The difficulties of being the son of a "man's man"

I bought a copy of Strange Tribe from Powells after reading so much about Greg Hemingway in Hemingway's Boat. He was the most tortured of the author's three sons, and died while being held in jail after having a sex change operation. Greg's struggles as a transsexual are well documented as well as his bouts with depression. In Strange Tribe Greg's son John writes about the complicated often destructive relationship between Greg and Ernest and the Hemingway family's long struggle with depression. (It's not a "curse", it's biology.) I wanted some more insight into what it was like growing up as the son of one of the most infamous symbols of manhood in American history. The fact that Ernest was struggling with his own issues concerning what it means to be a man just makes the whole story that much more interesting.

It's difficult to read Strange Tribe and not feel a bit like a voyeur. John Hemingway is so honest about his family and his own relationship with Greg that sometimes you almost wince while reading. But Ernest casts such a large shadow over American literary and pop culture history that his story is pretty irresistible. What keeps me pursuing it is the desire to understand how a man will go to such great lengths to prove he is a man and how our definition of manhood - always changing - can lead some individuals to go beyond the limits of their own capabilities.

This is where the flying in Alaska angle comes in.

It is endlessly fascinating to me how the appeal of "being a man" never goes away. All those reality tv shows set in Alaska are about ideas of tough male behavior and so was much of what Hemingway wrote. But I don't have a problem with any of that (I think Hemingway's short stories in particular are excellent). I just want to understand it better so I can better understand the dangerous behaviors I witnessed and now write about. With that in mind, reading about how much Ernest Hemingway struggled nearly his whole life, both as a writer and man, and how much the family was at odds with each other for so very long, is fairly sobering. In many ways, it's a miracle that any of them made it out of that family capable of finding happiness at all. So many of the words he left behind carry such power but when it came to truly changing the world, the author couldn't do it at home, where it mattered most.

So many of us run away to prove something, and so many - like Hemingway - just keep on running forever. That is a big part of what I'm researching right now and what I lived at the Company where running (or escape) was part and parcel of who we were and why we were there. (Even those of us who weren't men!)

[Post pic of Ernest Hemingway with sons Patrick on left and Greg on right, November 1946. Courtesy JFK Library.]