Hemingway’s Suicide
Like Robert Graves in the Great War, Hemingway was mistakenly reported dead—after a car crash during the London blackout in May 1944 and after two African plane crashes in January 1954—and was able to read the reports of his own death. He once remarked that surviving a war was “the next best thing to getting killed and reading your own obituary”.
In his essay “The Christmas Gift,” published soon after the African accidents in April-May 1954, he rejected the idea that he was much possessed by death and saw the skull beneath the skin. His motto was Il faut d’abord durer (“First, one must last”). He suggested that he was a survivor, and it seemed that nothing could destroy the tough guy who’d lived up to the legend of the mythical “Papa Hemingway”. “In all obituaries, or almost all, it was emphasized that I had sought death all my life,” he wrote. “Can one imagine that if a man sought death all of his life he could not have found her before the age of 54? It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her. . . . So much for the constant pursuit of death.”
In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus famously observed, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” As a volunteer and reporter Hemingway had managed through luck and skill to fend off everything that had been trying to kill him: shrapnel wounds in World War I, battles in Turkey, Spain, China and France, German submarines, raging bulls and charging lions—until he finally decided to kill himself.
In “Montparnasse”, an early poem published in Paris in 1923, Hemingway mocked the fashionable attempted suicides among the “people one knows”, who are always rescued and continue to reappear:
There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows
No successful suicides.
A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.
(They continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dôme)
A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead
(No one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)
They find a model dead.
Alone in bed and very dead.
(It made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)
Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water soapsuds and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.
Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.
In A Moveable Feast (1964), he mentioned the real suicide of Jules Pascin, his artist-friend in Paris, and suggested that it was preordained: “afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us.”
In his story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933), two waiters talk about a regular customer who was cut down before he could choke to death:
“Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.
“Why?”
“He was in despair.”
“What about?”
“Nothing.”
When the old man leaves, the compassionate waiter defines “nothing” by mocking the Lord’s Prayer to suggest the overwhelming sensation of nothingness: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name. . .”
By 1961 Hemingway himself had been severely damaged by accidents, alcoholism, physical disease, paranoia and disastrous shock treatments. He suffered from profound depression and could not write nor even speak. On July 2 he put the barrel of his shotgun against his forehead, pulled the trigger and blasted away the upper half of his head. Blood, brains, bones, teeth, hair and flesh were flung against the ceiling, walls and floor of the room. His fourth wife, Mary, who’d locked up the guns but left the keys out in the kitchen, had to step over the shattered parts of his head when she was awakened by the shot and came down the stairs to find him. I’ve been in that room and spoken to the woman who cleaned up the carnage.
In 1926 his father had also killed himself with a gunshot inside his house. Later on, Hemingway’s brother and sister committed suicide. Mary confused matters by falsely claiming that he died while cleaning his gun or in a hunting accident. But his friends did not believe her and the truth soon came out. Twenty-three writers — old companions, young disciples and future suicides pondering the possibility of their own tragic fates — were shocked by the sudden loss and the shot heard round the world. They were all eager to record their reactions, explain his character and pay homage to the work of the titanic figure.
In a strange foreshadowing of his own self-destruction, Hemingway predicted, even hoped, that James Jones would kill himself. He considered World War II his exclusive literary property and bore like the Turk no rival near the throne. After his war novel Across the River and into the Trees (1950) had been savaged by the critics, he manically attacked James Jones’ highly successful From Here to Eternity (1951). In a letter of April 12 to their mutual publisher Charles Scribner, he asked how Jones “could announce in his publicity in this year 1951 that ‘he went over the hill’ [and deserted] in 1944. Things will catch up with him and he will probably commit suicide. . . . All I hope is that you can make all the money in the world out of him before he takes the overdose of sleeping pills or whatever other exit he elects or is forced into. In the meantime, I wish him no luck at all and hope he goes out and hangs himself as soon as plausible.” Irwin Shaw, who knew both writers, noted that “Jones grappled with the ghost of Hemingway all his life, excoriating him, mocking him, worried about what Hemingway meant to him”—unable to equal or even approach his achievement.
