PAPA: A Personal Memoir

As Norman Mailer indicates in his brief foreword, there has never been a real portrait of Hemingway Hotchner's was ""skewed""; Baker's was ""monumental""--and monumentally dull; and the various family mementos Mailer doesn't mention were highly incidental. Not so this one, son Gregory's, where, as Mailer says, ""His pride and his evasions have become one man, his innocence and sophistication, his honesty and outsize snobbery, etc."" After Hemingway reached 50, he became ""a snob and a phony,"" a ""bully, a sick bore, or a professional celebrity,"" according to Gregory. But before that there are the true-to-life, larger-than-life remembrances of fishing and war games on Key West, boxing on Bimini, drinking in Havana (Gregory was ten or eleven), cockfights, shooting, sharks--and a German U-boat. There was also his bout with polio when Hemingway spent the nights by his cot--telling him stories, stories. . . . A small book but live in memory, live on the page, and touch-true.