Hemingway: Has his death eclipsed his work?
by Robert Roper
JULY 5, 2011 TAGS:
Now, 50 years since the death of Ernest Hemingway, the pummeling of his corpse is becoming less popular. His books remain in print. Readers continue to find him, outside the classroom as well as within. His former preeminence no longer threatens; his pumped-up maleness seems mainly sad. The 50 years since his death, by shotgun, in July 1961 have seen so much cultural outburst and evolution that the issues raised by his life now seem antique.
His death, though: That escapes change. It remains one of the iconic American deaths. He has come close to being remembered as much for his death as for his work, a terrible fate for a writer.
Hemingway left us right at the cusp, with John F. Kennedy, a Hemingway fan, fresh in the White House and symbolizing something new. February 1961, supporters of the electric new president asked the eminent novelist to contribute a handwritten tribute, and Hemingway struggled for a desperate week to write three or four sentences, weeping tears of anguish and frustration. He had just returned from the Mayo Clinic, where he had been treated for paranoid depression with many sessions of electro-convulsive therapy. Afterward his memory was gone. He was finished as a writer; for him, that meant he was finished.
Hemingway was a nasty piece of work, cruel to his wives and many of his fellow writers, not an especially good father, needy of sycophants and of pliable women to sit at his knee. He was also great company and an unforgettable presence in a room, deeply loyal to many friends, the very model of an engaged writer, fighting the biggest, hardest battles of his era. He was a premature and mature anti-Fascist. A lover of the Spanish people, beloved of them in return, he involved himself deeply in the Spanish Civil War. Generalissimo Franco’s victory, with the support of Hitler and Mussolini, disgusted him but did not put him off political struggle.
His novel of that war, For Whom the Bell Tolls, tells the truth about Nazi involvement in Spain, but it’s also honest about the murderousness of the Soviet agents who rushed to fight on the good side, alongside Hemingway and other right-thinking Westerners. As Hemingway pointed out, a bullet in the neck from a Soviet commissar left you just as dead as from a Fascist.
About that death, though, that memorable death. Here is how it came for him:
Hemingway’s decline began at 18, with a wound suffered on the Italian front in World War I. He took over 200 pieces of shrapnel in his body and endured a massive concussion that rearranged his brain. The concussive wounds continued at an alarming rate. There were car-crashes, falling skylights, fistfights, bad falls on slippery boat-decks. His biographers count six major brain traumas, with others suspected. In 1954, returning from an African safari, he was in a small plane that crashed. The next day, being rushed to a hospital for treatment, he was trapped when that plane also went down, in flames. To save his wife and himself, Hemingway headbutted them out of a cabin window.
The drinking. The drinking was massive, as with Faulkner and Fitzgerald. By the time of his first serious wound in Italy, he knew his way around a bottle, and in his Paris years he drank with Bohemian abandon, becoming a pub-going buddy of James Joyce, a major-league drinker. Probably the most iconic bottles of wine in American literature appear in a Hemingway novel, The Sun Also Rises: in between bullfights and other diversions, the hero and his best friend fish for trout in the Irati river, and they stick their bottles of wine in the river to cool them down.
We need not tally every sip and guzzle. Suffice it to say that Hemingway drank seriously for 40 years, almost never missing a day. When he turned 60, he had a diseased liver, high blood pressure, bad blood cholesterol levels, type II diabetes, kidney infections, eye trouble, chronic headaches, and insomnia. Finding he lacked the old pep sometimes, he asked the doctors of his acquaintance to help him out, and they prescribed many medicines just then coming on market, such as Oreton-M, a synthetic testosterone that “stimulates the development of male sexual characteristics,” according to the Physicians’ Desk Reference of 1947. The doctors also put him on Serpasil, a sedative; Doriden, a tranquilizer; Ritalin; Seconal and Eucanyl for insomnia; plus heavy daily doses of vitamins A and B for his liver.
Profoundly polluted, the writer managed to awaken at dawn every day and go to work. In his last decade, drinking for the finish line and taking all those drugs in insane combination, he wrote Across the River and Into the Trees, The Dangerous Summer, The Old Man and the Sea (Pulitzer Prize), A Moveable Feast, and three long late novels, published posthumously as Islands in the Stream, Clear at First Light, and The Garden of Eden. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize. As long as he could work he could live – wanted to live.
In 1928 his father had killed himself. Hemingway’s mother sent him the revolver that his father had used – it was a Smith & Wesson his grandfather had carried in the Civil War. Hemingway was said to cherish the gun but to have been deeply disturbed by his mother’s gesture.
