>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC.
>> They told me to start.
Wow. I've got reverb
in my own voice.
Hello, thank you for coming.
Thanks to the Library of Congress.
Thank all of you book
lovers out there.
I'm glad a number of you
found your way to this room.
We'll try to make it worth your
while for these 45 minutes.
My feeling is it's
going to flee past.
We would like to save some time at
the end to hear from several of you
to just shoot your hand up and I'll
try to find you and you stand up
and shout your question out.
Informality is the key here.
We want this to be a
conversation among the three of us.
Not in any sense presentation.
Although our two authors,
I'm the moderator,
my name is Paul Hendrickson.
I'm going to -- so Mary Dearborn
here on my immediate left
and Nicholas Reynolds beside her.
Both authors of recent
Hemmingway books.
Mary's published in May of this
year and Nicholas in March.
I'll do a tiny bit more of a formal
introduction in a few moments,
but I wondered just to get our
juiced marinating, whether yours,
as well as ours, whether I could
just toss out a question to Mary
and Nicholas and after they
say something about it,
maybe I'll have a way in as well.
I think it's the unanswerable
question,
therefore, let's start out with it.
The question, why do
we keep returning?
Why does Earnest Hemmingway seem
an almost inexhaustible American
subject for biographers
and literary historians?
Faulkner, yes, Fitzgerald, yes,
Emily Dickenson, yes,
Robert Frost, yes.
But Earnest Hemmingway, the
industry rolls on and on and on
under the American literary knife.
Mary, please.
>> Thanks, Paul.
What I can say is it's
what he wrote and I think
that somehow you are all here,
we're all here because we connect
in some way to what we read.
For me it's been the
short stories and over
and over again I can imagine myself,
even as Nick Adams or even in --
or inhabit stories like even the
killers, that in a way that I don't
with other writers and I
feel connected in that way.
I think that's true for most of us.
We come to Hemmingway through
our reading rather than --
I think there's a potent
Hemmingway myth, talk about later,
but and if we get through his work.
>> Good, thank you.
Good. Good pithy answer.
Nicholas?
>> So, I would say part of the
reason -- I would agree with Mary,
first of all -- I started
out as a Hemmingway reader
and lover long before as I thought
of myself as any kind of biographer.
But one of the thing that
fascinates the biographer is there's
so many different Hemmingways.
And he's so good at so
many things in his life,
it's almost like there's
a Hemmingway role
for almost any population.
You know, are you a sailor, well,
then there's that part of his life.
Are you a hunter, a fisherman,
are you a spy, are you a soldier?
There's almost a Hemmingway for
everyone and I think that accounts
for some of the attraction.
>> Beautiful again.
Both of -- both Mary
and Nicholas saying,
"The work, the work, the work."
And then you find the life in a
sense and Nicholas making a point
that there's a Hemmingway
for everyone,
because he lived so many lives.
My own little take on it might
be this, I'm stealing actually
from a book I wrote,
"Hemmingway's Boat."
I's something along the
lines of this, I think,
that the Hemmingway -- I totally
agree it's the work, those stories.
Big Two Hearted River was the
story that took me over when I was
on a camping and fishing trip on
the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland.
I do also think this.
the Hemmingway myth, however
much oversold and devalued,
can still powerfully stand in this
new century, now 17 years old,
for a great many tensions unresolved
in American males and not only males
or so I believe, but I also believe
that all of Hemmingway's writing,
every bit of it, even at its most
self-parodistic and papa cult worst,
is seeking to be about
the living of this life,
the doing of this life,
the being of this life.
And in that sense the work and
even I am willing to say so much
of the coarsened personal
history can be thought
of as something spiritual and indeed
almost holy and for those of you
who want to laugh me off
this stage feel free.
But that is why I think we
keep coming back and back.
I would like to more formally
introduce our two panelists.
Both of whose books came out,
as I said, in recent months.
And both of them receiving some
wonderful, wonderful reviews.
Mary Dearborn, her
biography Earnest Hemmingway,
Mary received a doctorate in
English and comparative literature
from Columbia where she was a
Mellon fellow in humanities.
