Valerie Hemingway Offers Insights into Famed Author Ernest Hemingway

SEELEY LAKE – "Life is completely filled with coincidences," Valerie Hemingway, author of "Running with the Bulls: My Life with the Hemingways," told the crowd packed into the Grizzly Claw Trading Company for the June 9 Open Book Club event.

Coincidences certainly filled her own life. She met Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, became his personal secretary, was hired by his wife after his suicide to sort through and organize all his papers and correspondence and ended up marrying and then divorcing Hemingway's youngest son.

Valerie's book, and her presentation at Open Book Club, was not a discussion of Hemingway's great novels or his writing skills. Rather it was a debunking of the familiar myths about his drinking and bellicosity and a very personal insight into the man as she knew him. While she acknowledged he had a bad temper and "did sometimes resort to fisticuffs," she said, by Irish standards, he was a moderate drinker.

Valerie said, "The myth of Hemingway that I hear about, read about, has very little, in my experience, to do with the person that I knew. The person I knew was a very serious writer. He was a reader. He was an intellectual. He was very kind to people." She added, "I've never met another like him. I don't imagine I ever would."

Born and raised in Ireland, Valerie's first awareness of Hemingway came at age 15 when, quite by chance, she read his book "Fiesta" [the UK title for "The Sun Also Rises"]. The book centers around bullfighting and the running of the bulls. The young Valerie found she liked the book but couldn't quite pin down why. It was the only book she had ever read by an American author.

Valerie said because Ireland has some 800 years of literary history, the Irish looked down on American authors. Prefacing her comments by saying, "We're terrible snobs in Dublin, worse even than in London," Valerie explained, "We were told, 'The Americans, they've only got 200 years at this job. It's going to take another 200 or so years before they can turn out a decent novel.'"

Reading the book "Fiesta" made Valerie curious about Spain. When she turned 19 she took a job as a stringer journalist in Spain for the Belgian News. Her job was to ask pre-established questions to certain people deemed potentially newsworthy. If her write-up of the interview was deemed sufficiently interesting and got printed, she would be paid.

One of the people she was assigned to question was Ernest Hemingway. Though the interview itself immediately ran into a snag, apparently Valerie intrigued Hemingway enough that he invited her to join him and his wife Mary in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. The next thing Valerie knew, Hemingway sent her a French book explaining the art of bull fighting, which she was to read before attending the event. According to Valerie, that typified Hemingway's approach to everything.

She said, "I learned so much about life from Hemingway. Everything you did, you did with complete gusto and it was fun but you had to know about it. You had to understand what it was you were doing and why you were doing it. You acquired this knowledge and then enjoyed what you were doing."

The two years she accompanied Hemingway and Mary, Valerie described as a whirlwind of activities and encounters with famous people. It became so intense at times that Valerie said she wished she could just step away from it for a time before plunging back in. But she said she didn't fully realize what a powerful personality Hemingway was until one occasion when he sailed for America while she and Mary and another friend traveled by car down to France. Suddenly everything seemed flat. They hardly knew what to talk about in the car. Even four-star food tasted flat.

She tried to explain to the listeners at the Grizzly Claw, "Whether you liked it or you didn't like it, he was just this bundle of energy and knowledge that was constant. He had this incredible view of the world, like the world was so real to him. He woke up in the morning and he always went outside to know what it was like. What bird was singing or chirping or doing. It was a complete living in the present and in everything that's around you. There was never a time that Hemingway said it's boring or that you, if you were with him, you would say you were bored. It was always, what's the next thing; what's the next thing?"

She added, "For me it is something that has sustained me during my lifetime. To know there's a world out there and every day it's a little different."

During the question period, one audience member asked about Hemingway's suicide. Valerie spoke about his despair at having lost his house in Cuba after Castro confiscated property owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. Along with valuable papers, manuscripts and art pieces, Hemingway also regretted the separation from servants who had become long-time friends and the loss of some of the animals he had raised. She also said he had a number of health issues and was particularly depressed that his eyesight was failing.

"There were many things," she said, "Life is such an accumulation of things."

Circling back around to ponder on the amazing coincidences that steered her life in different directions, Valerie said, "The thing about life is, and I just can't emphasize it enough, is how much things are intertwined. It's amazing how you meet someone or things happen and they might be very uninteresting and then somehow it becomes a vital part of your life. You just never know what is going to be the really important thing. So you just have to live life as though everything is important."