While reading “Hemingway’s Boat,” it occurred to me that serious students of Ernest Hemingway have been like passengers in another vessel, the metaphorical boat invoked by his friend and rival F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Great Gatsby.” As readers, we have been beating against a ceaseless current of posthumously published novels, biographies, family memoirs, psychoanalytic studies and polarized critical debates about Hemingway’s oeuvre and character. Now thanks to Paul Hendrickson, we can rest on our oars for a while.
This book is a large-minded, rigorously fair summation of the best thought on Hemingway’s writing, his life, traumas, pathologies, his family and friends, his even more abundant cast of personal, literary and cultural enemies. There is new reporting, too, about significant events and previously ignored witnesses aboard Pilar, a 38-foot ocean fishing boat delivered to Hemingway in 1934. Like earlier books by this deft storyteller, this parallel biography of Pilar and her captain is extremely well written. Moreover, in the academic field of Hemingway studies, the book will stand as an indispensable document. It recognizes Hemingway’s deservedly high place in the modernist literary pantheon and broadens our understanding of the half-century fad among scholars and critics to denigrate his magnificent early work, notably “The Sun Also Rises”, “A Farewell to Arms,” and “The First Forty Nine Stories,” by documenting the declining editorial judgment, manners and common sense that marked his later years.
(Knopf/Knopf) - ‘Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961’ by Paul Hendrickson
In journalistic and scholarly terms, here is the main thought. Hendrickson makes a convincing case that Gregory Hemingway, the author’s transvestite (and eventually transsexual) son, was acting out in extreme ways a gender confusion shared by — and sympathetically understood by — his father. Contrary to other accounts, including Gregory Hemingway’s own memoir, which depicts them as totally estranged for the last decade of Ernest’s life, their contacts continued, by letter and phone, until a few months before the father killed himself in 1961. By the time of Gregory’s first arrest for entering a ladies’ restroom in female attire in 1951, the father already knew about his son’s gender issues, often writing him caring letters, paying his psychiatric bills, and advising him on business and marital disasters. True, the ensuing 10 years were also marked by storms of rage on both sides, but the record is clear that an author who supposedly was terrified of homoeroticism understood that Gregory’s obsessive need to wear women’s clothes was linked genetically to the elder Hemingway’s own penchant for gender-switching, role reversal in lovemaking, and the fetishism underlying his fondness for dying and cutting women’s hair to make them boy-like. Hendrickson shows that, contrary to critics and psychobiographers who have depicted Hemingway, almost gleefully, as a self-deceiving homophobe, both the author and his son were psychosexually aware and “far braver human beings than anyone ever knew” in confronting their compulsions.
Loading...
Comments