Jeff Heinrich interviews John Hemingway about a new play about his grandfather Ernest.
John Hemingway never met his famous grandfather, Ernest – “he died when I was about 11 months old” – but the great writer’s life and legacy had a profound influence on his own. Now living with his wife and two children in Montreal after moving from Italy, the grandson – a writer himself, author of a biography of his father and grandfather – is quite aware he has a heavyweight name.
“When I was young, it was very much a burden. Not so much because of Ernest, but because of my mother and father,” John explained. “My father was bipolar, my mother was schizophrenic. So (being a Hemingway) meant having a very, very dysfunctional family and wondering, at times, ‘What benefit is there, at all, in having this name?’ ”
Well, one, at least: bringing Hemingway to a modern audience. As an expert consultant, John has helped fine-tune a new Quebec play called Dans l’ombre d’Hemingway. It’s a one-act drama written and directed by Stéphane Brulotte, the Quebec actor and playwright who last year staged Une partie avec l’Empereur, which explored the life of another famous figure of world history, Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Hemingway play takes place in Cuba in 1950, and depicts the American writer’s platonic love affair – while still married to his fourth wife, Mary – with a young Italian countess named Adriana Ivancich, whom they’d met in Venice two years before. She and her mother were guests of the Hemingways at Finca Vigia, their estate near Havana, for three months. It was a critical time in Hemingway’s career.
His reputation that year was in tatters after a wave of bad reviews for his latest novel, Across the River and into the Trees, which had actually been inspired by his infatuation with Ivancich. But after the Italians left Cuba, Hemingway bounced back with The Old Man and the Sea, a critically acclaimed novel that renewed his worldwide fame. Three years later, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
As imagined dramatically by Brulotte – with historical veracity assured by John Hemingway – the Cuban idyll proved rich for family drama. Essentially, it’s the story of a man coming to terms with the limitations of middle age. It’s a subject John Hemingway is intensely familiar with himself, having shadowed his famous grandfather for years without ever grabbing the spotlight.
The twisted lineage is this: John’s father was Hemingway’s third son, Gregory, a physician who in later life got a sex change operation and called himself Gloria. His mother was Alice Thomas, Gregory’s second wife. In 2007, John wrote a critical book about Ernest and Gregory’s troubled relationship called Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir.
“I was born in Miami, a place where the winters aren’t quite as cold as here, to put it mildly. I lived all over the U.S. – New York, Boston, I went to UCLA – and then I spent most of my adult life in Europe: 22 years in Italy, a year in Spain and some months in France,” John said.
“We came back here because English education in Europe is very expensive, as you know, and specifically to Montreal because it was close to New York, with all the contacts that we have there. My wife and my kids already had Canadian citizenship; she’s from Ontario.”
John Hemingway came to Brulotte’s project two years ago by way of the classic six degrees of separation. Hemingway has a daughter; his daughter went to the alternative school FACE; she had a friend; John met the friend’s father at a school event; the father told his wife about John; the wife turned out to be an ex-girlfriend of Brulotte.
Brulotte had already written a first draft of his play at the time, and was doing readings with actors. When he heard there was a real live Hemingway in Montreal who might help with the script, he jumped at the chance to meet him. Brulotte told him he got the idea for a Hemingway play after visiting Cuba and realizing how popular “the old gringo” still was there; Brulotte had abandoned an idea to write about Che Guevara in order to concentrate on Hemingway.
“I went to a reading of an early version,” the grandson recalled. “Parts of it were good, parts of it needed to be changed, and (Brulotte) did change them. He had a party scene that was really dragging.” Several meetings later, Brulotte came out with the final draft. “The present version is a lot better – very tight, very good,” said Hemingway, who now sees Brulotte frequently and considers him a friend and fellow writer (and vice versa; Brulotte calls him “a gold mine of information”).
“He presents a very interesting portrait of my grandfather – much more human, much less legendary,” John said. “Obviously it’s fiction, because he’s making up conversations. But what you get is a much more fragile Ernest Hemingway. Yes, there’s all the über-macho stuff, the hunting and deep-sea fishing and drinking” – there’s alcohol in practically every scene, in fact. “But he’s a man in decline – a man in decline who finally decides to act like a man.”