She is a thorough going
American biographer.
A whole raft of books,
I can't say them all.
But the life of Peggy
Guggenheim, Normal Mailer,
who some people have accused of
being a vest pocket Hemmingway.
I don't think if you read Mary's
book -- he stands on his own.
Mailer, a biography.
A biography of Henry Miller.
Title, "The Happiest Man Alive."
I said reviews.
Just to say one, a reviewer
said this, "A nuanced portrait,
a powerful work that
draws on new material,
as well as offering fresh
insightful perspectives on one
of American literatures
most complicated icons."
Nicholas Reynolds.
His book is entitled,
"Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy."
Nicholas has worked in the
fields of modern military history
and intelligence for 40 years.
He actually is a former
United States Marine.
In the 1970s serving as an
infantry soldier and officer.
And then migrating I think might be
the way to say it, as a historian.
He was a colonial in the reserves
and in charge of field history
and deploying historians
around the world.
Most recently he worked as the
historian for the CIA museum.
Responsible for developing
its strategic plan.
So, his book is more narrowly
focused in some ways than Mary's,
but we will bat around its ideas.
Just to quote one review, from
the London Review of Books,
"Reynolds looks among the shadows
and finds a Hemmingway
not seen before."
So, each of our authors now is going
to give the briefest little
synopsis presentation,
whatever it might rightly be called,
of what they were trying to do
with their book and I think it
will go 4 or 5 minutes at most
and then we'll bat some ideas
around and we'll keep going.
Mary, please, start.
>> Hi. Thank you, Paul, thank
you for that introduction
and no thanks for that
first question.
I did want to talk -- I have
three main points I want to make
and the first is because
everyone is curious about it.
I'm the first woman to write
a biography of Hemmingway.
And that both means a lot and
it doesn't mean much at all.
But just one quick thing about
why I thought I had something new
to say about this as a woman.
Because I started my research
at the University of Texas
at the Harry Ransom Center and
I was looking at Hemmingway's,
Earnest Hemmingway's
mother's papers.
That's what they have there mostly.
Grace Hemmingway.
She's a remarkable woman.
What I found there, there's
a very large archive.
Her letters and all kinds of
documents and charts she wrote out,
was that it didn't' seem to me
that the previous male
biographers had even looked at them.
And there was so much in there.
I mean, there was so much
that I could have just written
a book about Grace alone.
Anyway, then I felt there
was probably something new
for a woman to say.
I also felt that there is, as you
all know, this is my second point,
a very potent Hemmingway myth.
A very potent legend about
Hemmingway, the man, the hyper male.
It's repeated over and
over again, I think,
in these biographies
by man -- these --
>> Male biographies.
>> That's excluded.
I think that we all have -- I think
that writers who write about him
and that his readers we have a lot
of stake in seeing him this way.
And I'm not sure how useful it is.
and I think what I get -- I think
I bring my own baggage to my study
of Hemmingway, but I don't
think I have much investment
in that particular myth.
So, that my third point, which
is something I just discovered
when I was out promoting the
book, it sounds kind of obvious,
but that in place of the
legend, what do I have?
Well, I have the work,
but you know, okay --
but what I had was this
incredibly human person
that few of us really know about.
You know, the work and we
sort of know this legend.
But we don't know this really
human guy who is like -- he's a --
I agree with Paul, yet I'm not
sure I think it's spiritual.
I think a book slide, this is a
very human person, very talented,
but at the same time,
parodistic of his own talent.
An extremely charming
guy, but extremely --
charming and loving person, yet
he was not able to keep a friend.
He wasn't able really to love.
All these things at the
same time, words and all.
He was extremely crippled
by several things.
He had a number of traumatic
brain injuries and he probably had
that accumulative brain injury
problem, he was bipolar,
he was an alcoholic and he
was taking various kinds
of psychotic drugs that
didn't really work then.
So, by the end he was a model
-- he was a very human person.
And I found when I was
on the road talking
about him I got so
protective of him.
I just -- it was like he was
alive and I wanted to protect him.
And I think that has
its source in the sense
that he was this very
particular human being.