By contrast, two old friends remembered him fondly, as he’d remembered Jules Pascin. John Dos Passos, who’d quarreled bitterly with Hemingway about politics during the Spanish Civil War, wrote to their mutual friend Sara Murphy: “Until I read of his poor death I didn’t realize how fond I’d been of the old Monster. In Madrid I found myself in places I’d been with him.” The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, a rare survivor of Stalin’s Purges, had also known Hemingway in Spain. He recalled that “Hemingway’s death meant the loss not only of a writer whom I love, but also of a man whose friendship I was proud. In my memory he lives on as a tall sturdy man with a sad expression and a vague smile.”
In his excellent memoir Dangerous Friends (1992), Hemingway’s comrade Peter Viertel recalled his response to the news and doubts about the accident. He connected it to the death of Hemingway’s father and the radical deterioration of his health. He then quoted two matadors who shared Hemingway’s code:
I’ve just heard that Hemingway had been killed in a hunting accident in Ketchum, Idaho. I was stunned. . . . Knowing how careful Hemingway had always been with weapons, I still refused to believe the news. . . . His death had been confirmed and it was believed he had committed suicide. It seemed incredible, and yet he had spoken so often of his father’s suicide that the fact that he had chosen the same fate had a frightening logic. . . . He had been unable to write or read. The shock treatments he had been submitted to at the Mayo Clinic to cure him of his deep depressions had left him a shadow of his former self.
The matadors agreed about his suicide. The old Juan Belmonte said “He hecho bien, Don Ernesto—Ernest did the right thing.” The young Antonio Ordóñez, whom Hemingway had praised in The Dangerous Summer, thought “It’s better for him, even if it’s bad for us.” The matadors, whose profession was almost suicidal, saw the positive aspects of his suicide. They believed he had the courage to overcome the fear of death and choose when to die instead of passively accepting his mental and physical collapse.
The poet Anne Sexton, who killed herself by carbon monoxide in 1974, and Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, who killed herself with cyanide in 1998, agreed with the matadors. Sexton observed: “Hemingway did the right thing. . . . To shoot himself with a gun in the mouth is the greatest act of courage I can think of. I worry about the minutes before you die, that fear of death. I don’t have it with the sleeping pills, but with a gun there’d be a minute when you’d know a terrible fear. I’d do anything to escape that fear; death would be a friend, then.” Gellhorn stated that Hemingway was “not murdering himself with hate, but simply leaving while there was time, from the empty ruins of life, because he knew—and I think rightly—that he had finished, and that what remained was going to be bleak and belittling.”
John Steinbeck, Hemingway’s old rival, also doubted that his death was accidental, and related it to the dominant idea in his work: “Although something of this sort might have been expected, I find it shocking. He had only one theme—only one. A man contends with the forces of the world, called fate, and meets them with courage. Surely a man has the right to remove his own life but you’ll find no such possibility in any of H’s heroes. The sad thing is that I think he would have hated accident much more than suicide.” In Hemingway’s story “Indian Camp,” however, an Indian kills himself after witnessing the unbearable pain of his wife in childbirth.
Like James Jones and Irwin Shaw, Norman Mailer and Nelson Algren were strongly influenced by Hemingway. Mailer missed his final illuminating word and called his suicide “the most difficult death in America since Roosevelt”: “Hemingway constituted the walls of the fort: Hemingway had given the power to believe you could still shout down the corridor of the hospital, live next to the breath of the beast, accept your portion of dread each day. Now the greatest living romantic was dead.” Algren perceptively saw his hero as a sacrificial victim who portrayed America’s tragedy in his art: “In truth, he was a broken man who had seen more loss of life than anyone should have to, and expressed in his writing, the whole buried burden of American guilt, the self-destructiveness of a people who felt their lives were being lived by somebody else.”
Anthony Burgess agreed that Hemingway had inevitably become his own casualty: “He had reached a plateau of achievement and could not move. He was paralysed and might as well be dead. To impose a melodramatic end on a failed life, he had to be his own big game.”
In Italy, Hemingway’s old friend Ezra Pound repeated the belief that the country ruined its authors, that there was something wrong with the culture as well as with the man. He’d heard about Hemingway’s death but didn’t know it was by suicide. When he learned the truth he became upset and lamented that America destroyed its best writers—including himself.
