http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-farewell-to-macho.html?_r=1&pagewanted=printexcerpt:
But Diliberto says women are wrong to think Hemingway has nothing to offer them. Especially now that women are rising and men are declining, as The Atlantic has noted in two cover stories, women can feel secure enough to “relax and enjoy him,” as Diliberto puts it.
“Much of Hemingway’s work, particularly the stories he wrote during his marriage to Hadley,” she said, “brilliantly chart the emotional nuances in relationships between men and women.”
Hendrickson notes that after Hemingway’s death, “it was very fashionable to put him down for his misogyny. But now scholars, ironically including great female scholars, have burrowed down into him and found this sly and deceptive sensitivity toward women. He understood there was something about himself so sensitive, a tuning-fork tremulousness, that it was almost as though it shamed him, and he put on the he-man act.”
That “Kansas City-boy brutality,” as Gertrude Stein called it, was an authentic part of him. But Hendrickson believes it was also a mask covering up “a tortured sexual ambiguity.”
The loathed mother, Grace, who raised her little boy for a few years as his older sister’s “twin,” dressing him in frilly bonnets, frocks and Mary Janes, imbued him with sexual confusion.
Following up on interviews with the author’s sons that he did 24 years ago for The Washington Post, Hendrickson explores the bond between Hemingway and his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who was a manic depressive, transsexual and heterosexual and who sometimes called himself Gloria Hemingway. He married four times, had eight children and died in the women’s annex of a Miami jail cell after being picked up for exposing himself.