Early on July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway woke up in his cabin in the Sawtooth Mountains. Like Cleopatra ceremoniously dressing up before she poisoned herself, Hemingway put on his favorite, self-named “emperor’s robe.” The sun was not out yet and he moved past his wife’s bedroom, took a key she kept on the kitchen window, unlocked the basement, took his favorite double-barrel shotgun, walked to the front of the house, bent himself over the gun, and pulled the trigger.
At that time, he was the most famous living writer in the world, having won the Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer. Everyone was stunned. His wife Mary first claimed it was an accident. His was an ideal life – full of adventure, living and traveling through the US, Europe, Africa and Cuba. He was well into his 4th marriage and countless well-known affairs. He was a legend of a man – war hero, bullfighter, boxer, sailor, big-game hunter and deep-sea fisherman – worshipped by every red-blooded American male. Why would this handsome, beloved writer want to take his own life?
Only months later would his wife admit it was suicide, and only afterwards would everyone begin to uncover the opposite story of his life.
Old Havana
Like his father, Clarence Hemingway, Ernest was prone to irritability and mood swings. Clarence was a bully of a disciplinarian who Ernest feared and admired. Just before Christmas of 1928, Clarence took his father’s Civil War revolver and shot himself in their Oak Park home. Ernest was 29. He wrote to his second wife, Pauline, “I’ll probably go the same way.”
The family explained away Clarence’s death due to health and financial problems. But the truth is mental illness and depression will pave a clear way through the family. Like father, like sons. The youngest, Sunny, who heard the shot and found his father’s body, also committed suicide two decades after Ernest’s death. Again with a gunshot to the head. Their sister Ursula and Ernest’s granddaughter Margaux also took their own lives, overdosing on barbiturates before bed.
Looking back, the image Hemingway perpetuated of himself as the ultimate in strength and bravery may have been a mask for loss. Clarence’s death was the catalyst to Hemingway’s preoccupation with death and suicide. He wrote about it in his letters and stories. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, an American fighting in Spain against Franco, has a duplicate father who commits suicide with a Civil War revolver – an almost autobiographical detail.
Hotel Ambos Mundos, where Hemingway stayed and wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls
Also after his father’s death, Ernest Hemingway was plagued with a series of bizarre accidents. The first was in Paris when he accidentally mistook a window chain for a toilet flush and pulled the entire skylight over him. He needed nine stitches. A car accident cut his scalp and needed 57 stitches. During WWII, he flew off a motorbike dodging German bullets. He suffered memory loss and a slowed speech. While living in Cuba, he split his forehead in another car accident and fell on his boat deck. In 1954, he sprained his shoulder after their plane crashed in Africa. The second plane burst into flames on the runway. Maybe thinking himself indestructible, Hemingway butted his own head twice against the door to get it open. He was hospitalized afterwards. It was the worst of at least nine total concussions.
But even without a lifetime of too many accidents or too much bravado, bipolar disorder and chronic alcoholism set in on Hemingway early on. The genetics of such illnesses were almost unheard of back then. Even today, we are still exploring the depths of mental illness. But they were definitely factors contributing to Hemingway’s demise.
He started drinking more after his father’s death. He was known never to leave a bottle unfinished. At the Floridita Bar in Cuba, he held the record for 16 double daiquiris in one sitting. He cured his hangovers with absinthe and champagne. Back then a man who could drink was well-regarded and Hemingway certainly met the expectation. But again, it came at a price. He was diagnosed with liver damage in 1937 and told to give up drinking. He ignored the warning and empty bottles of alcohol were found under his bed in subsequent hospitalizations.
There is a chair at the Floridita bar reserved for Hemingway. Until today, no one else is allowed to sit there.
La Bodeguita del Medio – birthplace of the mojito and another one of Hemingway’s old haunts.
Along with Hemingway’s great adventures, his inner turmoils contributed to the deepness (and greatness) of his writing. In turn, writing was his way of turning a suffering life into beauty. A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises were his war and post-war epics, taken from his own harrowing time in WWI Italy and the disillusionment that plagued the “lost generation” after the war. A Moveable Feast is a memoir of his time in 1920’s Paris in an art and literary circle that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot. He was a poor, struggling journalist then, but no matter. And The Old Man and the Sea was inspired by his deep-sea fishing days in Cuba.
El Morro
Writing was Hemingway’s way of making the best and the most out of life. His first wife Hadley said, “He had writing the way other people have religion.” So in 1960, when the head injuries and alcoholism finally took a toll on his writing, his spiral down was fast and uncontrollable. His memory loss got worse and dementia set in. He became paranoid and delusional. He thought that he was being followed and monitored by the Feds all the time, that his friends were trying to kill him. When he was asked to write something for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Hemingway came up empty and wept.
Severely depressed, he agreed to seek treatment at the Mayo Clinic where he was given ECT. Antidepressants were still in their very early days and rarely used then, but electroconvulsive therapy touted a 90% success rate. Of course it didn’t cure him. When asked what was the source of his troubles, he simply replied, “because I can no longer write.” The doctor decided to release him to be with his loved ones at home – in hopes that he can go back to writing – rather than allow him to continue to deteriorate alone in a hospital. The drive from the Rochester clinic to Idaho took five days and Hemingway seemed in good moods when they arrived home on July 1st, singing along with Mary before bed.
But such are the complexities of such a man. And so it was on the following morning, after a lifetime fighting his too-many demons, that Hemingway finally lost to them.
“Writing at its best is a lonely life.. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” -Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961
Casablanca Landing
