll never forget her.

Oh Canada!

2008-07-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

I’ll never forget the first time I found out about “Canada Day”. It was July 1st, 1985 and I was in sitting in the living room of my father’s apartment in Missoula, Montana watching TV. Gregory Hemingway had separated from his third wife about a year before and while he’d seemed a bit nervous when we’d met in June, I think that he was happy to have me there. He was full of plans and in the evenings after he’d finish his work as a doctor at the state prison in Deerlodge, he’d let me in on all the things we were going to do, the countries we’d visit, the car he would get me, the local university that I would enroll in for my Masters and the house that he would buy for the two of us should I decide to stay.

My dad was bi-polar and had I known more about his condition back then I’m sure that I would have seen all his extravagant promises and ever-increasing energy as early warning shots across the bow. He could only get worse and finally “crash” before slipping into another deep depression that might last months if he didn’t undergo ECT (electro-convulsive therapy).

That morning I was wondering where he was. He’d hadn’t come home the night before, nor had he called to say that he’d be back late and that I shouldn’t wait up for him. I figured that eventually he would show up and grabbed a box of donuts from the fridge and had breakfast as the Canadian ambassador in Washington fielded questions from an audience of American college students on the Today Show. What did the Ambassador think of the US and Americans in general, how strong was the relationship between the two countries and did Canada have a president and if so who was he? The Ambassador said that Canada was a constitutional monarchy and that the Queen of England was its head of state, and it was right about then when the front door opened and I saw my dad peek inside wearing what looked like a blond wig. I think he was surprised to see me because he closed the door almost as quickly as it had opened.

I sat there in my chair as the college students continued to ask their questions on TV and I thought, “Was that Greg?” I had heard from a step-brother a few years before that he liked to put on make-up and my mother had once told me that when she had been married to him he would cross-dress, but hearing about his exploits was one thing, seeing him actually do it quite another.

A few minutes later the door opened again and my father walked in, this time without the wig and holding his high heel shoes. He was wearing a silk dress and had a serious look on his face as he passed in front of me. He was pretending that I wasn’t there, his lips pursed in a kind of grimace as his muscular body turned and he slowly started to walk up the stairs to the bedroom.

I continued watching the Today Show and didn’t say anything, and when he eventually came down, having changed into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, he didn’t offer any explanations. In retrospect, it was an important moment in my understanding, subconsciously at least, that there was much more to being a Hemingway than I was aware of and that the dividing line between my father and my grandfather’s essential character was not nearly as great as most people might think. My family truly was, as Ernest had once described it, a Strange Tribe.

Fiesta de San Fermin

2008-06-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

I’ll be going to Pamplona in July for the Fiesta de San Fermin, traveling as a member of thePena de Los Gatos, an American club that travels to Fiesta every year. While I spent several months in Spain near Malaga, this will be my first time up in Basque country. The Fiesta, as everyone knows, was made famous by my grandfather’s novel The Sun Also Rises with its decadent tale of emasculated males and sexually hyperactive females. It’s a great story, one of Hemingway’s best. There’s something in it for everyone, his descriptive style, his crisp dialog, the carnival atmosphere of the Fiesta itself and, as always in his works, his fascination with androgyny, or as the protagonist of The Garden of Eden put it, finding “a more African sexuality, one that goes beyond all tribal law.”

There was always more to Ernest’s character than met the eye. There was another side to him that most of his admirers never see, one that had a great deal more to my cross-dressing, transsexual father, Gregory, than the macho image that most have of him.

I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that many things haven’t changed about the Fiesta de San Fermin from my grandfather’s days. There was something very primitive about it that attracted him, a non-stop, no-holds-barred quality that for him must have been healing.

Photos by Jonathan Knowles

Then and now

2008-06-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot said for the early 1970’s. It was an age of transition from a period of Cultural Revolution to one of Pet Rocks, Saturday Night Fever and Mood Rings. A peace treaty between the USA and Vietnam was signed in 1973 and by 1975 American sailors were ditching the last helicopters to make it out of Saigon off the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. But for me, at least, what was truly inspiring about those years was a US Congress that still had the balls to stand up to a criminal in the oval office when needed. They actually took the constitution of the United States seriously and when it became clear that Richard Nixon had broken the law and betrayed his oath of office to defend that very same constitution they knew that they had no other choice but to impeach the man. Anyone who was old enough, and I was 13 at the time, remembers the Watergate congressional hearings and the long line of administration officials who testified and who were often sent to jail for their crimes. We were all mesmerized at this spectacle of a government being held accountable for its sins. It was something that you, honestly, rarely saw, anywhere in the world and in spite of the horrors of the Vietnam War and the political assassinations of the 1960’s we could at least say as American that there was still room for hope. It was evident that our fundamental democratic values had survived and the proof was there on our television screens.

Thirty-five years later, things have taken a turn for the worse, to put it mildly. We still have congressional hearings. US congressmen have to do something with their time, so when the spirit moves them they “investigate” and make a show of trying to set the wrongs of the nation right. Last week a Senate Armed Services Committee probe heard testimony regarding US military torture of prisoners of war. One of the most damaging comments to emerge from the hearing came from retired Major General Antonio Taguba. Taguba was the officer the Pentagon put in charge of the investigation of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals and he is even more convinced than ever that serious human rights violations were committed by the United States government. In a report, prepared by the group Physicians for Human Rights, Taguba stated “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Now, this is from a man who was a career military officer and someone who would still be serving if he hadn’t been forced to retire because he told the truth in 2004. His statement is an example of the same sort of moral clarity that guided the US Congress back in 1973, and were America’s present day politicians even remotely like those of the seventies you could be sure that Bush and his henchmen would have been impeached. Not only that, but committing war crimes is a Federal offense because of international treaties that the USA has signed against torture. So, in addition to seeing Bush and Cheney kicked out of office we would also have the pleasure of seeing them tried for murder. Many men have died in the vast Neocon galaxy of clandestine gulags and it used to be that if you killed someone in the United States you would pay for your crime with your life. But not any longer. America has become a forgiving nation, at least as far as the high and mighty are concerned.

No one will ever send Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld to prison. They are the law. They’re not just above it. They represent the system in its entirety, Democrats included.

What I do

2008-06-24T12:04:00.000-07:00

This is my very first posting, and before I start I'd like to thank my wife, Ornella, for encouraging me to do this. She's been after me for months, no, make that years to get a blog set up. Up to now I've been writing for other sites, magazines and a few newspapers, mostly in Italy.

I live in Montreal, in the Hochelaga/Maisonneuve neighborhood. It's a very french part of town where hardly anyone speaks English. All the Quebec nationalists on the island live out here. It's a poor section of the city, many families are on welfare, but the people are very friendly. As for the weather, in the summer it's very green with lots of trees and overgrown gardens. The winters, on the other hand, tend to be brutal. They last about five months out of the year and are extremely cold and full of snow.

I'm not from Montreal. I'm not even a Canadian. I was born in Miami and spent most of my childhood there. The other big chunk of my life was spent in Europe. Twenty-two years in Italy and a year in Spain.

While in Milan I started and finished Strange Tribe, a memoir about my father Gregory Hemingway and his dad, Ernest Hemingway. Click here to see a review from Curledupwithagoodbook.com which I think gives you a pretty good feel for the book.

Bene, per oggi questo e' tutto.