Dear Papa The letters of Patrick and Ernest Hemingway

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ernest Hemingway emerges as a "devoted family man and engaged father" in this intimate collection of three decades' worth of letters between Hemingway and his son Patrick. There's Hemingway's first letter to his son (then four years old) in which he describes a Wyoming hunting trip, a note with some fatherly advice on football ("Always remember to swing your arms wide when you tackle"), and dispatches from Patrick on studying, boredom, and homesickness while he was at boarding school ("​​I sure wish I could write you more, but there just isn't anything to say"). Hemingway's support of Patrick's changing career goals is touching, and while the letters easily capture the pair's close bond, the lack of annotation presents its share of problems; readers will have to parse their way through a jumble of family sobriquets (Patrick is referred to as "Mouse"), pets' names, and sporting banter ("An old guy named Copin who hadn't shot since 1937 won the trap championship with 100 straight almost precipitating a wave of suicides in the class shooters 2nd 100 straight in 30 years"). Hardcore Hemingway fans will appreciate this view of the writer as a father. (June)

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Review by Library Journal Review

In Also a Poet, New York Times best-selling author Calhoun blends literary history and memoir, examining her relationship with her father, art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared passion for Frank O'Hara's work as she draws on taped interviews he conducted for a never-completed biography of O'Hara. In Somewhere We Are Human, distinguished writers/activists Grande and Guiñansaca compile 44 essays, poems, and artworks by migrants, refugees, and Dreamers that help clarify the lives of those who are undocumented. Featuring a selection of letters exchanged by Ernest Hemingway and his son Patrick over two decades, Dear Papa was edited by Patrick Hemingway's nephew Brendan Hemingway and his grandson Stephen Adams (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, Horn's Voice of the Fish uses fish, water, and mythic imagery to illuminate the trans experience, with travels through Russia and a devastating injury the author suffered as backdrop. Former deputy editor of The New Yorker and former editor of the New York Times Book Review, McGrath looks back on childhood summers as both joyous memory and obvious idealization in The Summer Friend, also considering a close friendship with someone from a very different background. Starting out with his nearly dying on the day he was born, the world's best-selling novelist has some amazing stories to tell in James Patterson by James Patterson (250,000-copy first printing). Having probed the lives of Mary Shelley and Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's wife and daughter, acclaimed biographer Seymour takes on Jean Rhys, the celebrated author of Wide Sargasso Sea in I Used to Live Here Once.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A son's loving memorial to his famous father. "The man I knew," writes Ernest Hemingway's son Patrick (b. 1928), "tried very hard to be a good family man. I think our correspondence shows he was intimately connected with his wives and his children all his life." Patrick was the writer's son with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he married in 1927; Gregory (Gigi) was born in 1931; and Patrick's older half brother, Jack (Bumby), was the son of first wife Hadley Richardson. Edited by Patrick's nephew Brendan Hemingway and grandson Adams, the letters reveal shared enthusiasms for fishing, hunting, African terrain, and rigorous adventure. As a father, Hemingway was doting, solicitous, and demanding. "I wish to hear from you and Giggy and Bumby on the first and the fifteenth of each month throughout the year," he ordered Patrick. "The letters are not to be hurried, nor sullen, nor forced; but are to be as good letters as you can write at bi monthly intervals." Some letters betray tensions that Patrick was eager to alleviate. "When I am acting stupid or disrespectful, please tell me and tell me plainly," he wrote when he was 23. "I am not as talented or interesting as Mr. Giggy, but I want to be a dutiful son to you." After his mother died in 1951, Patrick wrote from Key West, where he was attending to estate matters: "If you think I am a worthless person, that I am sitting over here loafing, with designs on your property, tell me so, and I will know clearly what I am and make some effort to do better." Apparently, he did very well. "You were the only brother I had among my sons," Ernest wrote. "Mr. Bumby admirable but not really intelligent and Mr. Gigi wonderful but always strange." Later, he added, "I love you always and am very proud of you." An intimate glimpse into Hemingway family dynamics. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue PROLOGUE THIS BOOK contains selected conversations, by letter, between a father and son. It is an attempt to answer the question I have been often asked, by friends and strangers alike: "Did I know my father?" There is a lot of hunting and fishing in these letters, but I think the significance of this correspondence is not the hunting and fishing. It's the light it casts on our relationship, and how I grew to know my father. I grew to know him as a person, quite different than how he is often portrayed. The man I knew tried very hard to be a good family man. I think our correspondence shows he was intimately connected with his wives and his children all his life. I would like to call up a letter by my father that he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, when Papa had only one family and marriage to play with. July 1, 1925 Burguete, Navarra Dear Scott, We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda? I am feeling better than I've ever felt haven't drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be. A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably be an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows. To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers. Well anyway we're going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the Hotel Quintana Pamplona Spain Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something. So long and love to Zelda from us both. Yours, Ernest This letter demonstrates Ernest's complex personality and his ability to create art with his writing. As my maturity developed, I too could use my letters to create something similar to his and in certain fields, such as poetry and hunting, I could openly compete. This letter to Fitzgerald was written three years before I was born and John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway was Papa's only son and child. My appearance on the scene, the son of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, altered the complexity of the family Papa had to deal with. This complexity also affected the development of the letters between Papa and me. In the first place, there was the matter of the Catholic Church. Papa had entered into a relationship with the Catholic Church during the war that was fought in Italy, a strongly Catholic country. With his second marriage to Pauline, he would become very much under the influence of her religion, and I would be brought up as a Catholic child. This relationship in turn would be affected by Papa and Pauline's divorce in order for him to marry Martha Gellhorn. These changes that Papa had to make in the families he felt responsible for, very much underlie the trajectory of our correspondence and the task of getting to know my father. Patrick Hemingway Excerpted from Dear Papa: The Letters of Patrick and Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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