>> What an interesting thing to say
that you found yourself protective
of him, even as you were
doing the biographer's task
of ruthlessly dissecting.
Beautiful for me to hear.
And thanks for keeping
to those 4 or 5 minutes.
Nicholas, can you do the same?
>> I'll try.
I'll start by ripping off
something Mary just said
and that is being protective
of Earnest.
I was doing a show in Boston a
couple weeks ago and it was one
of these late night shows and
half way through the guy goes,
"Wait a minute, let's stop here
a minute, you started off talking
about Hemmingway, now
you're talking about Earnest
like he's a member of your family."
And I think that was a very
astute observation on his part
and that's kind of how I feel now,
I don't like everything
Earnest did in his life.
I admire a lot of things.
I don't like other things,
but he's still a member
of the family whether
like it or not.
So, I'll tell you a little tiny
bit of the history of the book
and I didn't start out
to write this book.
You know, I was a fan, I was,
you know, of various sorts.
I'm used to having people tell me
what to do and I'll do it as well
as I can and then go
onto the next task.
And in this case I was
doing something else.
I was researching American
intelligence in World War II
for the CIA museum and I
remembered that the Hemming--
especially Earnest, had been
involved in intelligence
in World War II and I wanted
to refresh my memory on that.
and I eventually came
up to the conclusion
that all three Hemmingway men, who
were of military age more or less,
Earnest was actually over
military age in World War II,
but they all came independently
to OSS.
So, population of 130 million
and OSS there were more 13,000
on any given day, and three,
yet three Hemmingway men show up
and they want to join or think
about joining, in Hemmingway's case,
Martha actually put
his name forward.
And so that kind of lit the fire
for me and then I kept going pulling
on the thread, finishing
the work for the CIA museum
and then continuing on my own.
And what -- so, mostly I was
trying to satisfy my own curiosity,
especially after I came upon this
book, "Spies," which is the history,
it's published by Yale University
Press and it's the history
of Soviet espionage
in the United States.
And I'm used to going to -- at
that point I was used to going
to the index very sophisticated
research technique.
I'm finding Hemmingway's name.
And it was usually something
contextual, you know.
It would be around the time of this
crisis, Hemmingway had published X
or Y or he was a rising star
or he reflected this or that.
But, no, there's like a subchapter,
10 or 15 pages, about Hemmingway
and the NKVD, which is the
predecessor of the KGB,
basically Stalin's secret service.
And in there there's a
verbatim quote from a KG --
NKGB, slash, NKGB document,
that says,
"Earnest Hemmingway was
recruited for our work
for ideological reasons."
And that just blew me away.
That deeply upset me as
a lifelong Hemmingway fan
and I started going
-- looking for the --
looking for some kind
of explanation.
What are we supposed
to think of Earnest.
It's like you find
out that you're --
you know, one of your relatives is
an embezzler or, you know, done --
committed some other crime and all
the time you thought, oh, well,
they're really a fine,
upstanding person.
And so it was troubling to me
and so I went and searched.
Tried to find the answer, which
comes from many little places,
it comes from a letter here, it
comes from a quote in a book,
it comes from unpublished papers.
And initially I thought he
story didn't' really have legs.
I thought it was mostly a World
War II story, that, you know,
was an interesting sidebar to
World War II intelligence history
and to Hemmingway biography
and as I get into it deeper
and deeper I found that
it had a lasting affect
that extended beyond the war and
I also found that it was connected
to what he did before the war.
That the pivotal thing in this
story is the Spanish Civil War
and his dedication to antifascism.
That's kind of the driver for his --
I won't say political
thinking, political attitudes.
He wasn't a political scientist,
he was -- he was a novelist,
he was an artist, so he
really had attitudes more
than reasoned political positions.
So, long story short, I
eventually -- I didn't have --
you know, there wasn't -- I didn't'
sit down and write an outline,
I just started to write it one day.
And, you know, pretty
soon I had five chapters
and then I started
getting rejected by agents,
which I think happens
to all of us who write.
And then I found a wonderful agent
who liked it enough to believed
in it to take it over
the finish line.
>>Thank you, thank you.
