Hemingway’s dalliances are part of his mosaic

Just in time for the Hemingway clan’s Father’s Day, Vanity Fair’s July issue dishes up 7,000-plus words about one of Papa’s affairs, ensuring his sexual waywardness shares attention with literary genius during Hemingway’s 100^th birthday celebrations.

Writer Alane Salierno Mason opened a moldy old family steamer trunk, discovering lovey-dovey correspondence from Hemingway to Mason’s adoptive grandmother, Jane Kendall Mason, a devil-may-care international socialite who frolicked with Papa while both were married to others.

This Hemingway extramarital partner was under the nose of his second of four wives, Pauline, and under the nose of the first of Mason’s four husbands. Hemingway boasted later that Mason was so sex-driven she risked life and limb climbing into his upper floor Havana apartment for a liaison.

Their dalliance began in the Prohibition era 1930s, in Havana, where Hemingway retreated to write and fish, and where Mason lived in a dreary marriage to an executive of Pan American World Airways.

I hadn’t seen Vanity Fair when I wrote Jack Hemingway, Papa’s son No. 1, a Ketchum resident, with a question I reckoned would be good for a Father’s Day reflection.

"What question do people ask you over and over?" I wrote.

The phone rings. It’s Jack Hemingway, with that joyous burst of infectious laughter that typifies his cheery persona.

"Simple," he said. "Most people ask, ‘What’s it like being the son of a famous father?’ "

His answer: "The pluses greatly exceed the minuses."

Whatever hurt Papa visited on his children and wives – reckless drinking, a trail of adulterous affairs, multiple marriages, long absences from home, suicidal impulses that eventually paid off – doesn’t show in the oldest of three sons.

Most of us have plenty of minuses, but devoutly hope we’ll be judged on our pluses.

A Phoenix minster friend, the Rev. Culver Nelson, has a theory: Many heroes or geniuses whose courage or risk-taking we admire have dark sides that mothers chasten their children not to emulate.

Hemingway fits. His behavior was abominable.

But what of his literary greatness? What writer can touch his work, which, by one estimate, generates $1 million a year in sales for his estate?

Had Hemingway been a model husband and father, could he have written with such brilliance and bequeathed such an ageless collection of towering literature?

I think not.

I asked my two grown daughters if I’d been a lousy father – since I was often away chasing stories in Latin America, Europe or around the United States, or working the 4-to-midnight newsroom shift in Miami, thus missing vital parenting moments.

Nope, they assured me generously. While their classmates’ fathers had routine 9-to-5 lives, my daughters could talk about Dad covering a revolution, investigating a mob murder in New Jersey, interviewing movie stars and heads of state.

As Jack Hemingway said, pluses count.

Murphy is the retired publisher of The Arizona Republic and a former radio commentator.