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

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.

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.' "

Chalk's

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.

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.

Oh Canada!

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.