John’s honesty is bracing as he tries hard for understanding and acceptance, but the Hemingway legacy remains as complicated...
Desperately sad memoir by Ernest Hemingway’s grandson chronicles a wretched family history of turbulent father-son relationships exacerbated by chronic, hereditary mental illness.
The author’s father, Gregory Hemingway, was Ernest’s son by second wife Pauline. Ignored and abandoned as a boy by his glamorous parents, Greg grew up hating his mother and idealizing his famous father. He was afflicted with the same bipolar disorder that led Papa and grandfather Clarence to commit suicide in late middle age. Moreover, Greg was a transvestite, frequently arrested for cross-dressing; he eventually underwent a sex-change operation. Born in 1960, the author also had to deal with a schizophrenic mother who was often hospitalized, leaving him and his siblings to be shifted among relatives. John writes in a surprisingly evenhanded fashion about these traumatic events, as well as Greg’s mental degeneration as he moved from one wife/caretaker to another, much as Ernest did. The author reproduced family patterns, too: Financially dependent on his father’s handouts, he wheedled to get what he wanted, just as Greg did with Ernest. “I would like to see you straighten up and fly right,” Ernest exhorts his son in one of the explosive letters printed here to trace their fraught bond. Greg was deeply ambivalent about his identity, and John argues that perhaps Ernest was as well. He enlists Papa’s work to back him up, and to cast a more forgiving light on Greg’s troubled behavior. He couldn’t be a writer, he realized, until he made peace with his father. In the book’s moving afterword, the author promises to his own newborn son that “this time it’d be different.”
John’s honesty is bracing as he tries hard for understanding and acceptance, but the Hemingway legacy remains as complicated as ever.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59921-112-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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