Papa's Secret
Words, as well as deeds, are the key to understanding Hemingway.
Nov 5, 2012, Vol. 18, No. 08 • By EDWIN M. YODER JR.
http://weeklystandard.com/articles/papa-s-secret_657912.htmlThe most valuable feature of Hemingway's Boat is that it does justice to the shadow under which Hemingway lived and wrote, the clinical depression that he probably inherited from his physician father. Both were suicidal and both ultimately acted on the impulse. An adequate grasp of the deadly dangers of depression only came to the literary scene long after Hemingway blew his head off one summer morning in 1961.
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Paul Hendrickson makes no such mistake. He builds his account around Hemingway's fishing yacht, the Pilar, which he bought in New York in 1934 and fished from for decades in Key West and Havana. Hemingway's fascination with big-game fishing becomes the frame for a sympathetic look into many neglected corners of his life, some of them very dark. All are revealing, but perhaps the most revealing is the story of Hemingway's youngest son, Gregory, known to the family as "Gi-Gi." Gregory was a devoted physician when he chose to be, but he was also a man of confused identity who secretly began slipping on his stepmother's stockings at age 11. By the end of his erratic and often drugged and exhibitionist life, he had undergone sex-change surgery. But even then he continued to oscillate between male and female roles.
