Hemingway's Secret

[SquidInk]

By A. E. HOTCHNER
Published: July 1, 2011

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life.

Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his stories and novels for television specials and film, and we shared adventures in France, Italy, Cuba and Spain, where, as a pretend matador with Ernest as my manager, I participated in a Ciudad Real bullfight. Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

[...]

In May 1960, Ernest phoned me from Cuba. He was uncharacteristically perturbed that the unfinished Life article had reached 92,453 words. The contract was for 40,000; he was having nightmares.

A month later he called again. He had cut only 530 words, he was exhausted and would it be an imposition to ask me to come to Cuba to help him?

I did, and over the next nine days I submitted list upon list of suggested cuts. At first he rejected them: “What I’ve written is Proustian in its cumulative effect, and if we eliminate detail we destroy that effect.” But eventually he grudgingly consented to cutting 54,916 words. He was resigned, surrendering, and said he would leave it to Life to cut the rest.

I got on the plane back to New York knowing my friend was “bone-tired and very beat-up,” but thinking he simply needed rest and would soon be his old dominating self again.

In November I went out West for our annual pheasant shoot and realized how wrong I was. When Ernest and our friend Duke MacMullen met my train at Shoshone, Idaho, for the drive to Ketchum, we did not stop at the bar opposite the station as we usually did because Ernest was anxious to get on the road. I asked why the hurry.

“The feds.”

“What?”

“They tailed us all the way. Ask Duke.”

“Well ... there was a car back of us out of Hailey.”

“Why are F.B.I. agents pursuing you?” I asked.

“It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell. They’ve bugged everything. That’s why we’re using Duke’s car. Mine’s bugged. Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.”

[...]

Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all. - source

The life and death of Hemingway is nothing short of incredible. From our perspective today, it hardly seems real - but it was all too real for him. Especially in the end, as he was finally driven over the edge by an overly zealous federal security apparatus - an apparatus which is infinitesimal compared to what is arrayed against us today.

I have a lot of respect for a person who asks this: “What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?” What is the answer? I would like to know that answer.

One thing I do know is that I too will never retire.

The craziest part is that Hemingway was only one of many in his generation - the Generation au Feu - who lived & died this way. He stood alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Pasos, St Exupery, and many more. They lived life as life should be lived - hugely. Huge flaws, huge strengths, huge quarrels, huge adventures, etc.

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." -Hemingway

Here's another - LINK

[HB3]

I read this earlier today. Pretty interesting. I'll comment more later.

[HB3]

First of all, I think Mary needs to get much more of a bad rap. I don't know if this is a taboo in Hemingway studies or what. But think about this paragraph:

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

As noted, he had already tried to kill himself on multiple occasions; yet the lockable gun rack remained unlocked, allowing him unrestricted access. After his suicide, Mary made some lame excuse like, "I never thought it was the place of a wife to keep anything locked up from her husband." Bull****. That statement has all sorts of unnerving, creepy undertones once you start looking into their relationship.

So while it's interesting that he was right about the feds and it may have been a contributing factor, it's only one of many. He'd probably gotten brain damage from a head trauma he sustained from their last safari in Africa, when their light plane crashed and Hemingway head-butted the door to free them from the cabin. He definitely had a concussion, but refused to be transported for treatment, and instead continued drinking and "running wild" in Africa, finally sustaining third degree burns while sleeping too close to a campfire at night. Finally, they shipped him to a hospital. A disaster.

I have a lot of respect for a person who asks this: “What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?” What is the answer? I would like to know that answer.

Hemingway had no belief in the transcendent, which is what ultimately -- I think -- caused him to slowly self-destruct in the first place.

I do agree with your assessment that the modernists were the last great literary movement in the United States (and England, etc), with the Beats a weak follow-up. But they all had serious problems outside of their image. Fitzgerald didn't really suffer the same fate as Hemingway; in ways it was worse, or at least different. He, too, was with a bad woman he idealized, and who probably had a very destructive influence. But I'd have to say Zelda was a better writer than Mary, which maybe counts for something. And Zelda and Scott's relationship must be the mirror of Gatsby and Daisy. Fitzgerald ends up a Hollywood burn-out trying to support her. Ever read "The Crack Up"? It covers that period.

