El Txupinazo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.