Bacchanalia: A Pamplona Story

Five years have passed since my last post on this blog. My apologies, but they were five years in which I dedicated myself to fiction and journalism. I wrote for hunting and fishing magazines, worked on a collection of short stories and just recently I published a new novel, “Bacchanalia: A Pamplona Story.” It takes place during the Fiesta de San Fermin and as probably anyone who has been to Pamplona knows this town and its fiesta were in a very real sense put on the world map with the publication of my grandfather’s book “The Sun Also Rises.” His novel was a huge success in the United States, describing as it did a group of jaded and decadent American and English ex-pats who spend most of their time at the fiesta drinking, talking, flirting, dancing and watching bullfights.

That was almost a hundred years ago and the town and its destiny were changed forever, although its spirit in many ways has remained the same. The large contingent of Anglo-American ex-pats still spends most of its time at the fiesta drinking, talking, flirting, dancing, watching and, of course, running with the bulls. They are not a part of a Lost Generation as Ernest Hemingway was and certainly not as jaded as the characters he wrote about in his novel. Instead they live like the rest of us in the modern world with all its distractions, pleasures, conveniences and absurdities. They are drowning in that sea of ridiculous choices that all of us are forced to make every day and come to the fiesta in search of something that has healing powers, something that has remained true to itself and that will not change and which has ancient roots. What they find is the Roman Bacchanalia in a post-modern guise. There is an excess of everything during the fiesta and for nine days and nights they forget about the outside world and live their lives to the fullest.

“Bacchanalia: A Pamplona Story” is, in short, a modern take on this ancient festival. It is a portrait of what goes on there as seen through the eyes of its Italian-American protagonist, Frank Ardito.

So prepare yourself and get a copy of the novel on Amazon.com (ebook or paperback) at this link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081LKJZPJ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Bacchanalia%3A+A+Pamplona+Story&qid=1573941392&s=books&sr=1-1

and then come to the fiesta in July of 2020. Because as they say in Pamplona, Ya falta menos (every day is one day less until the next San Fermin).

Copyright 2019, John Hemingway

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The Pilar

The first time I heard about the Pilar or actively spoke about it was in 1974 when I was living with my great-uncle Leicester in Miami Beach. If my father mentioned it I was either too young to understand what he was talking about or it was just another boat that he and his dad happened to be fishing on when he was a boy in Bimini in the 1930s. Leicester was much more descriptive and in his biography of his brother there was a passage where he sees Ernest sitting in the fighting chair of the Pilar at sunset in Key West taking swigs from a bottle of rum. My grandfather was a tall man, as tall as my great-uncle, 6 ft., and strongly built, and back then his hair was still black and he had a moustache. The white beard would come later and the potbelly too. He was lean and young and Leicester writes that that was the first time that he noticed all the shrapnel wounds in his legs from the Austrian shell that had nearly killed him during the First World War.

It was a powerful image and one that stuck with me as I moved from one house to another from Florida to Connecticut to Los Angeles and then finally to Europe as a man. I could easily see him sitting there and smell the salt water in the bay and feel the slight rocking of a heavily built wooden boat in the waves.

Eventually my father would also write about the Pilar and the Nazi U-Boat hunting expeditions that Ernest would organize with a few friends and his captain, Gregorio Fuentes. Packing everyone aboard the Pilar with supplies and a homemade bomb that they intended to drop into the conning tower of an unsuspecting German sub, they would set out from Cojimar in search of trouble. A slightly suicidal mission if there ever was one. How they ever thought that they might get close enough to the U-boat to pull it off before they were machine-gunned into the Gulf Stream is beyond me, but that was the plan.

Luckily they never found the Germans except for my grandfather’s fatal encounter with them at the end of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. They were never shot at, the boat survived and Ernest fished aboard her until he left Cuba in 1960.

Today the Pilar is in dry dock on the grounds of his house the Finca Vigía outside of Havana. It was painstakingly restored in 2007 and is kept under a steel awning that protects it somewhat from the elements. I say somewhat because when I saw it for the first time last Thursday I noticed that the varnish on the wood in the cabin had already started to chip and peel. What impressed me though was the size of the boat, something that photographs can never really convey. I could finally see it with my own eyes and imagine my grandfather standing on the flying bridge above the cabin because it was obvious now that it was strong enough to support someone as big as Ernest. Likewise I could see my Uncle Patrick as a young boy sitting in the fighting chair as he wrestled with a huge marlin for hours, just like the second son of the protagonist of Islands in the Stream does.

But the Pilar itself was an archive of dreams and past lives, which I could not avoid now in her presence. I could feel my father and my Uncle Leicester. I could sense their energy and their pathos and I knew that while they were gone and I missed them dearly that they would always be here in this place, with this boat.

Interview on Public Television station WSRE with Jeff Weeks

Here is a link to an interview I gave on public television while I was in Pensacola in October, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5oXODNQWEw

Bimini, Wahoo and the Hemingways

Here's an article of mine that just came out on Sport Fishing Magazine.

ALL MAN!

 

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

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

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

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.

A new start for Bimini

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

John Hemingway at The Windy City Story Slam

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?

San Fermin

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!

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.

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.' "

Socialism for the rich!

"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.

Yoshi

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.

Solidarity for Ronaldo and Hemingway

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.

El Doble

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.

Fiesta de San Fermin

I’ll be going to Pamplona in July for theFiesta 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