He often talked about suicide. The times just after finishing a book were some of the worst for him. Even in his robust roaring 20s, world-famous as an author already, he talked often about having night terrors, about feeling “contemptible,” about being afraid he was losing control – “you lie all night half funny in the head and pray and pray and pray you won’t go crazy.” In a love letter to the woman who would become his second wife, he wrote, “I think all the time I want to die.” A love letter! The inner Hemingway was agonized, was ever on the cross.
The relation of the greatness of some of his writing to his terrors and his self-loathing is no simple subject. Of his five brothers and sisters, three died by their own hand, a fourth probably also. One of his sons, Gregory, was drug-addicted and deeply troubled and died in jail. One of his granddaughters, Margaux Hemingway, the actress, also was an addict and an early suicide.
Enough already! an inveterate Hemingway reader wants to say, enough of this inescapable, written-in-the-genes doom. We do not have to admire him or forgive his excesses to think that his life was, indeed, an exercise in courage, as he often told us – just not the courage of facing down a lion, or going into combat armed with only a pencil and a reporter’s pad. Courage was “grace under pressure,” he said, and the head that he kept putting in the way of car windshields, bullets, and plane fuselages was terribly full of self-generated destructive forces. Why it was that way none of his biographers has ever adequately expressed. That so large and memorable a personage was so entirely without hope so much of the time awakens compassion.
With his memory mostly gone, after all that electro-shock, his despair was immense. But it lifted when he convinced a staff psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic that he was feeling better now, that it was safe to send him home. Then he was all smiles, as he hadn’t been in years. At home his shotguns awaited. Not with unseemly haste, but briskly, he made his way downstairs to the gun cabinet in his home in Ketchum, Idaho. There he put his hands on his deliverance.
Robert Roper writes often for Obit and teaches at Johns Hopkins.
His death, though: That escapes change. It remains one of the iconic American deaths. He has come close to being remembered as much for his death as for his work, a terrible fate for a writer. Hemingway left us right at the cusp, with John F. Kennedy, a Hemingway fan, fresh in the White House and symbolizing something new. February 1961, supporters of the electric new president asked the eminent novelist to contribute a handwritten tribute, and Hemingway struggled for a desperate week to write three or four sentences, weeping tears of anguish and frustration. He had just returned from the Mayo Clinic, where he had been treated for paranoid depression with many sessions of electro-convulsive therapy. Afterward his memory was gone. He was finished as a writer; for him, that meant he was finished.
Hemingway was a nasty piece of work, cruel to his wives and many of his fellow writers, not an especially good father, needy of sycophants and of pliable women to sit at his knee. He was also great company and an unforgettable presence in a room, deeply loyal to many friends, the very model of an engaged writer, fighting the biggest, hardest battles of his era. He was a premature and mature anti-Fascist. A lover of the Spanish people, beloved of them in return, he involved himself deeply in the Spanish Civil War. Generalissimo Franco’s victory, with the support of Hitler and Mussolini, disgusted him but did not put him off political struggle.
His novel of that war, For Whom the Bell Tolls, tells the truth about Nazi involvement in Spain, but it’s also honest about the murderousness of the Soviet agents who rushed to fight on the good side, alongside Hemingway and other right-thinking Westerners. As Hemingway pointed out, a bullet in the neck from a Soviet commissar left you just as dead as from a Fascist.
About that death, though, that memorable death. Here is how it came for him:
Hemingway’s decline began at 18, with a wound suffered on the Italian front in World War I. He took over 200 pieces of shrapnel in his body and endured a massive concussion that rearranged his brain. The concussive wounds continued at an alarming rate. There were car-crashes, falling skylights, fistfights, bad falls on slippery boat-decks. His biographers count six major brain traumas, with others suspected. In 1954, returning from an African safari, he was in a small plane that crashed. The next day, being rushed to a hospital for treatment, he was trapped when that plane also went down, in flames. To save his wife and himself, Hemingway headbutted them out of a cabin window.
