Valerie Danby-Smith was 19 and had been raised largely in a Dublin nunnery. Her employers sent her into the interview with Papa Hemingway armed with bad questions based on a faulty premise. And Valerie, while well-versed in Irish literature, had little backgrounding in Hemingway’s works.
Hemingway, the gallant veteran journalist, took the young reporter under his wing and, soon, into his employ. She would come to travel Europe with the author and to live in his home in Cuba, the Finca Vigía, during the last two years of his life.
Papa would eventually discuss the prospect of marriage with Valerie. She demurred, but eventually did wed Ernest’s youngest son, Gregory "Gig" Hemingway whom she met at Ernest’s funeral.
After more than 40 years of near total silence on the subject of the Hemingways, Valerie has composed the revelatory memoir Running with the Bulls (Ballantine Books, 314 pages, $24.95), arguably the finest of any of the books penned by a Hemingway insider.
Following Ernest’s suicide in Ketchum, Idaho in July 1961, Valerie moved from being Ernest’s "secretary" to widow Mary Hemingway’s assistant. Valerie traveled to Cuba and Key West with Ernest’s fourth and final wife to recover manuscripts and papers and eventually took up residence at the Kennedy Library in Boston, which Mary had chosen as a repository for Ernest’s manuscripts, letters and personal possessions.
The ghost of another Hemingway also casts a long shadow across Running with the Bulls.
Valerie’s husband, Gregory Hemingway, the youngest of the famous writer’s sons, had the most turbulent relationship with his father of any of the three Hemingway sons. The two battled bitterly and remained estranged for many years.
The youngest Hemingway also chafed under his father’s disappointment that he had not been born Ernest’s long-hoped for daughter. Eventually, Valerie Hemingway would discover that her bipolar husband was a transvestite.
In the throes of his mood swings, Gregory would give visitors gifts and mementos related to Ernest that belonged to Valerie. She eventually fled the house with her daughter following a physical attack by Gregory.
In 1995, Gregory actually underwent a sex change operation and adopted the name "Gloria." He died of heart disease in a woman’s jail in Florida in October 2001.
Many other authors crop up in the course of Running with the Bulls, not the least of which is Irish writer Brendan Behan, with whom Valerie had a brief affair, and a child, in 1962.
Valerie Hemingway spoke with interviewer Craig McDonald in November 2004 from her home in Bozeman, Montana.
PART 1:
RUNNING WITH THE BULLS
Hemingway: I felt I could look back. I did try it in about 1991. I was suggesting ideas for books and my agent said, "You know the one book that would really sell would be to write your memoirs of your days with the Hemingways." I started and I got into about sixty pages and said, "I can’t do this." It just wasn’t the right time. My husband was still alive. I probably would not have mentioned him. It would have been a completely different book. For some reason, I couldn’t go on, so I stopped and I said, "I’m going to put that aside and I don’t know if I’ll take it up again."
And then he came back to me again a couple of years ago. What got me started on it was that Maxwell Perkins’ granddaughter went down to Cuba and she realized that there was a stash of Hemingway papers there in the basement of the Finca that she had never heard of. When she came back with the news it seemed like completely new information to all of the literary people in America. So she set about getting funding — and she still is working on this — so that those papers at least can be preserved because they were crumbling. When I heard this, of course it wasn’t news to me because it was Mary and myself in 1961 — I actually assembled all those papers — who put them there.
Mary had intended to leave the Finca to the people of Cuba and her first idea was that this would be a learning center. With that in mind, we selected an across-the-board sampling of Ernest’s sort of writing and letters and notes and things and photographs that would validate the Finca being a learning center. So what I did was I wrote that chapter that is Mary and myself going back to Cuba, thinking I could sell it as an article. The response to that was, "This looks like a much larger work … we’d be interested in it if we saw something more complete." So my agent said, "Why don’t you at least write an outline of a whole book?" And that’s exactly what I did. I thought maybe it is the time to say it because if I don’t speak out, then the time goes and everybody draws their own conclusions, as they have done.
McDonald: For many years….
Hemingway: And many biographies. And even though I know that my part is a very very minor part in the scale of Ernest’s life — I said somewhere I spent two years with him and that was one-tenth of my life at the time, and it was one-thirtieth of his life, you know. Still, nothing can compare with a first-hand account. You can tell things, but things get diluted as it goes from mouth to mouth or whatever.
Normally, I have tried to avoid giving interviews prior to this because it was hard to explain, say, my relationship with Ernest. It was somewhere between being a daughter, being a muse … being an employee. It was a little mixture of a lot of things that don’t translate into the present day sound-byte. They want everything cut and dried. So I thought the only way to do it was to describe how it was and then the reader will know.
McDonald: You have a postscript in the book in which you deal with your former husband’s fate. Had you written the manuscript for your memoir and added that coda, or was the memoir written subsequent to your ex-husband’s death?
Hemingway: When I wrote the book and sent it to my editor I said, "I don’t feel that Greg’s death is my story because I heard it second-hand." But I think she very wisely said to me, "You need to mention it." I think when you are face on with people you say, "That’s what happened … that’s how it was." You’re much less likely to sort of stir up the questions. And people always imagine things to be much worse than they are, you know?
McDonald: Sure.
Hemingway: Even though I’d rather not have done it — mainly for my children … they’d rather not have it rehashed again, but it will be — so I thought it was sort of the brave thing to do. I put it in a postscript to indicate that this was something that was not mine first-hand … it’s how I came to hear of it — which was through my son Edward — and what emotions, or some of the emotions, it brought to me.