Before he met John, Brulotte imagined Hemingway as “the grandfather I’d always wished I’d had – someone fabulous.” Then John told him the whole self-destructive story, the truth behind the legend of the white-bearded literary titan the world had affectionately and naively come to call Papa Hemingway. It was a reality check for Brulotte: “John burst a lot of balloons in my imagining of Hemingway.”
The play, said John, will have the same effect on audiences.
“It’s not quite what people are going to expect of Ernest Hemingway. He was much more complicated than they think,” he said.
“This is a love story between a man who is at the end of his career, at the end of his life, and a young Italian countess from Veneto. They really did love each other, it’s just that he couldn’t really satisfy her physically.” The prescription pills he pops, the booze he abused, his bipolar condition “and the pressure he was under all the time to write” combined to rob him of his vigour, his grandson said.
Unable to leave his wife, on whom he depended totally and who would eventually survive him by a quarter-century, Hemingway was stuck. “You see the passion between my grandfather and Adriana Ivancich, but on the other hand you see a man who knows that he must let go of this young woman. It’s a different kind of tragedy that you don’t read too often about Ernest.”
(One thing the play doesn’t reproduce well, however, is Ernest’s nasally, Chicago-bred voice. Though the spitting image physically, the actor who plays him, Michel Dumont, has a deep, sonorous voice, not at all like the original.)
Left out of the play’s plot is a lot of what John Hemingway turned up in own research: letters between his father and grandfather “that not even the scholars have seen” and that show what kind of a father Ernest Hemingway was. “He was a very attentive father, for as long as anything mattered to him, and who also came to discover how similar his son was to him.”
In what way? “My dad cross-dressed from the time he was 11 years old, okay? And he eventually had a sex-change operation in his 60s. My grandfather was in his prime in the 1920s and ’30s when a lot of things were being experimented with in Europe; Paris and Berlin were the capitals of research into transsexual, androgynous theory. Ernest was a product of that time; he was a student of Gertrude Stein, a lesbian artist who sent him to see corrida for the first time in Spain.
“She knew about the roots of corrida, which is a dance, a ritual, not a sport, and which represented the gift of the bridegroom to the bride; the matador is the woman and the bull is the man, and only at the end of the dance, when he finally kills the bull, is there union between the two. Again and again in (Hemingway’s) short stories, there’s this search for the point of union between a man and a woman.”
For example, in the gender-bending, unfinished novel The Garden of Eden, published posthumously in 1986, the protagonist dyes his hair the colour of his girlfriend’s and tells her how much he admires Rodin’s statue The Metamorphoses of Ovid, because, as he puts it, there’s no telling where the man begins and the woman ends. Likewise, in his early story from 1925, Big Two-Hearted River, Hemingway wrote of a quiet, deep part of the river where the larger fish swim but where smaller fish go only at their peril. “The deep pool is his own desires, his own research into his own masculinity, his own femininity,” his grandson believes. In another story, The Sea Change (1931), a young couple argue in a Paris café over whether he’ll agree to her having a lesbian affair, which is only alluded to, preserving the mystery.
One family trait John Hemingway did not inherit was manic depression and a propensity to suicide. Ernest Hemingway’s father, Clarence, killed himself; so did Ernest’s younger brother, Leicester, also a writer; so did their sister, Ursula; and so, famously, did Hemingway himself, in 1961. In John’s generation, supermodel Margaux Hemingway – daughter of Ernest’s eldest son, Jack – killed herself, too, by overdose. “I don’t have that,” said John. “I’m not bipolar, nor do I suffer from clinical depression. It’s something that can skip you.”
What message does he hope will emerge from Dans l’ombre d’Hemingway?
“It’s what Ernest would say all the time,” John responded. “ ‘You’re going to die, you can’t get around that, but that isn’t the question. The question is: How are you going to live your life?’ ”
For the Hemingways, the answer has never been simple.
Dans l’ombre d’Hemingway, written and directed by Stéphane Brulotte, opens Wednesday and continues through Dec. 3 at Théâtre Jean Duceppe of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $20 to $52. For showtimes and a video of the actors talking about the play, visit pda.qc.ca.
John Hemingway’s 2007 book Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir (Lyons Press, $29.95) is available from Chapters and other book retailers. For his blog, visit www.johnhemingway.blogspot.com
For the original report go to http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/Dans+ombre+Hemingway+Iconic+writer+grandson+consults+Quebec+play/5598910/story.html#ixzz1bllcyZaC