In a letter to me, using Hemingway’s famous phrase, the Catholic novelist J. F. Powers noted the decline of his literary work and related his death to his lack of religious belief: “My feeling is that his built-in shit detector wasn’t working too well at times, certainly not toward the end; actually, long before that, maybe even from the start. Still, he was great in his way. My dislike was and is mostly of his philosophy, and that is what makes his end so sad, as it failed him as it naturally would, as it’s failed everybody who ever held it.”
Like Powers, in his little-known “Elegy for Ernest Hemingway” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton contrasts the spiritual element to Hemingway’s “brave illusion.” Merton uses Latin phrases translated as “you won’t die in darkness” and “for the dead.” He alludes to Hemingway’s works: For Whom the Bell Tolls (which now tolls for him), The Sun Also Rises and—with “far country” and “forgotten war”—“In Another Country”: “In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it anymore.” As Hemingway becomes his own prey, a single shot leads the adventurer to a quick death. Though suicide is a mortal sin, nuns in convents and monks in monasteries pray for his salvation and hope for mercy.
Now for the first time on the night of your death
your name is mentioned in convents, ne cadas in
obscurum.
Now with a true bell your story becomes final. Now
men in monasteries, men of requiems, familiar with
the dead, include you in their offices.
You stand anonymous among thousands, waiting in
the dark at great stations on the edge of countries
known to prayer alone, where fires are not merciless,
we hope, and not without end.
You pass through our midst. Your books and
writing have not been consulted. Our prayers are
pro defuncto.
Yet some look up, as though among a crowd of prisoners
or displaced persons, they recognized a friend
once known in a far country. For these the sun also
rose after a forgotten war upon an idiom you made
great. They have not forgotten you. In their silence
you are still famous, no ritual shade.
How slowly this bell tolls in a monastery tower for a
whole age, and for the quick death of an unready
dynasty, and for that brave illusion: the adventurous self!
For with one shot the whole hunt is ended!
Robert Frost had helped Hemingway oppose Pound’s execution for treasonous wartime broadcasts on fascist radio, and in 1958 had cooperated with Hemingway in securing Pound’s release from his insane asylum. Thinking of his own son Carol who’d killed himself, Frost intuitively knew Hemingway’s death was not an accident and understood the dark impulses that had driven him to suicide. He felt sympathy for Hemingway and insisted that he had shown great courage by killing himself when he’d lost the ability to write. In the New York Times he praised his strength of character and his pure style: “He was rough and unsparing with himself. Fortunately for us, he gave himself time to make his greatness. His style dominated our story-telling long and short. I remember the fascination that made me want to read aloud ‘The Killers’ to everybody that came along. He was a friend I shall miss. The country is in mourning. A brave man has gone where we all must go.”
Both André Malraux and Cyril Connolly thought Hemingway was destined to die violently. Malraux alluded to Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway’s nurse in the Milan hospital in 1918, and to Adriana Ivancich, the Venetian heroine of Across the River and into the Trees: “Hemingway, throughout the curve which begins with the young man in love with an older woman, then with a younger one and ends—after God knows how many [fictional] instances of impotence and suicide—with the sixty-year-old colonel in love with a young girl, never ceased to foreshadow his own fate.” The English critic Cyril Connolly wrote admiringly in the London Sunday Times: “By the death of Ernest Hemingway we have lost a Titan: whatever judgment we make upon his books the man was of the stature of a great novelist. . . . He must have had from boyhood a preoccupation with death and violence, an imagination drawn irresistibly towards the macabre—a common attribute of genius” since the Romantic era.
Two of Hemingway’s most distinguished contemporaries took a negative view of his suicide. Edmund Wilson had been the first important critic to praise his early work. In his diary The Sixties Wilson wrote: “The death of Hemingway upset me very much. Absurd and insufferable though he often was, he was one of the foundation stones of my generation, and to have him commit suicide is to have a prop knocked out. I have now been told that his mind had been going and that he had had shock treatments in Rochester; I hear reports that he was quite demoralized and could sometimes hardly talk intelligently. But at the time I was depressed by the notion that, after encouraging writers ‘to last and get their work done,’ he should have died in such a panicky and undignified way as by blowing his head off with a shotgun. The desperation in his stories had always been real: his most convincing characters are always just a few jumps ahead of death.”