To me, the problem they have in common is the absent belief in the transcendent. They attempt to compensate for this in various ways, but all begin with this fatal flaw. The decay of Western society in general leaves them totally helpless, and who can blame them. Dos Passos, by the way, turned to reactionary politics, totally at odds with his earlier work. I've never really read any of that stuff in detail, but always meant to. I tried to cover that pendulum swinging from left to right, liberal to conservative, in the protagonist in Avalon, based on what I knew of Dos Passos and other modernist intellectuals.

[SquidInk]

HB3 - thanks for a great response. You've pointed out a few things I was unaware of (admittedly, I have not studied Hemingway. I had no idea he headbutted his way out of a plane wreck, for instance).

What role did WW1 - the first mechanized war - play in the forming of Hemingway's (and the whole generation's) 'world view'?

They found themselves in an evermore ordered, mechanized, & 'efficient' society, where technical prowess is valued over creative ability - or more accurately, all successful creative effort would be adapted to improving methods of efficiency. All of the sublime experience & insight to be gained in supremely inefficient 'one against the world' scenarios was on the wane.

It seems to me that folks like Hemingway, Richard Halliburtan, Ernest Shackleton, St. Exupery were truly the last of certain kind of western character. They were the Lost Inefficients! And as such, they had a quickly shrinking place in the world around them - a place which is now completely gone, making their lives seem incredible.

I don't understand the motivation completely. Why spend a lifetime pinning chest hair on yourself like that? To whom were they proving their manliness?

[HB3]

"The Lost Inefficients" -- I love that. You could also call them the Last Inefficients. That reminds me of Gregor Samsa in "The Metamorphosis" -- another great "inefficient" character, who finally dies to make way for the "efficient" world.

Regarding WWI -- this is a huge factor. Basically, they all had battle fatigue, shell shock, or "post-traumatic stress disorder," as it's now called. Hemingway was an ambulance driver on the Italian front. That is, he was the first guy on the field of battle after the battle was over. Their job was to provide emergency treatment as possible or applicable, and otherwise transport the wounded. You can imagine the scenes they came upon.

With this in mind, Hemingway's obsession with dangerous macho behavior is roughly the same thing as the characters in "The Deer Hunter" playing Russian roulette.

The war is the hidden informing factor in "The Sun Also Rises," never explained, but always present -- he called this the "Omission Theory." You leave out the most important stuff in your stories, but leave clues so the reader can figure it out. This is also notably the case in his famous short story, "The Big Two-Hearted River." The protagonist is a war veteran, and this is motivating everything's he's doing, but the reader isn't told this directly. You could say similarly the macho response is not to be direct in expressing what you're really feeling, but to act in a certain way anyway.

[HB3]

I'm not gonna say the Fed thing isn't interesting, though -- it's quite interesting. But it has to be seen in an overall pattern in which these guys get eaten up by American society. It's a consequence of celebrity, too -- this generation was the first generation of artists to be captured by modern media, esp. film and esp. television, the type of media saturation that totally dominates your life. They were "watched" in all sorts of ways. As far as his macho image, it's funny that there appears to have been all sorts of bizarre gender-bending going on behind the scenes, as documented to a certain extent in one of his posthumous novels, The Garden of Eden.

[SquidInk]

Yes. The Last Inefficients.

Here is an illustration of the direction the world had taken at that time - a direction it still moves in today, no doubt.

First, think of the "The Old Man and the Sea" - one man, one fish, many days, a 'biblical' struggle, & in the end nothing to sell. That (with some embellishment to make a metaphor) was a snapshot of the life of a Cuban Fisherman.

Before it was really light he had his baits out and was drifting with the current. One bait was down forty fathoms. The second was at seventy-five and the third and fourth were down in the blue water at one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five fathoms. Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait fish, tied and sewed solid and all the projecting part of the hook, the curve and the point, was covered with fresh sardines. Each sardine was hooked through both eyes so that they made a half-garland on the projecting steel. There was no part of the hook that a great fish could feel which was not sweet smelling and good tasting.

[...]

The wind is our friend, anyway, he thought. Then he added, sometimes. And the great sea with our friends and our enemies. And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought.

"Nothing," he said aloud. "I went out too far." - The Old Man and the Sea

Epic.

