The Hemingway you don’t know

Among the things we know about Nobel-winning American author of the 20th century Ernest Hemingway are the facts that he was the symbol of American machismo through big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing and bullfighting.

But what we don’t know is his internal family struggles and his freakish exploration of the transgender, which John Hemingway, his grandson, has attempted to present in a bold new book, ‘Strange Tribe — A Family Memoir’.

According to John, who actually couldn’t spend much time with his grandfather as he was born only a year before Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, the biographies of the great author usually present a sanitised versions of his life.

Son of Gregory Hemingway, who struggled with his sexuality and had his sex changed, John explores the relationship his father had with this grandfather, which turned bitter towards the end and how he grew up with the weight of the Hemingway surname while at the same time dealing with psychological impacts of having a bipolar father and schizophrenic mother.

“My father hardly spoke about my grandfather, but I knew he was obsessed about his father though he didn’t wear it on his sleeve due to the conflict they both had. But I knew he missed his father terribly and hated him at the same time,” said John as he discussed the details of the book that covers the lives of both his father and grandfather.

Providing an insight into a complex relationship the father and son shared, he added that his father Gregory blamed himself for Hemingway’s suicide, though it wasn’t his fault.

Reading from a passage of his, John said: “My grandfather was in a bad shape towards the end of his life and was suffering from the combined effects of heavy drinking, memory loss and the various drugs he was taking for his conditions. For my father, all of that didn’t matter. In the last three years of Hemingway’s life, they weren’t communicating much.”

The book also delves into Hemingway’s own exploration of sexuality and shares an insight into his portrayal of several transgender characters throughout his literary works

source : gulfnews