We'll be circling back
to that shortly,
because there's much more
about the spy business.
I love what you just said, you
just sat down and started writing.
I think the writer starts in
chaos and confusion and tries
to work himself toward
clarity and form.
That's what I tell
my writing students
at the University of Pennsylvania.
The reason I'm here
moderating, I think,
is because I published a
Hemmingway book, but not this year.
It was published in 2011, it's
called, "Hemmingway's Boat."
Everything he loved
in life and lost.
And if I can speak even shorter
in a minute and a half about what
that book is about, to give
you some sense of context.
I think I was trying to write
a book about the strange,
sad distance from a Brooklyn
boatyard named Wheeler Shipyard,
to a tight oak paneled entry way in
a bunker like house in Ketchum Idaho
when the world went away
from a suffering man
in fractions of a second.
"Hemmingway's Boat" is largely
the story of the span of years
between the first week of April 1934
and the first week of July 1961.
But the narrative doesn't
always stay there.
In my quirky way I kept
wanting to travel elsewhere.
No human history every
proceeds in a straight line.
Perhaps least of all
Earnest Hemmingway's.
His prose was wonderfully rooted
in geography and linear movement,
but his life, like his boat, beat
against so many cross currents.
It was trying to come to
a modest understanding
of an almost insanely complicated
life through the narrative lens
of something in the material
world he loved very much.
A possession that was intimately
his and he hers for 27 years,
which were the final 27 years,
her name was Pilar, and she lasted
through three wives, the
Nobel Prize and all his ruin.
My aim, if I had a stated aim,
is to try to lock together
the words Hemmingway and boat,
in the way that they'll lock
together an equally American words,
DiMaggio and bat or Satchmo and
horn, quickly means something
in the minds of a lot of people.
The material thing in question
was not a figment or a dream
or somebodies psychosexual
interpretation, she was actual.
And that is "Hemmingway's Boat."
When we started here I said,
"Spiritual and almost holy."
I would also say, just as Mary
has reminded us and Nicholas to,
that at every turn
Hemmingway betrayed himself.
His high human aspirations,
which he continually somehow
for some psychic reason and
we're not psychiatrists,
he was needing and
wanting to sabotage.
Nicholas, back to you for a moment.
On this spy craft.
Being recruited by the
Soviets, you found this out
and that got your attention.
He even had a code name, right?
>> He was Argo.
>> Argo was his code name.
But -- so the audience can be clear,
what did he do as a Soviet spy?
No money was exchanged.
Did he actually contribute anything
in actual spy craft for the Soviets?
This is during the
Spanish Civil War,
the Soviets are the clearly
most anti-fascist group
out there, is that true?
So, Hemmingway, who's just
politically turning anti-fascist,
would have a reason to be enamored
of this, but what happened?
>> So, the way I like to think about
this is when he was with the Soviets
in Spain he -- it was like dating.
It was like getting to know the
espionage and intelligence business.
And he did things for them
there on a casual basis
that they would have
wanted after recruiting him.
So, he did a propaganda film, he
spoke to people on their behalf,
tried to get them to hew the
company line, he wrote for Pravda.
There's a couple of articles
he would probably prefer us not
to remember.
And he participated in a
paramilitary operation that drove
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
drove the plot
of For Whom the Bell Tolls later on.
So, those are the kind of things
that the Soviet intelligence,
which is -- and Russian
intelligence,
it's been happening for decades.
Maybe -- well, now
about a 100 years.
And , you know, it's an enterprise
that does classical espionage,
which is steal the -- government
official steals the secrets
from the safe, turns them
over to the bad guys.
And other things that
are much more amorphous.
There about influence, they are
about lower level confidences,
not state secrets.
And that's the sort of thing they
were looking for from Hemmingway.
And, so, the recruitment
comes at the end of 1940
or possibly the very
beginning of 1941,
and then it's like getting married.
So, before he was dating the Soviets
and that was fun and exciting
and what not, and now all of a
sudden he's married to the Soviets.
He understands what recruitment is
and he almost immediately takes
a deep breath and says, "Hmm,
I wonder if that was
such a good idea."