William Faulkner, critical and quite upset, considered it unmanly. His biographer wrote, “he knew that Hemingway was ill, but also felt that beneath the Hemingway persona there was another being who was neither tough nor virile. He suspected it was suicide, and felt Hemingway had constructed a fierce male exterior to shield him from whatever he was.” His illness and suicide were all linked to fears in Faulkner himself. The death of a figure like Hemingway, two years younger, when they had been bracketed for years, was deeply disturbing.
Other authors took his death personally and even feared for their own lives. As his own writing became more and more difficult, Graham Greene noted, “There were moments when I realized perfectly why Hemingway shot himself.” Christopher Isherwood, an English writer living in America, wrote in his diary: “Hemingway is dead; he probably did it deliberately, suddenly sick of it all, including his legend! No wonder. I understand senile dementia now.” John O’Hara’s biographer recorded his self-reflective response: “O’Hara was deeply affected by the death of Hemingway. After fetching a photograph showing the two of them together, he sat down and wept. He was depressed by Hemingway’s suicide because he ‘understood it so well.’ He had noted a deterioration in Hemingway and was distressed by his ‘petulant arrogance’ and his allowing himself to be familiar with his inferiors. Hemingway had everything O’Hara yearned for, including the Nobel Prize, but watching his last years, he could see the terrible destructiveness which he knew so well in himself.”
In Archibald MacLeish’s elegy, published in the Atlantic (November 1961), the past is like a film reel winding in reverse. He alludes to Anton Chekhov’s famous statement that if a gun is mentioned in the first act of a play it must go off in the last. MacLeish names three locales where Hemingway hunted, fished and lived. The Closerie (Lilac Garden) was a favorite café in Paris. The flash of life led to the flash of death, and his violent end was fatally predetermined.
Hemingway
“In some inexplicable way an accident.” Mary Hemingway
Oh, not inexplicable. Death explains,
that kind of death: rewinds remembrance
backward like a film track till the laughing man
among the lilacs, peeling the green stem,
waits for the gunshot where the play began;
rewinds those Africas and Idahos and Spains
to find the table at the Closerie des Lilas,
sticky with syrup, where the flash of joy
flamed into blackness like that flash of steel.
The gun between the teeth explains.
The shattered mouth foretells the singing boy.
John Berryman had the most personal and agonizing reaction. A suicide, like Sexton and Gellhorn, he jumped off a bridge in Minneapolis in 1972 and landed on the rocks. He had wept like O’Hara when he heard the news and exclaimed: “Hemingway’s defection bothered me; I cried; I didn’t blame him—it’s his own business—but I felt bad.” His biographer wrote: “Although no one yet knew the manner of Hemingway’s death, Berryman told a friend, ‘The poor son-of-a-bitch blew his fucking head off.’ ”
In his elegy on Hemingway, “Dream Song 235,” Berryman, another suicidal son of a suicidal father, identified with the dead man and took him as the model of the self-destructive artist. Berryman damned his father for leaving his son the fatal legacy of a disastrous youth and tragic death. He pleaded with his dead father not to pull the trigger of his gun, which would kill his love as well as himself and condemn his son to lifelong suffering:
Tears Henry shed for poor old Hemingway
Hemingway in despair, Hemingway at the end,
the end of Hemingway
tears in a diningroom in Indiana
and that was years ago, before his marriage say,
God to him no worse luck send.
Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides.
It all depends on who you’re the father of
if you want to kill yourself—
a bad example, murder of oneself,
the final death, in a paroxysm, of love
for which good mercy hides?
Mercy! my father; do not pull the trigger
or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger
killing what you began.
As Auden observed in his elegy on Yeats: “By mourning tongues / The death of the poet was kept from his poems.” Hemingway’s suicide left a great emptiness that no one else could fill. The obituaries confirmed that his work lived on and, like an extinct star, continued to radiate light long after his death.
Jeffrey Meyers has published Hemingway: The Critical Heritage (1982), Hemingway: A Biography (1985) and Hemingway: Life into Art (2000).
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