The drinking. The drinking was massive, as with Faulkner and Fitzgerald. By the time of his first serious wound in Italy, he knew his way around a bottle, and in his Paris years he drank with Bohemian abandon, becoming a pub-going buddy of James Joyce, a major-league drinker. Probably the most iconic bottles of wine in American literature appear in a Hemingway novel, The Sun Also Rises: in between bullfights and other diversions, the hero and his best friend fish for trout in the Irati river, and they stick their bottles of wine in the river to cool them down. We need not tally every sip and guzzle. Suffice it to say that Hemingway drank seriously for 40 years, almost never missing a day. When he turned 60, he had a diseased liver, high blood pressure, bad blood cholesterol levels, type II diabetes, kidney infections, eye trouble, chronic headaches, and insomnia. Finding he lacked the old pep sometimes, he asked the doctors of his acquaintance to help him out, and they prescribed many medicines just then coming on market, such as Oreton-M, a synthetic testosterone that “stimulates the development of male sexual characteristics,” according to the Physicians’ Desk Reference of 1947. The doctors also put him on Serpasil, a sedative; Doriden, a tranquilizer; Ritalin; Seconal and Eucanyl for insomnia; plus heavy daily doses of vitamins A and B for his liver.
Profoundly polluted, the writer managed to awaken at dawn every day and go to work. In his last decade, drinking for the finish line and taking all those drugs in insane combination, he wrote Across the River and Into the Trees, The Dangerous Summer, The Old Man and the Sea (Pulitzer Prize), A Moveable Feast, and three long late novels, published posthumously as Islands in the Stream, Clear at First Light, and The Garden of Eden. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize. As long as he could work he could live – wanted to live.
In 1928 his father had killed himself. Hemingway’s mother sent him the revolver that his father had used – it was a Smith & Wesson his grandfather had carried in the Civil War. Hemingway was said to cherish the gun but to have been deeply disturbed by his mother’s gesture.
He often talked about suicide. The times just after finishing a book were some of the worst for him. Even in his robust roaring 20s, world-famous as an author already, he talked often about having night terrors, about feeling “contemptible,” about being afraid he was losing control – “you lie all night half funny in the head and pray and pray and pray you won’t go crazy.” In a love letter to the woman who would become his second wife, he wrote, “I think all the time I want to die.” A love letter! The inner Hemingway was agonized, was ever on the cross.
The relation of the greatness of some of his writing to his terrors and his self-loathing is no simple subject. Of his five brothers and sisters, three died by their own hand, a fourth probably also. One of his sons, Gregory, was drug-addicted and deeply troubled and died in jail. One of his granddaughters, Margaux Hemingway, the actress, also was an addict and an early suicide.Enough already! an inveterate Hemingway reader wants to say, enough of this inescapable, written-in-the-genes doom. We do not have to admire him or forgive his excesses to think that his life was, indeed, an exercise in courage, as he often told us – just not the courage of facing down a lion, or going into combat armed with only a pencil and a reporter’s pad. Courage was “grace under pressure,” he said, and the head that he kept putting in the way of car windshields, bullets, and plane fuselages was terribly full of self-generated destructive forces. Why it was that way none of his biographers has ever adequately expressed. That so large and memorable a personage was so entirely without hope so much of the time awakens compassion.
With his memory mostly gone, after all that electro-shock, his despair was immense. But it lifted when he convinced a staff psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic that he was feeling better now, that it was safe to send him home. Then he was all smiles, as he hadn’t been in years. At home his shotguns awaited. Not with unseemly haste, but briskly, he made his way downstairs to the gun cabinet in his home in Ketchum, Idaho. There he put his hands on his deliverance.
Robert Roper writes often for Obit and teaches at Johns Hopkins.
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COMMENTS (1)
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Chris Roberts wrote on July 7, 2011 1:03pm
I wouldn’t call using a shotgun to end your life “iconic.” This suicide method (firearm) is in the top two. I think a better word is ironic given the fact that Hemingway the trophy hunter (he didn’t use the meat for sustenance, Beefeater Gin doesn’t count) used his favorite hunting gun to kill himself. Iconic would be the image of Virginia Woolf wading into the water, laden down with stones. Very few suicides drown themselves, the only exception being, suicide by Niagara Falls. Here is how I imagine Woolf’s last moments to be: Terrible it is this insidious melancholy that walks alongside of her. Then, one day, Virgina comes across the event quite by providence. She reads of a small boy who happened on a train wreck. The child went around to each body and placed small stones on the eyes of the dead. It is a quandary as to why he did this and than a light comes on: it is better to go into death blind. To go without any preconceived idea as to what awaits the passage of the spirit. So, indeed, Virginia’s heart feels light for first time in many months. She shall go to the river weighted down with stones, her very eyes in her pockets, and slip into the deep. [Report Comment]
