Ernest Hemingway: war hero, big-game hunter, ‘gin-soaked abusive monster’
Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, editors
THE LETTERS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Volume One: 1907–1922
Paul Hendrickson
HEMINGWAY’S BOAT
Everything he loved in life, and lost, 1934–1961
"Gee I’m afraid I wont be good for anything after this war!”, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his parents in September 1918. He was recuperating at an Alpine hotel on Lake Maggiore, having been granted leave from the military hospital where he was undergoing “electrical treatments” on his severely wounded legs. “All I know now is war”, the nineteen-year-old continued. “Everything else seems like a dream.”...
The prediction that war was all he knew was less reckless than it sounded at the time, however. Hemingway died fifty years ago, shooting himself in the head in the early morning of July 2, 1961, at the house he shared with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, in Ketchum, Idaho. The last ten years of the marriage, which began in 1946, had been marked by insult, paranoia and violence. “It is more than a year since he actually hit me”, Mary told her husband’s publisher, Charles Scribner, in 1950. An entry in her journal for October 1951 says: “E. followed me to my bathroom and spit in my face”. The information that follows is almost as startling: “Next day he gave me $200”.
Between the youthful war hero and his bullying reflection you can fit three failed marriages, two messed-up children, five car accidents, two plane crashes (on succeeding days), one self-shooting (beside the fatal one), murderous safaris, vertiginous celebrity, precarious wealth, and a peculiar type of literary success that seemed, in his eyes, to spell “failure”. The subtitle of Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat states the terms of the battle eloquently enough, though no more so than the title of Hemingway’s last original collection of short stories, published in 1933 when he was thirty-four, in which one may still – just – catch sight of the experimental modernist he had been for ten productive years: Winner Take Nothing.
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume One: 1907–1922 covers the years of the future writer’s childhood, his schooldays, beginnings as a journalist first on the Kansas City Star and then the Toronto Star, and of course his adventure on the Italian front...
The most ruinous artifice of all was celebrity, which demanded a set of poses that masked the murmuring trauma underneath. Hemingway’s self-invention was matched by that of his third and youngest son Gregory – also known as “Gigi” – a lifelong transvestite. In November 1952, Gregory wrote to his father:
“When it’s all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons – Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centred shit, the stories or the people?”...
