Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir (review)

Given the myriad memoirs and biographies by Hemingway family members—books by Ernest's siblings Leicester (My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 1962), Marcelline (At the Hemingways, 1962), and Madelaine (Ernie: Hemingway's Sister "Sunny" Remembers, 1975), wife number two, Martha Gellhorn (Travels with Myself and Another, 1978), wife number four, Mary Welsh (How It Was, 1976), sons Jack (Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa, 1986) and Gregory (Papa: A Personal Memoir, 1988), daughter-in-law Valerie (Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, 2004), granddaughter Lorian (Walk on Water: A Memoir, 1998), and niece Hilary (Hunting with Hemingway, 2000 and Hemingway in Cuba, 2003)—the reader who greets with skepticism this new family memoir by Ernest's grandson John might easily be forgiven. But if readers doubt that anything remains to be learned about Ernest and the Hemingways from a grandson who never met his famous grandfather (Ernest died before John was a year old), they are in for a welcome surprise. John Hemingway, son of Ernest's youngest son, Gregory, has written a remarkable and ambitious book.

The author's childhood, lived in the shadow of his celebrated grandfather and spent shuttling between his schizophrenic mother, his bipolar and cross-dressing father, and his generous, eccentric granduncle, Leicester, is rich enough material for any memoir. Yet John blends this story with a biography of his father, a study of his father's relationship with Ernest, and a meditation on the similarities between his two progenitors. Weaving two generations' worth of father/son relationships into a sort of narrative fugue, Strange Tribe makes for compelling reading. John writes about his family with a disarming candor, deep love, and hard-won compassion and understanding. Sensitive, insightful, and by turns funny and deeply sad, his book tells a powerful story of growing up in a family shaken by mental illness and of struggling to come to terms with his father and family name. Hemingway scholars, however, will be most interested in the way the book forces us to rethink Ernest's relationship with Gregory—a relationship with profound implications for Hemingway's writing during the final decade of his life.

Perhaps John writes with such sensitivity about Gregory because his own childhood in some ways paralleled that of his father. Both were sons of second wives of fathers who each had four wives. And both John and Gregory early idolized their often-absent fathers, in part to compensate for what they found lacking in their distant mothers. John's mother, Alice, was distanced by her schizophrenia. (At one point after the divorce from Gregory, her voices told her to become a nun, and she actually tried to give her children to the Catholic Church.) Pauline Hemingway's distance from young Gregory was of a different sort. In a 1989 interview, Gregory described his mother as follows: "I hated the bitch. She was born without the maternal instinct. She never showed any affection towards me. She never kissed me once in my life that I know about. She never held me" (19).

One problem was that Ernest (and therefore the desperately obliging Pauline) had really wanted a little girl. During his parents' frequent absences in Europe and Africa, Greg was raised by his alcoholic and "cruelly manipulative" governess, Ada Stern, a surrogate mother who would threaten to leave Gregory whenever the little boy broke one of her many rules. (Nevertheless, Gregory retained a lifelong attachment to Ada. In a 1954 letter to Ernest, explaining why he wanted to bring Ada with him to Africa to take care of his 3-year-old daughter, Lorian, Gregory wrote: "I owe her a lot. She took care of me until I was twelve, was practically my mother" [128].) On those rare occasions when Pauline spent any time alone with Greg, she found him to be the "lousiest type of mama's boy," clinging and "crying out whenever he lost sight of her." At such moments, she...