Fifty years ago, Ernest Hemingway, writer, sportsman, big-game hunter, soldier, poseur, genius and Nobel Prize winner shot himself with his favorite Boss doublebarrel shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. His wife Mary at first pretended it was an accident, but nobody bought that fairy tale. He'd been suffering almost every imaginable physical and some mental problems, including writer's block and, so it is said, impotence.
In previous months, he had submitted to more than 15 punishing ECT (electroshock convulsive) treatments at the Mayo clinic, due, in part, to his fear that the FBI was shadowing him. Paranoia? In fact, the FBI's director J Edgar Hoover hated him as a "Communist" for raising money for ambulances to the antifascist loyalist side of the Spanish civil war and sheltering anti-Franco refugees. Hoover kept a 124-page file on Hemingway, and had ordered his agents to trail the writer's movements. His doctors, family and friends saw Hemingway's anxiety as proof of his mental instability requiring shock treatment.
Since his death, it's been chic to spitefully pick over his moldering bones to psychoanalyse and thus not-so-subtly degrade Hemingway's work and life. A much-quoted secondhand "psychological autopsy" of Hemingway's suicide by an American shrink, who never met the writer, finds him guilty of "narcissistic personality traits" and - of course! - "bipolar disorder". And - predictably - "an Oedipal desire to kill his father". To add to this bill of indictment, an English literary critic recently slammed Hemingway's "psychotic self-dramatisation."
Self-dramatization comes naturally to those who live life to the fore, and no one made American literature more of a personal, heroic mission.
Up to the very end, Hemingway put up a tremendous battle to stay alive as a writer, despite severe wounds that never healed from air crashes, boat accidents and large living. The Garden of Eden, his last, unfinished book, published posthumously, was a daring, heroic attempt at a summing up on a grand scale. It experimented with androgyny, and sex reversals, and clearly was a painful effort to demasculinise and broaden his writing. It's a crime that the published novel compared to the unfinished original is a cartoonish cut-and-paste job. (I'm indebted to the literary archaeological digging of the K, who tracked down Hemingway's original draft in a Boston library.) He'd worked on this magnum opus for 20 years, and if anything killed him, his Promethean struggles with The Garden of Eden did.
Remember the times - and our own. He grew up with terror. His father shot himself, and other family members also committed suicide, including his actor niece, Margaux. The miserable Italian campaign of the first world war, where, as a Red Cross volunteer, he saved a soldier's life and almost lost a mortar-shattered leg to a surgeon's knife; the following "small wars" in Europe and Asia Minor, and his boisterous joining the 4th Infantry division for its liberating drive to Paris, were no picnics. From the start, most poignantly in the Spanish civil war, he threw himself body and soul into the "struggle against fascism". Some psychosis.
If you were to read only biography of Hemingway, this is the one I would recommend--Kenneth Lynn's.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/06/ketchum-if-you-can.html
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