A Quarter-Century Later, the Myth Endures

In 1928 Ernest Hemingway's mother mailed him a chocolate cake. Along with it she sent the .32-cal. Smith & Wesson revolver with which Hemingway's father had just killed himself. Hemingway dropped the pistol into a deep lake in Wyoming "and saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in that clear water, and then it was out of sight."

The story is minutely savage in its details and haunting in its outcome: perfect Hemingway. And of worse, there is the water. Doctoral theses have been fished from all the waters and fluids in Hemingway--lake water and trout stream and Gulf Stream and the rain after Caporetto and the endless washes of alcohol retracting in his brain. His style was a stream with the stones of nouns in it and a surface of prepositional ripples. Ford Madox Ford wrote that a Hemingway page "has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the flowing water. The words form a tesselation, each in order beside the other." It is easier to see to the bottom of the brook than to the dark cold place in the psyche where that pistol came to rest. Ernest Hemingway's books are easier to know, and love, than his life. He wrote, at his early best, a prose of powerful and brilliant simplicity. But his character was not simple. In one of his stories, he wrote: "The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man, is a man's life." The most complicated subject that he knew was Ernest Hemingway.

He was a violently cross-grained man. His life belonged as much to the history of publicity as to the history of literature. He was a splendid writer who became his own worst creation, a hoax and a bore. He ended by being one of the most famous men in the world, white-bearded Mr. Papa. He stopped observing and started performing. He sentimentalized and pontificated and lied and bullied.

Still, a long mythic fiesta between two explosions may not be a bad way to have a life. The first explosion came in Fossalta di Piave in northeastern Italy at midnight on July 8, 1918. A shell from an Austrian trench mortar punctured Hemingway with 200-odd pieces of shrapnel. The wounds validated his manhood, which they had very nearly destroyed. The second explosion came 25 years ago this summer. Early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway (suffering from diabetes, nephritis, alcoholism, severe depression, hepatitis, hypertension, impotence and paranoid delusions, his memory all but ruined by electroshock treatments) slid two shells into his double-barreled Boss shotgun. Mens morbida in corpore morbido. There was a gruesome ecology in the fact that the last creature Hemingway brought down was himself.

Hemingway was mourned mostly as a great celebrity, his worst side, and not as a great writer, which he was. The Louisville Courier-Journal wrote in an editorial: "It is almost as though the Twentieth Century itself has come to a sudden, violent, and premature end." He was a genius of self-proclamation. He made himself a representative hero. The adjectives he used did not so much describe as evaluate and tell the reader how to react: things were fine and good and true or lovely or wonderful, or else bad, in varying degrees. As the scholar Harry Levin has suggested, Hemingway sent postcards back home: "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here." He worked hard at his writing, and yet the interval between Fossalta and Ketchum was also a kind of permanent vacation: Paris, Pamplona, Africa, Key West, Havana, Wyoming. Readers chained to their jobs and mortgages and hometowns and responsibilities could pick up Hemingway and taste the wine and see the fish jump, and become Hemingway for a little while.