I had long known that Valerie Hemingway could write, even though she has only recently published her first book - Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways (New York: Ballantine Books). Over the past several years, a number of her largely autobiographical pieces have been appearing in various small magazines.
One piece, on her friendships in Spain, appeared in Martello, an occasional literary review named after James Joyce's tower - the one that features in the opening scene of Ulysses - and published by friends from that bayside section of south Dublin which served as her Irish home base for so many years. I lived near there for a decade, knew some of these friends and, being a Hemingway fanatic, kept hoping I would run into her when she returned from one of her visits. It never happened.
Born Valerie Danby-Smith in Stillorgan in 1940 into the solid middle-class comfort of that time, including the large house and garden and multiple servants, she and a brother were hived off by their feckless parents to a boarding school when she was but three years old. Other brothers would go elsewhere, including one whom she didn't meet until they were both adults. Her father largely disappeared from her life, her mother saw her for day-visits during summer vacations. This dysfunctional childhood proved good training for her future with the Hemingways.
At 18, after a year's secretarial school and exposure to the bohemian life to be found then in Neary's or the Pearl Bar, she set off for Spain, determined to become a journalist, while supporting herself as an au pair. Her reports were used by The Irish Times or in the magazine columns of her friend Terry Cronin, wife of the then IRA chief-of-staff. She cadged an interview with Ernest Hemingway. He swept her up into his cuadrilla, the circle of friends which travelled with him that dangerous summer of 1959 from city to city to follow the mano a mano bullfights of Spain's two leading matadors.
By the end of that season, Hemingway had become so dependent on her presence that he hired her as his secretary. Back at their expansive home in the countryside just outside Havana, she became a friend and companion as well to Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary. In her memory, that time was largely a tropical idyll: beautiful weather, a fascinating country, Ernest ever the charmer he could so easily be. What she didn't realise, though, was that much of his often-expressed need to have her close to him sprang from his growing manic depression - he had seized on her as a life preserver.
After his suicide in Idaho in 1961, she accompanied Mary back to Cuba to assist her in her negotiations with Castro to "exchange" their home (which the revolutionary government had already seized) for permission to take out of the country Ernest's papers and various personal belongings, including his world-class collection of paintings acquired from such friends as Miró and Masson during his early years as an aspiring writer in Paris in the 1920s. She spent the next four years in New York sorting and cataloguing the papers while also earning a living as a researcher for Newsweek magazine and then as publicity director for publishing houses, including the prestigious New Directions (as well as having a son by Brendan Behan - the result, she writes, of a one-night stand in San Francisco). A rather busy life.
During this time, she began seeing Gregory Hemingway, Ernest's youngest son, whom she had met for the first time at Ernest's funeral. Before that, she knew only that his name wasn't to be mentioned in his father's presence. They fell in love, married, and, gradually, Valerie came to learn the reasons for the bitter estrangement between father and son.
Here begin the real revelations of her book. When Gregory died in October 2001, it became publicly known that he had had a sex-change operation. Before that, there had been occasional newspaper reports of his transvestite activities and his numerous electric-shock treatments. What Valerie now details, with great sadness, was the long undiagnosed nature of Gregory's mental illness and the family tragedies it produced.
It was Gregory's first arrest for appearing in public in drag, while a university student in Los Angeles in 1951, that led to the angry accusatory telephone call between his father and mother and, indirectly, to his mother's death from shock following a surge and then collapse of her blood pressure.
A generous and kind and gentle man while in good health, like his father, Gregory turned increasingly abusive as his private demons took over his life. After two decades of marriage and three children (he also adopted the Behan son, Brendan), he and Valerie divorced: 14 years later he died of heart disease in a cell of the women's jail in Miami, arrested for "indecent exposure".
Some years back, at a Christmas party in Dublin in a friend's home not far from that Martello tower, I was chatting with a middle-aged woman, trying to place her accent - certainly southside Dublin by the cultivated tones - when Hemingway came into our conversation (I no longer remember why) and she began to tell me of her friendship with him. She had been a young reporter, she told me, when she met him in Spain and he insisted she join his circle in their pursuit of bullfight history. Then, she went on, she became his secretary and went to Cuba with him.
This expensively well-groomed and cultured Dublin woman had simply appropriated the young Valerie Danby-Smith's life-story. I listened in awed astonishment, said nothing challenging, smiled, and, as you do at cocktail parties, eventually moved on. After all, if you desire adventure, friendships with the creative great, and genuine love - and can stand the heartache - it's a life well worth appropriating.