Gloria Hemingway - Relationship With Ernest Hemingway

Relationship With Ernest Hemingway

Father and son were estranged for many years, beginning when Gregory was 19. As an attempt at reconciliation, Hemingway sent his father a telegram in October 1954 to congratulate him on being awarded the Nobel Prize and received $5,000 in return. They had intermittent contact thereafter. He wrote a short account of his father's life and their strained relationship, Papa: A Personal Memoir that became a bestseller. When it appeared in 1976, the preface by Norman Mailer said: "There is nothing slavish here....For once, you can read a book about Hemingway and not have to decide whether you like him or not." The New York Times called it "a small miracle" and "artfully elliptical" in presenting "gloriously romantic adventures" with "a thin cutting edge of malice." Hemingway wrote of his own ambitions in the shadow of his father's fame: "What I really wanted to be was a Hemingway hero." Of his father he wrote: "The man I remembered was kind, gentle, elemental in his vastness, tormented beyond endurance, and although we always called him papa, it was out of love, not fear." He quoted his father as telling him: "You make your own luck, Gig." and "You know what makes a good loser? Practice." Time criticized the author's "churlishness" and called his work "a bitter jumble of unsorted resentments and anguished love." His daughter Lorian responded to Papa with a letter to Time that said: "I would also like to know what type of person the author is...I haven't seen him for eight years...I think it sad that I learn more about him by reading articles and gossip columns than from my own communication with him."

According to his wife Valerie, Hemingway enjoyed his father's portrayal of him as Andrew in Islands in the Stream (1970) and later used the text as the epigraph to his memoir of his father. Valerie included this text as the epigraph to her own tribute to "Gregory H. Hemingway" written two years after his death:

The smallest boy was fair and was built like a pocket battle-ship. He was a Copy of Thomas Hudson, physically, reduced in scale and widened and shortened. His skin freckled when it tanned and he had a humorous face and was born being very old. He was a devil too, and deviled both his older brothers, and he had a dark side to him that nobody except Thomas Hudson could ever understand. Neither of them thought about this except that they recognized it in each other and knew it was bad and the man respected it and understood the boy's having it. They were very close to each other although Thomas Hudson had never been as much with this boy as with the others. This youngest boy, Andrew, was a precocious excellent athlete and he had been marvelous with horses since he had first ridden. The other boys were very proud of him but they did not want any nonsense from him, either. He was a little unbelievable and anyone could well have doubted his feats except that many people had seen him ride and watched him jump and seen his cold, professional modesty. He was a boy born to be quite wicked who was being very good and he carried his wickedness around with him transmuted into a sort of teasing gaiety. But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it. He was just being good while his badness grew inside him. —Islands in the Stream