Papa y el tirador: biographical parallels in Hemingway's "I guess everything reminds you of something".(Ernest Hemingway)

Hemingway's' relationship with his youngest son, Gregory, became increasingly acrimonious in the years following Pauline Hemingway's tragic death in 1951. Father and son blamed one another for her demise, and it does not appear that they ever reconciled. Around 1955, Hemingway wrote a biographically-based short story called "I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something;' possibly as a means to come to terms with what had happened. When considered alongside the biographical events that inspired it, "I Guess" provides insight into the complex emotions that fueled Ernest and Gregory's estrangement.

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WHILE VISITING CUBA IN 1952, Gregory Hemingway initiated a conversation with his father about "future plans and all that had happened recently" (G. Hemingway 8). Gregory's mother, Pauline, had died several months earlier of what Gregory would later maintain was complications resulting from a tumor of her adrenal gland (11-12). Her death was only a day or two after her youngest son had been arrested for being in a women's restroom while cross-dressing (V. Hemingway 254). The subject of the father-son talk soon turned to Gregory's arrest. Attempting to move beyond what had transpired, Gregory maintained that he said, "It wasn't so bad, really, Papa." Ernest Hemingway's alleged reply set into motion the decay of an already troubled relationship: "No? Well it killed Mother" (G. Hemingway 8). In the wake of Pauline Hemingway's death, Gregory and Ernest developed a mutual resentment.

On the night of 30 September 1951, Ernest received a phone call from Pauline about Gregory's problem with the police. No one knows the content of the conversation, but it was probably heated. Relying upon the testimony of Pauline's sister Jinny, Gregory wrote in Papa: A Personal Memoir that his father unleashed a vitriolic attack on Pauline, blaming her for their son's lack of discipline (7). (1) Approximately eight hours after the exchange between Ernest and Pauline concluded, she died in a Los Angeles hospital. In his memoir, Gregory says the autopsy report showed that Pauline had died of a pheochromocytoma, a rare and unusual tumor of the adrenal gland. Such tumors 'can secrete adrenaline intermittently, causing catastrophic increases in blood pressure that can rupture an artery or other blood vessel. Stressful events, such as Gregory's arrest or Ernest's quarrel with Pauline, could trigger an acute, potentially lethal release of adrenaline: "A stimulus as slight as standing up suddenly, being bumped from behind in a crowd, or getting emotionally upset by a bad dream could make the intermittent type 'fire off' and start putting out those tremendous quantities of adrenaline" (11). Gregory described how the secretions likely caused Pauline's blood pressure to escalate and then rapidly drop to zero. Gregory said that he wrote to his father and described Pauline's condition, concluding that his "minor troubles" were not what caused his mother's attack but rather her heated argument with Ernest (11-12). Although Hemingway corresponded with his youngest son after Gregory's 1952 departure from Cuba, they never saw each other again (8).

Hemingway wrote "I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something" in response to his falling out with Gregory. "I Guess" is unusual in that it is about a son who disappoints his father; Hemingway more frequently wrote about fathers who fail their sons. In a review of the posthumously published Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, where "I Guess" was first collected, Lee Lescaze wrote: "there are also two stories [ostensibly "I Guess" and "Great News from the Mainland"] in which Hemingway is the father betrayed by a weak son. They are cruel, unforgiving tales almost impossible to reconcile with the sensitivity in his great stories of Nick Adams [sic] coming of age. He knew what it is to be adolescent better than what it is to be a parent" (17). Lescaze made an understandable mistake when he said that "Hemingway is the father." Because the story is based on Hemingway family history, the distinction between narrator, father, and author is blurred. The father-son relationship is complicated and cannot be reduced to simple terms. "I Guess" is a biographically-based narrative that exposes the complex emotions leading to the collapse of Gregory and Ernest's relationship. "I Guess" has received scant critical attention. Perhaps scholars, like many reviewers, have decided that it is not a "great" Hemingway tale and thus deemed it unworthy of a thorough explication. Joseph M. Flora wrote a brief analysis based primarily upon Gregory's memoir (105--107). Among Hemingway's biographers, Baker, Lynn, Mellow, and Reynolds make no mention of "I Guess." Only Jeffrey Meyers touches on the history behind the work, but he offers little in the way of exegesis (291-292).

Neither the manuscripts nor the published version of "I Guess" contain information about when the story was written. If, as the story itself suggests, "I Guess" was written seven years after the events described, then it was probably composed in 1955 (Benson 453). Gregory turned 24 in November 1955, and was on his father's mind. In a letter to Philip Percival dated 4 September, Ernest wrote, "Everybody is waiting to hear from Mayito. I saw his oldest boy and he said everything was going fine on the place.... His kid is turning out absolutely first rate. And Mayito gave up on him once so maybe Gregory will turn out...." (SL 846). Hemingway's comments about Gregory are both hopeful and disparaging; it seems that he was not sure what to think about his son. Given his sentiments about Gregory at the time, it is conceivable that Hemingway chose this period to write a narrative illustrating his mixed impressions of his son.

The years leading up to the composition of "I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something" had been tumultuous for Hemingway. In 1950, nervous about the upcoming publication of his first novel in over a decade, Across the River and into the Trees, he wrote a letter to Lillian Ross in which he talked about committing suicide, and when the book was almost universally panned by reviewers, he was outraged (Lynn 553, 555-538). Evelyn Waugh wrote that critics had for years been engaged in a "whispering campaign" saying that "Hemingway is finished" (280). In the early 1950s, three people who had played prominent roles in Ernest's life passed away. His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, died in June 1951, an event followed by Gregory's trouble and Pauline's death. In February 1952, six months before the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, Charles Scribner died from a heart attack (Reynolds 45).

By 1955, Hemingway's circumstances were considerably different from what they had been five years earlier. Two African plane crashes in …