John Hemingway unpacks his fractured family history in memoir

Literature reached several milestones in 2011: The King James Bible turned 400 years old, while Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” turned 200. In American literature, last year marked the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death.

“I was invited all over the place,” John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest Hemingway, told Spectator.

John is the author of the 2007 family memoir “Strange Tribe,” which describes the complicated family dynamics of the Hemingway clan, focusing specifically on the relationship between Ernest and his youngest son, Gregory, the author’s father. John currently lives in Montreal and works as a journalist and creative writer.

“Strange Tribe” centers around Gregory (later Gloria) and his struggles as a transsexual who lived in the shadow of Ernest’s hyper-masculine image. Like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, Ernest embodied “a standard, a measure of what it was to be an American male,” John writes in “Strange Tribe.”

But John argues that Ernest and Gregory were more similar than people had realized. They were both interested in androgyny and experimented with it in different ways. As a physician who ultimately underwent gender reassignment surgery, Gregory explored androgyny in a bodily way, while Ernest dealt with it in a literary way. Ernest’s unfinished novel “The Garden of Eden” follows a husband and wife who both fall in love with the same woman.

In unpacking this similarity, he “tried to show a different [Ernest]­—a much more maternal man.” According to John, Ernest “was attached to his son, who seemed a mirror image of him.”
Gregory’s 1976 memoir about his father, “Papa: A Personal Memoir,” testifies to this bond. Gregory wrote of Ernest, “The man I remembered was kind, gentle, elemental in his vastness, tormented beyond endurance, and although we always called him papa, it was out of love, not fear.”

But Ernest and Gregory also shared an unfortunate similarity: Both father and son suffered from bipolar disorder and alcoholism. While Ernest’s mental health issues led to his suicide in 1961, Gregory died from hypertension in 2001 in Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center, days after being charged with indecent exposure and resisting arrest. He had also struggled with drug abuse throughout his life.

When John’s cousin Margaux committed suicide in 1996 one day before the anniversary of her grandfather Ernest's death, the press talked about the “Hemingway curse,” John writes, “as if my great-grandfather Clarence had made some sort of Faustian pact with the devil.”

The son of a bipolar father and a schizophrenic mother, John somehow managed to escape the family “curse.” But he is wary of this term. John instead attributes his family’s tragedies to genetics and bad luck.

About 11 months old when his grandfather Ernest died, John has no memory of the literary giant. Learning about his grandfather through family folklore and his world-acclaimed books, John said that he admires Ernest’s “ability to end a story in a way that hits you in the gut” and is “constantly surprised” by the different points of view from which a reader can interpret his texts.
But John also tries not to let his last name define himself as a writer. “In the beginning it was kind of a problem,” he said. So he resolved to find his own voice and develop his own style, different from his grandfather’s.

“I admire him [Ernest] tremendously,” John said. “He was truly a gifted author. [But] at the same time you have your own voice. If you try to imitate someone else it’s going to sound fake.”

Since he knows his grandfather only secondhand, writing “Strange Tribe” became a scholarly pursuit as well as a journey into his own family’s dark history. “I was learning as I was writing,” he said.

Aside from the pressure to get all of the details right, one of the most difficult parts of writing the memoir was developing the tone, Hemingway said. Although his relationship with Gregory had its turbulence, he made a point not to “trash” his parents or sound “self-pitying.” Instead, he opted for compassion. “The biggest thing for me was understanding and forgiveness,” he said.

In the end, most family members found it “pretty fair” in the way that it captured the turmoil of Gregory’s life.

A UCLA graduate with a B.A. in history, John likens writers to historians. Like historians, writers think about characters and how they react in certain situations. While writing his own family history, he realized that the discipline of history “teaches you humility.”

History “keeps you grounded in the reality that everything we do is not the absolute truth,” he said. “I never wrote [in “Strange Tribe”], ‘This is the way it was.’ I wrote, ‘This is how I see it.’”