So, as a recruited soviet
spy he does almost nothing,
except agree to further meetings
and make a number of meetings
with Soviet spies who
mostly are asking him, "Say,
remember when you signed up with us
and said you'd do whatever
you could to help us?
Well, we're ready now."
And he would say, "I'm
ready too, you know,
and I'll get on it tomorrow."
But somehow tomorrow never came.
>> Can I break in here?
This spying story that
Nicholas traces, doesn't --
the book doesn't begin and
end with the Spanish Civil War
and his flirtation, if that's
the word, with the Soviets.
It comes up through spying for --
working on America's
side during World War II
and his fishing boat, Pilar.
And then later on -- so I want
Mary to be able to jump in.
In fact, maybe switch
it to Mary now.
But later on Hemmingway's
extreme paranoia,
whether his earlier spying
adventures, Soviets spying
for America, it was going --
they were going to lob grenades down
the conning towers of German subs.
What a loony sounding idea.
With his little fishing boat.
He weaponized highlife
players, right?
From Cuba.
So, Nicholas traces
this all the way through
and then the extreme paranoia in
the 50s when Hemmingway is convinced
that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI
are tailing him at every turn.
Mary would have a lot
to say about this.
I wonder though if we can for a
minute get back -- Mary, I don't --
I want to tread lightly, because
you make a point of saying
in your book that,
yes, and the promoters,
the publicity people said,
you're the first woman ever
to do a full biography
of Earnest Hemmingway.
True fact, the first full length
biography period in 15 years.
But Mary said, there, you know, this
doesn't necessarily mean that much.
Mainly I find I am
interested in different aspects
of Hemmingway's life from the ones
that drew his previous
male biographers.
Very very deep in Mary's book.
We're in the late 400
pages of her book.
You said something that hit
me at dead center and I wanted
to noodle it a little
and congratulate you.
I have deep feelings about this.
You said, "Earnest was
extremely brave to take
up such issues in his fiction."
She is talking about the posthumous
novel, "The Garden of Eden."
And for those of you who
are Hemmingway aficionados
or even casual students, you
possibly know that that book is
so deeply invested in gender
issues, transgender issues.
So, you said he was extremely
brave to take this up
and I'm really thrilled, pleased,
grateful that you put it that way.
Would you say a little
more about that?
And, Nicholas, feel free
in a minute to jump in.
>> Leave it to the
English professor.
>> I just think it
is extremely brave.
I think anyone who's tried
-- it's not the case with me,
but people who've come out
to their families as gay
or decide what they want is to be
with somebody of the same gender,
I think that takes
incredible courage and to admit
to what you would like to do
in bed is take some people
a lifetime, or so I gather.
And Earnest, I think, was
transfixed by gender issues.
And by that I mean of
switching gender roles sexually,
but in all kinds of
other ways as well.
And -- there was one night when his
wife, his fourth wife Mary was away
and he got -- Hemmingway was
kind of obsessed with hair color.
This went with the being
interested in changing sex roles,
because he would imagine
in Garden of Eden himself
and his female partners cutting
their hair the same length,
the look alikes or the
different ones could be the boy
or the girl or coloring it.
So, he was really obsessed
with coloring hair.
And the fourth wife, Mary,
was blonde and he was just -
it's almost comical,
in each letter, "Well,
I think you could a
little bit more ash blonde,
there's a moonlight blonde
that I'm thinking of."
He does it with something
that translates to --
but, anyway, she was away
and one night he died his hair
red and he'd been drinking.
And then he wrote about it to
Mary the next day and he said,
"I woke up and I said, "oh, my god.
And what are all -- what are
the servants going to think,
what are the guys going to
think, what am I going to do?"
And he said, "Then I said to myself,
'This is a one and only life."
And that's something that he said a
lot in the last decade of his life.
And I think not when he
was feeling suicidal.
He felt that this was
-- we only live once.
I mean, it's a cliché.
And then he would go after
what he wanted sexually
or for the fantasies, he
would air them in his fiction.
He never would have published
Garden of Eden in his lifetime.
He didn't believe it
could be punished.
But he wanted to write it out.
I think that, yes, I think
that is extremely brave.
