Legend has it that William Carlos Williams circumcised Ernest Hemingway’s firstborn son.[1]

Actually, the story is an exaggeration. It turns out that the poet only “retracted” Bumby Hemingway’s foreskin (that is, he forcibly pulled back the infant’s foreskin, a rather painful procedure).[2] Williams later wrote that “the redoubtable lion hunter almost fainted” when the child cried.[3]

This fictional circumcision is commemorated in Jack Coulehan’s poem “William Carlos Williams circumcises Ernest Hemingway’s first son.”

[1] This myth is propagated by many popular-press biographies of the writers, such as Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 125-26; Paul Mariani, Williams Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 239; James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.), 258; John Leland, A Guide to Hemingway’s Paris (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1989), 36.

[2] As noted by Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, Hemingway (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 249.

[3] Williams writes in a letter of January 14, 1951, “Do you realize that when I was in Paris in 1924 I retracted Hemingway’s oldest boy’s foreskin for him while the redoubtable lion hunter almost fainted?” in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1957), 294.