The letters are chronological through Patrick’s college days (Harvard), and his move to what was then Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania), where he lived for 25 years as a farmer and hunting guide...Father and son both write beautifully about landscapes, birds, hunting, and fishing, and are sentimental about missing each other...As years pass, Papa dispenses advice and opinions about sports, education, women, ex-wives, painting, avoiding the draft, money, buying land...In all his letters Patrick is a dutiful middle son prone to smoothing problems between his brothers and father...Ernest is always encouraging but increasingly demanding and judgmental, bragging about sending them money then complaining about it, criticizing their girlfriends and wives...Ernest’s mania overcame him, and he raged on pounding his chest until his churlish behavior reflected all the virulence of the manhood he had created not just for himself but for his sons...Patrick loved him anyway and writes in the epilogue that Ernest tried very hard to be a good father...Papa’s letters become increasingly bitter...Patrick’s letters are very different, wanting to be as good a son as he can be, a better man than Ernest on the best day he ever had.
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...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...An intimate glimpse into Hemingway family dynamics.
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, and dispatches from Patrick on studying, boredom, and homesickness while he was at boarding school...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, pets’ names, and sporting banter...Hardcore Hemingway fans will appreciate this view of the writer as a father.