>> He wanted to write it out.
See, here's where I
come down on that.
So many Hemmingway scholars,
writers, would be out there saying,
"Ah ha, we've caught
him red-handed."
He left this material behind.
Wasn't he the first one who
would have known that all
of the posthumous grave diggers
would have discovered this material.
So, I think the missing link
in so much Hemmingway writing is
not willing to see and acknowledge
and say as you just
said in your text
that how extremely
brave of him to do this.
Nicholas, you're book's not
about any of these issues,
but you had to have
thought about this.
>> A couple things come to mind and
one is that he did live so fully,
that ties in with what
we said earlier
about the different Hemmingways.
And, you know, you look at Earnest's
life you see a guy who lived it
to the fullest extent possible
and that's one of the things that,
you know, that's a different
way of saying the same thing,
that there were many Hemmingways,
but there was always a
Hemmingway living very fully.
The only other thing that comes to
mind is he said at one point that he
and Gregory, his transgender
son were the closest,
of his sons he understood
Gregory's psyche or identified
with it more closely than
either Jack or Patrick.
>> There's a very powerful
thing Normal Mailer said,
Mary Dearborn has a
whole book about him.
Mailer said, "It may even
be that the final judgment
on his work may come to the
notion that what he failed
to do was tragic, but what
he accomplished was heroic,
for it is possible he carried the
weight of anxiety within himself,
which would have suffocated
any man smaller than himself."
That was a very resonate quote
for me and what I was doing
when I was working on Hemmingway.
Elaine Showalter, who reviewed
Mary's book in the New York Times
and talked about Nicholas's as well,
at the end of her review she said,
"You know, we all have been
subscribing to this business
that his insides were eaten
out by the diseases of fame,
the sin of pridefulness,
the curses of megalomania,
the onslaughts of bipolarism."
But Showalter's point also was,
in the Garden of Eden he's
revealing perhaps a man at the end
of his life, when he's
all used up trying
to tell new truths about himself.
So, you can almost flip
the tragedy upward.
Because isn't it so
essentially brave and beautiful.
I knew this was going to flee by,
I think we have about 8 minutes.
Somebody from the audience
ask something.
If you don't we'll continue here.
Yes, shout it out, sir,
shout it out quickly.
>> This question is
for Nicholas Reynolds.
Mr. Reynolds, back in the 50s
[inaudible] Cuba overseas he had
contacts of the kind with
the rebels [inaudible].
In Spain [inaudible].
CIA, Yale, Princeton men, ones
that were into literature,
for them Hemmingway
was God the father.
And God, the father, with his
[inaudible] past in the 30s,
you know, still had [inaudible]
contacts in the 50s, and Spain,
like I said, nobody knows what
he's going to say or do next.
Is there any evidence that he was
under surveillance either in Spain,
Cuba or anywhere else by the CIA?
Were the CIA [inaudible]
is that a possibility?
>> So, my -- I -- when I got
to a point in my work, yes,
I worked at CIA, yes, I had
access at the CIA computers.
But once I was doing work
on Hemmingway for myself,
I couldn't just roam the
files and call it up.
So, [inaudible] Hemmingway.
And eventually got a response
and the response to me indicates
that he did not have a CIA file.
So, you know, maybe it's out there,
maybe it's not, but I doubt it.
FBI file, he does have an FBI file.
>> It's thick, right?
>> Well, yes and no.
It's 128 pages.
It's on the FBI website,
but it shows that their interest
was moderate compared to some
of the people he worked
with like George Ivins,
the Dutch communist photographer.
His file, George's
file is 6, 700 pages.
So, I don't have enough time to go
into Hemmingway and J. Edgar Hoover,
but in the end J. Edgar
Hoover writes a thing
on Hemmingway's file
saying, "You know,
this wasn't such a
bad guy after all."
>> But even if it's 128 pages, two
pages could make you a paranoid man
if you think somebody's
watching you.
If you are susceptible
to those diseases.
Sir?
>> Yes. As you all know there
-- the New York Times --
>> A little louder.
>> As you all know, the New York
Times has a thing every Sunday
where they ask authors if they
could have a literary dinner party
who would they invite?
