Vivid Book of the Month February 2005

Book of the Month
The Hemingways: just your average family

by Andrew Begg
February 2005

Running with the Bulls – My Years with the Hemingways by Valerie Hemingway
Ballantine Books, 313 pages, 2004, ISBN 0-345-46733-7 $24.95

To many students of twentieth century American literature, two authors stand out like beacons: Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, yet they couldn’t have been more different. Hemingway was a broad strokes writer whose themes were big and manly and who, if he wasn’t writing about war and peace and honour, would be game fishing on his boat off the Cuban coast or on safari in Africa, or at a bullfight in Spain. At their first meeting in Paris in 1925 when Fitzgerald was the better established of the two, Hemingway surprised Fitzgerald by taking him into a men's toilet to compare the size of each other's penis. Fitzgerald was much more a cerebral writer whose ideas came from within, and it irked him considerably that, as inspiration dried up and he would have to resort increasingly to the bottle for ideas, Hemingway would be off on the most wonderful adventures, writing about them and creating works of art from them. As both men and their works were so different it was somehow difficult to appreciate both equally, and as a student of both I was much more firmly fixed in the Fitzgerald camp than in Hemingway’s.

Since their deaths (Hemingway died in 1961, Fitzgerald in 1940) a great deal has been written about the lives of both men - particularly Hemingway’s - that it is difficult to imagine what else could be added that is of interest. However, there is an insight in Running with the Bulls – My Years with the Hemingways that is of great interest. It has material that cannot be found elsewhere on Ernest and his relationships with his fourth wife Mary, and the rest of his family, particularly his troubled youngest son, Greg. The book also contains fascinating snippets of Hemingway’s meetings with equally famous men such as a young and idealistic Fidel Castro and an admiring Tennessee Williams.

In 1959 Valerie Danby-Smith, a recent graduate of secretarial school, encounters Ernest Hemingway in Spain, who soon employs the attractive 20-year-old as a general dogsbody who quickly becomes a member of Hemingway’s entourage, assisting him, researching for him and typing manuscripts and all the while living with him and his wife Mary in their house in Malaga. Hemingway is in Spain primarily to attend bullfights, with which he has been obsessed for many years (for those who want to understand bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, first published in 1932, is the best book ever written on the subject in English).

Hemingway is close to his sixtieth birthday and at this stage had recently dispensed with wife number 3, the renowned journalist Martha Gellhorn. Valerie becomes indispensable to him, and although there is never any suggestion that there was a sexual relationship between them, it is quite obvious that he was in love with her. She travels with them everywhere, living two eventful years with the great author and his wife in their homes in Malaga, Florida, Idaho and Havana. All the while, relations between she and Mary Hemingway are cool at best.

Hemingway grows increasingly paranoid, fearing that his best work is behind him and that there are people trying to kill him. He is continually depressed and eventually enters the Mayo Clinic for treatment. Valerie accepts a similar kind of job in New York with Brendan Behan, the Irish playwright who is about to experience great success on Broadway. Hemingway eventually dies, of a self-administered gunshot wound brought on by his sickness. Valerie is the only person to attend Ernest Hemingway’s funeral who is not a member of the family. After the funeral, Mary asks Valerie to accompany her to Cuba to sort out roomfuls of documents. The pair end up smuggling four trunks full of correspondence back to the United States and leaving the estate to the newly formed government of Fidel Castro.

At the funeral, in the small town of Ketchum, Idaho, Valerie befriends Greg, Ernest’s shy, retiring youngest son of whom Ernest had rarely ever spoken. They fall in love and marry. The last third of the book relates Greg’s unbalanced psychological state, his inability to hold down a regular job and his eventual decline. Valerie begins noticing that items of her clothing are missing with increasing regularity, and when she walks in on Greg admiring himself as a woman she knows that something is very, very wrong. They seperate, Greg eventually dies in a prison cell and the reader is left wondering how much influence the expectations of a celebrated father had on his decline and fall.

Running with the Bulls – My Years with the Hemingways will be read and enjoyed by any admirer of Ernest Hemingway. Published just last year, we should be glad that it was written at all. But a book of this quality - allowing such an insight into one of the great lions of American literature - is never too late.