Now consider this:

A Canadian group is pioneering a high-tech web system that allows diners around the world to track their seafood back to the person who caught it.

Participating fishermen tag their catch and the information is entered intoThisfish.info.

Earlier this week, Nova Scotian Gordon Beaton caught a lobster in the Northumberland Strait, tagged it and sold it on. A couple of days later, Toronto diner Lynn Patterson ordered lobster at the Royal York Hotel.

She pulled out her iPad, went to Thisfish and entered the code.

"It's coming up," she said as the site tracked the lobster. "[It] tells us what it is, of course, an Atlantic lobster. Who caught it — a guy called Gordon Beaton! Caught in the Northumberland Strait two days ago. Fresh, fresh, fresh!"

Diners can log into Thisfish.info and see where their dinner came from. CBCBeaton was pleased to learn his lobster's final destination.

"Well that's good. I'm glad it made it to such a good place," he said.

- source

... elsewhere, this article generated the following comment:

As human population on earth increases to 10b, 20b, 40b on the surface of Earth we will need better tracking software of how many fish to catch to maximize the number of fish to be caught. Catch too few, and you miss out, catch too many and you decrease the reproducing population. That number needs to be calculated.

Real time tracking like this could be used to monitor the fluctuations in the rates of fish populations, entered into databases, so we can figure out the exact number of fish we can catch sustainably.

Opensource this data, and let the open market process it, someone will write an algorithm to maximize the number of fish the Earth can produce in a given year. Then the government will "absorb" that system, and we can build a sustainable Earthwide fish management process. all the oceans are linked, and multiple governments will have to coordinate. It is the "Tragedy of the commons".

The comment may as well be 'trans-humanist' relative to the world of Hemingway. This is not a world well suited to The Last Inefficients!

I have asked this question for years (in fact, I asked Linnea this question): is there a place left in the world for a person with nothing to sell?

Was this similar to the questions Hemingway was asking in his later years?

[HB3]

Lol! You know, there's all sorts of arguments and controversy about angling -- big sea fishing. It's the same deal -- they track the fish with sonar, use all sorts of advanced technology that simply was available in the romanticized days of fish and fishermen.

[earthist]

]I have asked this question for years (in fact, I asked Linnea this question): is there a place left in the world for a person with nothing to sell?

Now, that's profound, Sir! It just may be the best-worded, and most important question I've heard since "Who (or what) am I?" May I steal it for use as a sig-line?

[SquidInk]

Now, that's profound, Sir! It just may be the best-worded, and most important question I've heard since "Who (or what) am I?" May I steal it for use as a sig-line?

Yes, earthist, go for it. But I am also curious to find out your thoughts ... if you're so inclined.

FWIW, I think discovering the answer to that question is pretty critical. So far, a large portion of my personal 'quest' (in all it's many forms) has been an effort in that direction.

[earthist]

Yes, earthist, go for it. But I am also curious to find out your thoughts ... if you're so inclined.

FWIW, I think discovering the answer to that question is pretty critical. So far, a large portion of my personal 'quest' (in all it's many forms) has been an effort in that direction.

Well, I assume you have your own meaning for it, and I assume, based on past posts I've seen about "Homo Economicus" that we're thinking along the same line. I doubt I have anything to contribute to you beyond what you've already thought.


For anyone coming newly to the discussion, I could say that I'm thinking of "sell" in terms of a push. As my current sig-line states, "Any time you get something for nothing, it means that someone, somewhere, got nothing for something," we all need to contribute something of value, IMO. Technically, that's selling. However, in our money-oriented social context, selling is about marketing things beyond their intrinsic value; convincing people that they "need" things whether they do or not; ie: "made-up value."

"Made-up value" describes so much that is wrong with our society, IMO, even including the money itself, that I find it profound to describe it so succinctly: "Is there a place left in the world for a person with nothing to sell?" If the question makes no sense to someone, I take it as a confirmation of how bad things are, and I doubt there's much I could add to enlighten them.

If we see the question differently, perhaps it's in my conviction that the answer is obvious; that the answer is "No!;" and that we need to change that. You state that you are still "questing" for the answer, but it seems from here that you already know it. Perhaps I'm assuming something that isn't true?