As the title suggests — and one assumes that the title and (at least on my paperback copy of the book) a photograph of the writer are intended to underline the fact — Ernest Hemingway would be the focus of the work. Well, he is, but only up to a point.
What is new is not relevant and what is relevant is not new. (That reminds me of the judgment many years ago by someone or other — I think it was Samuel Johnson — who wrote: ‘Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.’)
The pages in which Hemingway does appear cover the four months Valerie Hemingway spent nominally as a secretary and as part of his entourage while he was criss-crossing Spain following an exhausting and exhaustive tour of bullfights, and later when she lived in the Hemingway household in Cuba for about five months.
From the outset it seems Hemingway pretty much fell in love with the then 19-year-old as he had done ten years previously with another 19-year-old and, possessive old egoist that he was, more or less ‘blackmailed’ her into carrying on her secretarial duties for most of the following year at his Cuban home, the Finca Vigia.
Other biographers tell us Mary Welsh, his fourth wife, was not pleased at all, to put it mildly (and in those months in Spain Hemingway is said to have treated Welsh like dirt), but if this was apparent to Valerie, she makes scant reference to it. She and Welsh did, though, later grow closer.
‘Blackmail’ might sound extreme, but as our Val tells it, Hemingway made it very clear that he ‘relied’ on her to keep writing — he believed her presence was beneficial — and that he could not ‘go on’ if she would not come to Cuba. The implication, one very obvious to Valerie, was that he would end his life if she did not. So she did. What ‘Papa’ wanted, ‘Papa’ got.
When, back in Cuba Castro and not yet ‘a communist’ (and boy did the US play that one badly), came to power, Hemingway and his wife were persuaded that it would be safer for them to move to the US. Valerie did not join them, and she never saw Hemingway again.
He had made her promise not to get in touch with him unless he got in touch first and he didn’t seem to get in touch. Ironically, as she found out many years later on a visit to the Hemingway archive of Boston’s JFK Library, in October 1960 he had written to her, but she says she never received the letter.
She does concede, though, that even had she done so, his decline would have continued inexorably and he would still eventually have topped himself. From what we know of the last ten months of his life, she was right. Once Castro came to power in Cuba and departure to the US seemed inevitable, he mentioned it again and again.
One of the oddities about the book is the contrast, as provided by Valerie, between the seemingly ‘normal’ Hemingway of the 1959 bullfight tour (undertaken to write a feature for Life magazine) and the subsequent and apparently quite precipitous decline in his mental health.
In fact, and pertinently, most biographies suggest all was certainly not well in the summer of 1959 (the ‘dangerous summer’, though here ‘dangerous’ is just publishers’ clickbait).
As for that exhaustive tour of Spain, Valerie makes it clear that she became increasingly fed up with always, in a sense, being ‘on duty’ — being on call to booze into the night with the entourage (Hemingway had insomnia so went to bed very late and expected everyone else to stay up and keep him company) for example; being obliged to listen to the same tall anecdotes and stories told over and over again.
But then ‘Papa’ was by then ‘revered’ and ‘an elder statesmen’ of letters. She was a young woman who wanted a little independence, but reminded herself that it wouldn’t last for ever.
She did feel like a possession and recounts how just to get a little time to themselves, she and a friend who had also been roped into the entourage, the actress Beverley Bentley, who was later married to Norman Mailer for several years, one evening pretended to be ill so they would not have to join in and were able to get out on the town a little.
Hemingway was having none of that: he sent his Ketchum physician (who had flown to Spain with his to attend his 60th birthday party) to check on them. A little later, as Val n’ Bev were planning to get away, his rather creepy confidant / acolyte / friend / business partner A E Hotchner came to their room, also to check up. They eventually didn’t get away.
(One revelation which gives an insight into Hotchner was how he seemed to be encouraging Val n’ Bev to slag off others in the entourage. They remained diplomatic and were glad that had done because it seemed creepy Hotchner had been tape-recording their conversation. Odd.)
