Jack Hemingway

Jack Hemingway was the only child of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, born in Toronto on 10 October 1923. To readers he is "Bumby," the baby of A Moveable Feast — carried to cafés, wintered at Schruns, and left in his tall cage bed under the watch of F. Puss, the cat the household trusted as a babysitter.

The infant of the memoir grew into a soldier, a fly fisherman, and a conservationist who spent much of his life in and around his father's fame.

His name

Jack, John, and Bumby all name the same man. He was born John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, called Bumby as a child — the name his father used for him in A Moveable Feast — and went by Jack for the rest of his life. Archives that hold the family's papers, including the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, catalog him under all three.

A Paris childhood

Jack spent his first years in Paris and the Austrian Alps and spoke French for the rest of his life. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas stood as his godmothers when he was christened in 1924.

His parents' marriage did not survive the decade. Ernest and Hadley divorced in 1927, and Jack's childhood divided between their households on two continents. He grew up bilingual, later attending the University of Montana and Dartmouth College without taking a degree at either.

He was, from the start, a Parisian child. His father took him along to the cafés of the Left Bank, where he learned to sit quietly among the adults, and he grew up speaking French and keeping French habits as easily as a native.

The one thing that held steady was water. He learned to fish early, beside his father, and never stopped.

In his father's fiction

Jack's boyhood also found its way into his father's work. Ernest's 1933 story "A Day's Wait" retells a real episode: a small boy, sick with influenza, quietly waits to die through a long afternoon because he has confused the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales taught in his French and American schools, and believes a temperature of 102 must be fatal. The boy is drawn from Jack.

It is a small, exact portrait of the bilingual child of A Moveable Feast a few years on — one of the few times the father put the son directly on the page.

Bumby, illustrated

A few scenes from Bumby's Paris childhood, drawn for The Paris Atlas — illustrations, not photographs.

The war

Hemingway was inducted into the Army early in 1943 and commissioned in the Military Police, serving first in North Africa. Restless for something sharper, in July 1944 he talked his way into the Office of Strategic Services — the wartime forerunner of the CIA — and, as a French-speaking first lieutenant, was assigned to work behind German lines with the Resistance.

In mid-August 1944 a B-17 dropped him into southern France. By his own account his kit included a fly rod, reel, and a map case packed with trout flies, alongside the pistol, knife, and Thompson submachine gun. With his radio dead, he spent the following weeks arming and directing local fighters.

On 28 October 1944 his patrol ran into German mountain troops near Hérival, in the Vosges. Hit three times in the right arm and shoulder, he surrendered — and, giving his name, found that his captor had once worked at Schruns and remembered the family's nursemaid; a bottle of schnapps followed. What came after was harder. Moved between prison camps and caught after an escape attempt, he had dropped from about two hundred pounds to under a hundred and fifty by the time the U.S. 14th Armored Division reached the camp at Moosburg on 29 April 1945. He came home with the Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre.

A life on the water

Back in civilian life, Hemingway tried the conventional routes — a stockbroker for a time, then a fishing-tackle salesman — without ever quite settling into them. A heart attack in his mid-forties made the decision for him. In 1967 he retired for good to Ketchum, Idaho, the town where his father had spent his last years.

There he became something his father never was: an institution of conservation. From 1971 to 1977 he sat on the Idaho Fish and Game Commission, and his work there centered on the state's cold-water rivers:

• Pushed Idaho to adopt catch-and-release regulation, which helped rebuild the state's trout stocks.
• Championed Silver Creek, the spring creek south of Sun Valley he had fished since the 1940s.
• Urged the Nature Conservancy to buy the land; the Silver Creek Preserve was established in 1976.

Fishing, not writing, was the through-line of his life.

Family

In 1949 Hemingway married Byra Louise "Puck" Whittlesey in Paris. They had three daughters — Joan, known as Muffet; Margaux (1954–1996); and Mariel (born 1961). The younger two carried the name back into the public eye as models and actors, and Mariel was nominated for an Academy Award for Manhattan (1979).

Puck died in 1988, and the following year he married Angela Holvey.

The books

Hemingway published one book in his lifetime, the 1986 memoir Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa, which set his fishing life beside his childhood as Ernest Hemingway's son. A second volume, A Life Worth Living: The Adventures of a Passionate Sportsman, appeared after his death, in 2002.

On film

Death and legacy

Jack Hemingway died in New York on 1 December 2000, at seventy-seven, from complications after heart surgery. He was buried in Ketchum, not far from his father.

His memorial is not on paper. In 2001 Idaho established an annual Jack Hemingway Conservation Day, and the Silver Creek Preserve he helped create still draws anglers to the water south of Sun Valley.