McDonald: You express particular gratitude to your son Edward for his support of your book. Have some of your other children come around a bit now that they’ve read the book?
Hemingway: My daughter has been absolutely — it’s funny, because I was a little bit anxious with my daughter because she was the youngest and she lived through so much. The boys really didn’t see the worst side of Greg. They never saw him dressed up. But she did live through sort of realizing as a teenager that her father had some mental problems. Teenagers are sort of difficult, anyway. I don’t know if you have teenagers yourself?
McDonald: No, they’re very young. Four and six.
Hemingway: Well, lots of luck! Actually, they’re good, but they do go through difficult periods. She went through a difficult period. So I thought this book was going to touch her more than the other children. When she read it, she e-mailed me and said, "Mums, I’m just so pleased you wrote this book. I’m so proud of you for writing this book." She said for the first time "I feel proud to be a Hemingway." For years she had sort of … well, when she married, she took her husband’s name. She just didn’t want to be part of the Hemingway hubbub.
McDonald: It’s a lot to shoulder.
Hemingway: The funny thing now: she’s just had a baby and she’s going to take a year off work and try her hand at a novel. It was sort of sparked by what I wrote and there she is in it — that was part of her life. I guess she just sort of realized certain riches in her life even though the riches may not be the happiest riches. You know what I mean? One has a treasure there.
My other two boys are a bit more reserved about it. They feel that they’d rather not have the notoriety. They both complimented me on the book and said they’re behind me, but I could tell. Which is only natural — that they would rather not have to deal with people asking questions and I can certainly understand that.
But you know, instead of Hemingway just fading out, every year, there’s more and more interest in him and more and more articles. And now, every now and then, people do come up, just sort of interested in Greg. It seems to be much much less than one might expect. I’ve just done a three-week East Coast tour and there were barely a handful of questions about Greg and usually very polite and not intrusive. Which I’ve been pleased about. Because what people are interested about is Hemingway and his work and that’s what it’s all about, really.
McDonald: Gregory by all accounts, and by his own account, had a very bad relationship with his father and years of estrangement. You lived with Gregory for so many years. Did that color your attitude toward Ernest in any way?
Hemingway: No. I guess I’m able to compartmentalize. I never really thought of the two in sort of the same way. I met Greg after Ernest died and Greg turned out to be so different from what I — well, I hadn’t really thought about him — but what I thought was, "Well, this is a no-good person that I’m probably never going to meet." Then I meet him and I find he’s wonderfully charming, articulate, kindly … interesting. I mean, of course, he also had his moods and temper … all the other side. But, by and large, he was a very very interesting person.
I never thought of his father in the same sort of picture, because Greg had really not had much to do with his father from when he was 19. He was 29 when I met him. So the times hadn’t really overlapped. Once in a while he might ask me something about the Finca or something about my time with the Hemingways, but not much. What he remembered mostly was his childhood when things were great. He didn’t talk about the bad times with his father. He talked about being a little child and how enchanting it was and how he’d always tried to impress his father and up to a certain age he had done that. He was a great shot. He was fine athlete. Ernest had a little baseball team in Cuba in San Francisco de Palo, and they were Giggy’s friends. Someone just recently did a little movie on it, a documentary.
McDonald: I interviewed a man involved with that film … crime writer Randy Wayne White.
Hemingway: Yes, I know Randy. He’s a good guy. Although they did call (Gregory) "Gee-Gee" instead of "Giggy" (with hard "G"s). That’s something that happens in the tape of my book, too. My son Ed listened to the book and said, "Aw, they call my dad ‘Gee-Gee." It’s just that it never even occurred to me because it was just sort of my knowledge that it was Giggy and it never occurred to me that I should sort of phonetically spell it.
McDonald: Yeah, I can remember reading it in many places as "Gig."
Hemingway: Yes, he was Giggy as a little kid and then he became "Gig." So those were the times, if Greg tried to think of his father and the early times, he would think of the good times. He did his own book, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with that….
McDonald: Yes, Papa, I have read it.
Hemingway: It wasn’t that angry, except for that introduction where he’d had a fight with someone who’d mentioned his father and that sort of brought out unconsciously his anger and frustration at his father. But he didn’t allow the children to even talk about his father. It wasn’t until they went off to school and they’d come back and say, "Why is our grandfather so special? Everyone is asking us about our grandfather — why do you never talk to us about him?"
I remember saying to them, "If you want to know about your grandfather, read his books. There they are on the shelf — that’s how you’ll know about your grandfather. And I pretty much never told them anything. So I think in a way they feel a little bit cheated. But the thing is it’s hard to, well, when they read the book now, well, it isn’t how you’d tell children.
McDonald: Are you trying to write your account through the eyes of a nineteen-year-old girl?
Hemingway: That’s what I was trying (the first time). Because that’s how I met him. He wasn’t this enormous hero which is why I think it clicked. That’s one of the reasons why when we met that we got on so well. Because I wasn’t one of these adoring sort of American college-age students who had just read Ernest in class and wanted to connect with him. I wasn’t even interested really.
In an Irish school, in the sort of rather formal setting that I grew up in, writers, preferably, were dead. One had to be rather suspicious of writers if they were alive. They were better dead and up on the shelf.
McDonald: Where they can’t disappoint you?
Hemingway: Yes.
OF THE VALERIE HEMINGWAY INTERVIEW