It is ironic that it never occurred to Valerie that we the reader could also become quite exhausted by the — disproportionately long — chapters detailing the Hemingway entourage’s criss-crossing of Spain for four months. This reader did, at least and found her account ever duller and duller. The image that come to mind while writing this that of from the top of a hill viewing in the far distance a very large housing estate and being required to find anything of any interest in the sight.
She follows the Spain months with her months in Cuba, but these are by no means startling, informative or even interesting. She takes dictation, she goes for walks with Hemingway, visits the Havana markets every week with Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s fourth and long-suffering wife.
After a hard day’s whatever, she swims in the nude, though only after ‘Papa’ and then Welsh have had their turn. What with the nine-strong staff and Juan, the grey-uniformed (‘gray-uniformed’ — wouldn’t want to confuse American readers) chauffeur, there was something distinctly grand and feudal about the Hemingway court at Finca.
Finally, she parts company with the Hemingways and moves to New York. But things are not going well with Hemingway who was slowly losing his marbles. That summer he had taken it into his head that he needed to go to Spain again for more research on his Live feature, but it becomes apparent he can’t cope and Welsh sends Valerie out to keep an eye on his.
Eventually back in the US, Hemingway’s health, both mental and physical goes from bad to worse over the following ten months and blasts his head off. And that is pretty much all we get of Hemingway in Running With Bulls.
Those chapters covering April 1959 to summer 1960, are topped and tailed by a few opening chapters detailing Valerie’s childhood and how she ended up in Spain and met Hemingway. The nine chapters after attending his funeral and her subsequent life then follow. They all beg the question: of what interest are they given that Hemingway is the focus of this volume and the reason many would have bought it?
OK, you might say, this is Valerie Hemingway’s memoir, so it should be about her. But, quite frankly why, without the Hemingway months, should we be interested in Valerie Hemingway, neé Valeria Danby-Smith? Yes, she had a career in publishing, but it was not stellar or extraordinary and, well, so did and do many other people.
OK, you go on, but she did marry Hemingway’s third son, Gregory. Well, yes she did, and an odd and unhappy character he turns out to be, but those chapters are also curiously dull. The world is full of odd and unhappy characters, many like him who suffered and suffer from gender dysphoria. But a chronicle of their lives would not differ much from the chronicle of her life with Gregory, distressing as it must have been.
The only distinction was that Gregory was Hemingway’s third son and that his share of the royalties (finally granted after he and his brothers John and Patrick threatened to take Welsh, who inherited everything, to court) enabled him to live a somewhat harum-scarum life. But there again, in that respect he certainly did not stand out — the world is full of sons of wealthy dads who have gone off the rail.
Yes, as her husband, he surely deserves a role in Valerie Hemingway’s memoir, but — I’ll repeat — if it weren’t for those months she spent with Hemingway, would we even bother reading Valerie Hemingway’s memoir?
Frankly, what is of any interest that in this volume would have made a readable magazine or Sunday supplement feature of about 3,000 words (or in US where they seem to prefer for overwritten, longwinded features about 10,000 to 15,000 words). To be blunt, it overstays its welcome badly.
For me the one fact of note was the account of the last year or so of Valerie’s marriage to Gregory, who repeatedly got the all-clear from fellow physicians (who, as Val points out, were not about to rat out a colleague), but who was in demotic terms as nutty as fruitcake.
His virulent and very frightening verbal and almost physical abuse of Valerie in that time reminded me starkly of accounts of the manic treatment Hemingway meted out to his third wife Martha Gellhorn in the dying days of their marriage. It would seem Hemingway pére and Hemingway fils had more in common than either might have liked to acknowledge.
In fact, that is something the father did acknowledge when he once remarked that his son had ‘the biggest dark side in the family except me’ (and does prompt me to wonder whether Ernest also suffered from gender dysphoria? His manic machismo, his fetish for hair and his enthusiasm for role reversal in bed do make the notion not completely far-fetched).
I should, perhaps, explain my rather measly verdict of 2/5 for Valerie’s memoir. It might well have got 3/5, and it is certainly not badly written. But — to my tastes at least — it is rather too much like the ‘standard middle-class memoir’ turned out by ‘standard middle-class writers’.
