I am interested in Ernest Hemmingway’s suicide. How was his career going at the time? Was he on the wane? Why did he do it? Was he a chronically depressed person? Were his friends surprised or not? Where did he do it? Who found him? I think it was his wife Mary. Does this indicate anger towards her? Was he drunk? Did EH do other drugs? Was there a pharmachological (you know what I mean) report. Why… I guess is the question. I know that money can’t buy me love, but what was he missing?
Quick synopsis http://obits.com/hemmingwayernest.html
All I know is that he did the deed with his favorite shotgun. That kinda made me not want to inquire further.
Yeah, I know it was a gun. I read the article and this is what I came up with. EH drank a lot (sign of depression earlier in life?). His career was on the definite downside (couldn’t write with clarity due to the electroshock therapy). That’s pretty much it. I was surprised that he was famous for writing “clear, concise, short” sentences. I have to re-read some of his work. I am only familiar with “The Old Man and the Sea”. Is there a better book I should check out? I am still obsessed (if that is the right word) as to why he killed himself.
Maybe it was a physiological cause due to those injuries to his head from the crashes. The link above has good info. I’m a Papa fan & enjoyed visiting his old Key West house as well as his birth place in Oak Park, IL.
Also not too long before he shot himself, IIRC, he’d accidentally killed his favorite cat after mistaking it for a squirrel, which could have caused his depression to spiral downward, rapidly.
The Sun Also Rises is, I think, his best novel-length work. I’m not fond of A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls, which some other people favor.
There are a LOT of suicides in his family. ** Samclem’s ** link refers to one, buit I think a sister and a grandfather too? i think there were 3 others in his generation (sibs) and his parents, not to mention his granddaughter.
According to Carlos Baker in his Ernest Hemingway - A Life Story, Hemingway had suffered from “black moods” as he called them for years. He had been hospitalized for mental problems of which depression was one. Much of his depression stemmed from his inability to “perform” as a man and as a writer. He felt the two were sort of tied together. He also suffered from quite a bit of pain, some of it stemming from his two plane crashes in Africa.
According to Mary Hemingway in her book How It Was, Papa’s depression seemed to be getting better after they had gotten to Idaho, but he was still not at 100 percent. In her book, Mary makes a point that she does not feel that Hemingway killing himself was aimed at her. He just felt used up and empty. He felt that writing was his life. When he couldn’t write any more, he figured, why live?
According to virtually everybody who knew him that I have come across or read, they were and they were not surprised that he killed himself. Those that knew him well had heard him talking about it for years and the emotional turn downward definitely made it more anticipated. On the other hand, he was a man of huge emotional turns and many (see A.E. Hoechner’s Papa Hemingway) of his friends expected a turn toward the positive because they had seen it before.
Rather than a sign of depression early in his
life, his drinking tended to be just the opposite. It was a way to celebrate life for him. For him a good time for a man was punctuated with booze only weak people turned to it for solace.
Ike’s recommendations are excellent, but I also liked his Nick Adams Stories. Basically they were are a collection of his short stories featuring a young observer (Nick Adams). For me some his best and most vivid discriptions are there. In a way, many are very Zen like. I believe the Killers is included in this batch.
An excellent and entertaining biography of the man is Hoechner’s book I mentioned above. Probably the most thorough is Baker’s book. A good example of Hemingway creating fiction as autobiography (or I guess it could be autobiography as fiction) is A Moveable Feast where he discusses the 20s in Paris.
Not fond of A Farewell to Arms Uke? I guess my grandma was right: “There ain’t no accountin’ for some folks’s lack of taste.” 
His father, grandfather, and grand-daughter all commited suicide as well.
Everything I’ve read puts a lot of blame on the ECT. He really felt like he wouldn’t be able to write again.
Suicide after ECT is one of the “benefits” that the doctor won’t tell you about.
There’s a theory that when a parent commits suicide, his/her children are, from then on, at above average risk of doing the same. It seems to plant in their minds the concept that if things get bad, this is an acceptable way out.
How come nobody ever mentions the fact that Hemingway had LEUKEMIA at the time of his death? I can imagine that he was in constant, excruciating pain, or at least, feared soon to be in constant, excruciating pain.
Who can blame him? I don’t.
Here’s one cite, an interview with Gregorio Fuentes, the captain of Hemingway’s boat Pilar, and the model for The Old Man and The Sea. I originally read this story in the Chicago Tribune a few years ago.
http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/Aficionado/Archives/199703/fu397.html
Btw, I don’t smoke cigars, I just went on a search for that article and this reprint is what I came up with.
Scientologist?
Equipoise, I am looking into your author’s claim that Hemingway had leukemia, but I can find no other source for this information. None of the accepted biogrophies that I have of the man (six books) mention this. In addition, in two interviews I did with his wife Mary, she did not mention this and finally (and in my mind most conslusively) in one interview with his son Jack who was at that time dying of leukemia, he did not say that his father had the same form of cancer. While the agreement with him at the time was that my interview would be about him and not his father, I would have thought that he would have mentioned somewhere in the discussion of his health that his father had the same disease.
I am now trying to find Mr. Somrack (the author of your piece) and ask him where he got this fact. I am wondering if he had heard about Jack Hemingway’s death and tranferred the information to Ernest. In addition, Hemingway had two or three characters in his stories/novels who suffered from leukemia. He also liked to tell a story about a woman whom he loved who died from the disease.
Rumors of FBI harassment. True or false?
I believe his son killed himself as well.
True. While the FBI denied it for years, a Freedom of Information Act search indicated that yes indeed, he was followed, wire tapped, his mail was monitored, etc. Part of it was that he lived as long as he did in Cuba, part of it was because a number of his friends were “Communists” according to the 1950s Marcarthyism standards and part of it was because his stand against Franco in Spain (and some of his other stands, too for that matter).
Either Smithsonian or American History had a very good article on it about seven or eight years ago. It had copies of the FBI reports and everything. I will go through my old issues looking for a copy.
He used to claim that he was being followed, people were watching him and tapping his phone. Most people just put it off to paranoid ramblings. It was proven later that it was not necessarily so.