Posted by Leslie Pratch; written by Mark Johnson
Valerie Danby-Smith was born to a dysfunctional Dublin family in 1940 and spent 14 years in a convent boarding school right out of Charles Dickens. By the time she was 26, she had traveled from Spain to Cuba and New York with Ernest Hemingway, heard his proposal of marriage, and buried him; had a child by bad-boy Irish playwright Brendan Behan, and buried him; and married Hemingway’s estranged son Gregory, an abusive and violent husband who destroyed her most treasured possessions and wore her underwear.
So, the answer is: Yes, there are the makings of a memoir here. Valerie Hemingway is probably loyal above all else—more about that later—and this memoir did not appear until all the other major players were dead.
That means none of them can defend themselves, but there’s really no need. She doesn’t paint any of them as saints, but her portraits are astonishingly forgiving.
When Valerie, a young woman of limited prospects simply looking for work, met Ernest at the San Isidro Festival in Spain in 1959, he immediately scooped her into his circle, which he whimsically called his [ital] cuadrilla [unital] after the term for a matador’s entourage. Ernest and the cuadrilla “seemed bent on collecting as many pretty young girls as possible,” but even in this atmosphere of sexually charged merriment, Valerie must have stood out. Ernest hired her as “secretary to the cuadrilla,” but she soon became his personal secretary and subsequently his dear friend.
When he began speaking to her of marriage, she saw it as a young woman naturally might: flattered, but she’d rather spend her time with friends her own age. Nonetheless, she came to believe with pleasure that he would marry her, despite the fact that he was very much married to his fourth wife, Mary, and that Mary was with them and was also Valerie’s friend. Valerie seems not to recognize how much she was an enabler of impossible men, a pattern that would persist throughout her relationships.
Valerie doesn’t gloss over Ernest’s egomania—his impatience with any activity in which he was not the center of attention, his lifelong grudges and his lavish generosities. His antics in social situations, she said, “might suggest that he was not a serious person. But he was a serious person, specifically a serious writer.”
She admired his discipline. He wrote every single day, and took tremendous pains not only with his prose, but also with his accuracy regarding places and events. He read other writers voraciously and with insight, and was often generous in his praise and support of young writers.
The seeds of Ernest’s mental illness were barely evident at first, perhaps because Valerie did not yet know him well. By the time he had returned from Spain to his home in Cuba—with Valerie and Mary—his depression had deepened. Only Valerie, he told her once, could prevent him from ending it all. Even she proved not to be enough. When he and Mary moved to the Ketchum, Idaho, home where he killed himself in 1961, he had left Valerie behind in New York.
She was moving in the highest literary circles herself by now, personally and professionally (after working as a personal assistant to writers, she made a career with publishing houses and in journalism). She was working for Behan, before Hemingway’s suicide, when the Irish writer entered her bedroom one night; their son was born nine months later. Behan was married, and his wife wanted no part of his love child. Within two years he drank himself to death anyway, so Valerie raised young Brendan herself.
The subtitle “My Life with the Hemingways” suggests that Ernest would be center stage in this memoir, as he would have wished. As it is, however, he dies only halfway through. At Ernest’s funeral, Valerie met Gregory Hemingway, the black sheep of the family. Valerie spent years sorting Ernest’s papers and manuscripts for the estate, and she saw quite a bit of Gregory. She says almost nothing about his courtship, except that “he was wonderfully funny and had a flair for romance.” It was years before she discovered the reasons behind his bitter rift with his father.
She was rather slow to realize that Gigi, as he was called by the family, was a transvestite; the continual disappearance of her clothing did not seem to raise suspicion. That was only one of Gregory’s shortcomings as a husband, however. He was a dreamer who launched and abandoned grandiose schemes, a habitual liar about his past and his present, and a violent man who spoke with satisfaction about people he would like to kill and how he would do it. As his behavior over the years became more erratic and his actions more destructive, Valerie came to fear for her safety.
Nonetheless, she stayed married to Gregory for 20 years. Nine years after their divorce, he died tragically in a women’s jail cell—he had had a sex change operation and was now “Gloria.”
From the mother and father who didn’t raise her through the husband who intimidated, lied to and abandoned her, it doesn’t appear that Valerie Hemingway ever had a healthy, mutually supportive relationship in her life except (one supposes) with her children. She was never a quitter, she observes stoically, and so she wasn’t. As with many companions of strong men, she was always at the party while they [ital] were [unital] the party. She appears to have been a sweet and loyal friend and lover.
“I never had it in my heart to be angry with Greg, except momentarily, for he suffered far more than anyone I have ever known,” she writes. One wishes for her sake she had been angrier, and often, and not only at Greg.
She has written a vibrant and entertaining memoir, but in the end she calls it the saddest story she knows. It may even be sadder than she knows.
This review was originally published in the San Jose Mercury Times.
____________________________________________________________________________
Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at www.pratchco.com.
Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.
Tags: Leslie Pratch on Books