And I've always -- while
Hemmingway is my favorite author,
but variety because of
his fascinating life,
I've always been a little concerned,
would I really want him
as a dinner party guest.
Because I feel he might
suck all the air
out of the room and
everybody in there.
>>Right.
>> So, since you all are the experts
on him in the world right now,
convince me that I would want
him as a guest at a dinner party.
>>Mary, tackle that.
>> I'm not sure.
I don't know.
I think -- I would not
ask him to a dinner party.
He would probably drink too much
and start telling the same
stories over and over.
Actually I'm not kidding really.
But if I could have dinner
with one author, one on one,
that would be Hemmingway.
And, you know, I'd like
to talk to him about stuff
where nobody could overhear us.
And, yeah, I think.
>> They are flashing
the 5 minute card.
We'll see what we can get.
Ma'am, put the microphone
down to your face.
>>We were in Key West recently
and took the tour of the house,
so I had to buy your
book, Ms. Dearborn.
And because I worked with young
children there were two things
in the book that just really
were red flags for me.
One that his mother would
hold him and shoot a gun
so that he would hug her tightly.
So I think the picture on
your book was pretty obvious,
it's what happened after that.
The other one was that the
two children, his sister
and he were sometimes
both dressed as girls
and then other times
both dressed as boys.
So, I haven't finished the book, but
I would assume that what's happened
from him came from
those early experiences?
>> That's a whole -- we
could go 45 minutes on that.
[Talking over each other]
>> I'll just keep it brief and
say, yes, it definitely did.
But a lot of what happened in the
Hemmingway family was genetic.
He did -- he lived by the
gun, he died by the gun.
His father shot himself with a gun.
And three -- probably half
of the Hemmingway children
many believe killed themselves,
three out of six, that's a lot.
That's genetics.
That's -- a lot of other
things went into it,
but that will have to do for now.
>> You know, in this pious
Midwestern suburban Chicago family
of eight, six children and
two parents, half took --
at least half took their
lives by their own hand.
It was encoded in the DNA.
Sir?
>> I read all three of your
books and they were all great
for different reasons, so I'm
glad to see you here today.
Quick question.
Did he ever get close to publishing
any of the books published
after his death and what did
Scribners and his family do to try
to get him to finish those books?
>> Okay, that's a good question.
Scribners was not so keen on what
he was doing in the second half
of his career and I'm thinking
especially "Across the River
and into the Trees," which
was really a colossal failure.
Max Perkins, who've you've all heard
of, editor of Genius, he had died
and nobody was there to sort of say
-- to rain Earnest in or to say,
"That's not your best work."
Now, he did at the same time he
wrote, "The Old Man in the Sea,"
which won him back a
lot of his audience.
I liked the story, I like
to tell us that for all
that I think his talent fell apart
and Scribners didn't
know what to do with him.
On the other hand he put together
in the last year of his life one
of his most charming books,
"A Moveable Feast,"
about his life in Paris.
It's totally made up and full of
falsehoods, but it's a charming book
and he still had it together.
But Scribners had really lost
control and when you say --
>> Yes, yes.
Another thing that moves me, when
we talked about facing these --
if the deepest things that
are moving toward the end
of your life are these gender
possibilities and transgender
and you're willing to write it.
Not publish it, but write
it and leave it behind.
The other thing that moves
me so tremendously is
that Earnest Hemmingway went to
his writing desk every morning
that he could in all those
last years knowing that so much
of it was a shadow of what
he had formerly written.
That in itself is a heroic act.
Nicholas, say the last word.
>> I think of the body of
work that he left more or less
as the inheritance for his family.
He was taxed to death
during his life.
the house was -- he
must have realized
by then the house was
unlikely to be --
it would be a property that the
Hemmingway family could dispose of
and he's got this body of
work that he leaves for them
to publish posthumously
and, you know,
my educated guest is that's
something he's leaving
for Mary and the boys.
>> Yeah, that's a --
>> That's a good one.
>> I think that's a practical
and realistic answer.
Are we -- we're done.
>> We're done, no way.
>>Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
