Before, I saw Ernest Hemingway as the measure of man: a heroic, hard-drinking, big-game-hunting, bullfight-loving, deep-sea-fishing, world-traveling, womanizing war correspondent pugilist who—for better or worse—defined masculinity. I came to pay respect to that man, one whose shadow cast eternal over all men who write.
But being there, really there, I only saw pain. When he was a child, Hemingway's mother dressed him as a girl in lacy white frocks and flowery hats with ribbons. She kept his hair long. He'd call his mother "Fweetee [Sweeetie]" and she'd call him her "Dutch dolly. He was 29 when his father shot himself. As a teenage ambulance driver during World War I in Italy, a mortar shell blasted more than fragments of shrapnel into his legs, and he caught machine gun fire while carrying a solider to safety.
He accidently shot himself in both legs while hunting sharks. He survived two African plane crashes in two days. He is said to have been in three serious car accidents; suffered at least a dozen brain concussions; a ruptured liver, spleen and kidney; temporary loss of vision in his left eye; loss of hearing in his left ear; a crushed vertebra; fractured skull; sprained right arm and shoulder; sprained left leg; paralysis of his sphincter; serious burns on his legs, lips, belly, face, and arms; dysentery, malaria, anthrax, skin cancer, hepatitis, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
As one biographer wrote , "A less hardy man might not have lived to kill himself. Then there was the drink. At age 19, while recovering from his wounds in World War I, he supposedly kept a bottle of cognac under his pillow and nurses found a closet full of empties. Hemingway reportedly drank a quart of whiskey a day for the final 20 years of his life, seemingly hell-bent on destroying himself, one gulp at a time. His final years were wracked by depression and paranoia; he believed that the feds were after him.
Edgar Hoover had in fact been tracking him since the s, suspicious of his activities in Cuba. He was taken to the Mayo Clinic, where he received electroshock treatment, but, upon returning to Idaho, his mental state continued its decline. He was asked to compose a few lines for a presentation volume for John F.
Kennedy's inauguration, but as hours stretched into days, he could do little more than shuffle pages.
He broke down and wept, fearing that he had lost the ability to write. He twice turned his shotgun on himself, but others intervened. During a fueling stopover in Rapid City en route to the Mayo Clinic for more electroshock treatments, Hemingway walked toward the whirling propeller of another plane before the pilot cut his engine in time. Suicide had long fascinated Hemingway. One of his favorite books growing up was Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club , which, incidentally, Hemingway found on his father's shelf.
One of his first published pieces of fiction, back in high school, focused on suicide; and one of his first reported pieces of journalism did the same. On Sunday, July 2, , shortly after returning from the Mayo Clinic, just weeks shy of his 62nd birthday, Hemingway pushed two shells into his trusty shotgun while inside his Ketchum home that overlooks the Big Wood River and the Sawtooth Mountains—"the loveliest mountains that I know," he once wrote. Then, he fulfilled his prophecy and departed in the same manner as his father and, all told, at least a half dozen members of the Hemingway family over four generations, some of whom share plots surrounding his in the Ketchum Cemetery.
For me, the Hemingway myth began to deteriorate only recently when my mother told me of attending Wood River High School in nearby Hailey, Idaho, with Muffet and Margaux, two of Hemingway's granddaughters.
As Mariel Hemingway revealed in her documentary about the family's chronic history of suicide and mental illness, Running From Crazy , Muffet and Margaux, her two older sisters, were sexually abused by their father, Jack, which my mother would later tell me was obvious so many years ago. And suicide was the only way out for some. Was Hemingway my role model? As a writer, yes. His competitive drive was ferocious, his discipline admirable.
Like clockwork, he wrote undisturbed from daybreak until midday, always longhand, often wearing down seven No. But as a man? The best way to find the plain marble tombstones of Mary and Ernest Hemingway is to look for the three tall spruce trees that stand above them. Around the horizontal grey slabs many other graves bear familiar names.
His grand-daughter Margaux spelt "Margot" on her gravestone , also took her own life and her epitaph, "A free spirit freed," could almost be his as well. George Saviers, Hemingway's doctor, lies a few yards away, and beside him the grave of his son Frederick Saviers, who died of a viral heart disease at the age of sixteen.
One of Ernest Hemingway's last letters was to this boy. Hemingway was having treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester when he heard Saviers' son was ill but still found time, on June 15, , to write him a cheery letter.
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