Her style is English / Irish pedestrian: everyone is ‘enthralled’ and ‘enchanted’, meals are ‘devoured’, fires inevitably ‘roar’, nights are invariably ‘wonderful’. You’ve read it once, you’ve read it 1,001 times.
Some might like that style, but it sets my teeth on edge. Some might be — well are, judging by the many four-star verdicts this book gets — ‘enthralled’ by it. I wasn’t.
If by some chance Val reads my rather sniffy review: sorry. But as plain-spoken, down-to-earth Irishwoman I’m sure at heart you wouldn’t want anything but honesty.
Those chapters covering April 1959 to summer 1960, are topped and tailed by a few opening chapters detailing Valerie’s childhood and how she ended up in Spain and met Hemingway. The nine chapters after attending his funeral and her subsequent life then follow. They all beg the question: of what interest are they given that Hemingway is the focus of this volume and the reason many would have bought it?
OK, you might say, this is Valerie Hemingway’s memoir, so it should be about her. But, quite frankly why, without the Hemingway months, should we be interested in Valerie Hemingway, neé Valeria Danby-Smith? Yes, she had a career in publishing, but it was not stellar or extraordinary and, well, so did and do many other people.
OK, you go on, but she did marry Hemingway’s third son, Gregory. Well, yes she did, and an odd and unhappy character he turns out to be, but those chapters are also curiously dull. The world is full of odd and unhappy characters, many like him who suffered and suffer from gender dysphoria. But a chronicle of their lives would not differ much from the chronicle of her life with Gregory, distressing as it must have been.
The only distinction was that Gregory was Hemingway’s third son and that his share of the royalties (finally granted after he and his brothers John and Patrick threatened to take Welsh, who inherited everything, to court) enabled him to live a somewhat harum-scarum life. But there again, in that respect he certainly did not stand out — the world is full of sons of wealthy dads who have gone off the rail.
Yes, as her husband, he surely deserves a role in Valerie Hemingway’s memoir, but — I’ll repeat — if it weren’t for those months she spent with Hemingway, would we even bother reading Valerie Hemingway’s memoir?
Frankly, what is of any interest that in this volume would have made a readable magazine or Sunday supplement feature of about 3,000 words (or in US where they seem to prefer for overwritten, longwinded features about 10,000 to 15,000 words). To be blunt, it overstays its welcome badly.
For me the one fact of note was the account of the last year or so of Valerie’s marriage to Gregory, who repeatedly got the all-clear from fellow physicians (who, as Val points out, were not about to rat out a colleague), but who was in demotic terms as nutty as fruitcake.
His virulent and very frightening verbal and almost physical abuse of Valerie in that time reminded me starkly of accounts of the manic treatment Hemingway meted out to his third wife Martha Gellhorn in the dying days of their marriage. It would seem Hemingway pére and Hemingway fils had more in common than either might have liked to acknowledge.
In fact, that is something the father did acknowledge when he once remarked that his son had ‘the biggest dark side in the family except me’ (and does prompt me to wonder whether Ernest also suffered from gender dysphoria? His manic machismo, his fetish for hair and his enthusiasm for role reversal in bed do make the notion not completely far-fetched).
I should, perhaps, explain my rather measly verdict of 2/5 for Valerie’s memoir. It might well have got 3/5, and it is certainly not badly written. But — to my tastes at least — it is rather too much like the ‘standard middle-class memoir’ turned out by ‘standard middle-class writers’.
Her style is English / Irish pedestrian: everyone is ‘enthralled’ and ‘enchanted’, meals are ‘devoured’, fires inevitably ‘roar’, nights are invariably ‘wonderful’. You’ve read it once, you’ve read it 1,001 times.
Some might like that style, but it sets my teeth on edge. Some might be — well are, judging by the many four-star verdicts this book gets — ‘enthralled’ by it. I wasn’t.
If by some chance Val reads my rather sniffy review: sorry. But as plain-spoken, down-to-earth Irishwoman I’m sure at heart you wouldn’t want anything but honesty.
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