“In order to write about life, first you must live it!”
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) outlived most of his hard-drinking, hard-living contemporaries. Hell, he outwrote his buddies F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, based on his sheer amount of literary output (if not literary merit).
“You have to work hard to deserve to drink it,” Hemingway was quoted as saying in a magazine ad for Ballantine ale. “When something has been taken out of you by strenuous exercise, Ballantine puts it back in.” (His “strenuous exercise” included writing, drinking, fishing, drinking, hunting, and drinking.) There’s a world of difference between the young, thoughtful Hemingway of his days in Paris in the 1920s and the macho caricature that he played up in the beer ad. It begs the question, where did his need for macho validation come from? And at what point did he let it take over both his writing and his drinking?
Hemingway had a slightly unconventional childhood in Oak Park (a quiet Chicago suburb), at least as far as gender roles go. His mother dressed Hemingway and his sister Marceline as girls one week and as boys the next for their first two years. Additionally, Hemingway’s mother gave her son a girl’s haircut and called him “Ernestine.”
Still, he seemed like a well-adjusted, middle-class boy who spent his summers hunting, fishing, and camping at the family’s summer home in northern Michigan. Perhaps his biggest problem was with his own name, which he associated with The Importance of Being Earnest, the classic play by the effeminate Oscar Wilde.
Following high school, he became a reporter for the Kansas City Star after showing an aptitude for editing his high school newspaper and yearbook. His career was put on hold in 1918 when he responded to a Red Cross recruitment drive and enlisted as an ambulance driver in the First World War. Hemingway had been too young at the start of the war to be drafted, and he saw this as his chance to get close to the action. He was sent to Italy—“a silly front”—where he was wounded by enemy mortar fire while driving an ambulance.
According to Hemingway’s recollection, he somehow found the strength to carry other wounded men to safety some 150 yards away “with both knees shot thru” and “over two hundred flesh wounds.” In actuality, he collapsed from his shrapnel wounds before saving anyone and was carried off on a stretcher. He spent six months in recovery before returning to the United States, where he joined the Toronto Star Weekly as a U.S. correspondent and married his first of four wives.
Hemingway corresponded with Sherwood Anderson, who convinced him to move to Paris. The exchange rate was favorable for Americans, and many interesting literary and artistic characters were beginning to congregate there, including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso. Hemingway was introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris in 1924, and the two went on to have a long, tortured relationship with many ups and downs. It was also during these early years in Paris that Hemingway went to Spain to see his first bullfight, a spectacle that became associated with his name over the years thanks to his treatise on the sport, Death in the Afternoon. Bullfighting, he believed, was “of great tragic interest, being literally a matter of life and death.” After being blown away by The Great Gatsby, Hemingway decided that he had to write a novel of his own. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926 to critical acclaim. In a letter to Fitzgerald, Hemingway joked that he would subtitle his book A Greater Gatsby, as a nod to his friend for inspiring him.
It was also around this time that his personal life began to unravel. In January of the next year, he divorced his wife. He had been seeing another woman and married her that May. It was a sequence of events he would repeat several times, as if he were caught in a time loop and forced to relive his doomed relationships over and over. As Sir James Goldsmith once quipped, “When a man marries his mistress, it creates a vacancy.”
Hemingway left Paris in 1928 for Key West, Florida. It was a bittersweet homecoming: later that year, his father committed suicide. “I’ll probably go the same way,” Hemingway told his sister.
In the 1930s, Hemingway “began to drink more compulsively than ever, especially those double frozen daiquiris at the Florida bar in Havana,” his friend Tom Dardis wrote. “He set the house record for the number of these consumed in a single drinking session.” Hemingway even imported absinthe from Cuba. In a 1931 letter to a friend, he wrote, “Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks.” The drinking didn’t interfere with his writing, though: “I have spent all my life drinking, but since writing is my true love I never get the two things mixed up,” he confided to his friend A. E. Hotchner.
The drinking still took a toll, as Hemingway’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He seethed with anger when a critic, Max Eastman, gave a less than enthusiastic review to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon in 1932. When Hemingway ran into Eastman some years later in the offices of editor Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway ripped open his own shirt to show Eastman that he was a real man (because real men have hair on their chests, obviously). He stuffed a copy of the offending review in Eastman’s face and wrestled him to the ground.
Hemingway bragged in the press about his hunting expeditions—he once killed four hundred rabbits in one day, allegedly—and Vanity Fair even printed a collection of Hemingway paper dolls in 1934, featuring interchangeable matador, caveman, bon vivant, fisherman, and soldier outfits. Zelda Fitzgerald was not a fan. He’s “all bullfighting and bullshit,” she said.
Somewhere beneath Hemingway’s impenetrable machismo was a well-hidden sadness. In his short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” one of his characters asks, “What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing and a man was nothing too. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many just have it.” Hemingway tried to use common sense and intelligence to battle the darkness, but was it enough? “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” Hemingway once admitted.
Perhaps nothing frightened Hemingway more than the opposite sex. Still, he had the time and inclination to marry four different women. “Only one marriage I regret,” Hemingway told Dardis. “I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, ‘What will you have, sir?’ And I said, ‘A glass of hemlock.’ ”
Of course, he couldn’t stay away from women for very long. “When I was young I never wanted to get married, but after I did, I could never be without a wife again. Same about kids. I never wanted any, but after I had one, I never wanted to be without them.”
In 1940, he published his most famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. After a decade during which he had published only one novel (To Have and Have Not), his new book was the big fish that his publishers—and the public—had been waiting for. It sold more than half a million copies within a matter of months.
Next, Hemingway covered World War II as a journalist. He was present at the liberation of Paris and received a Bronze Star for having been “under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions.”
Despite the professional successes, his personal life was in turmoil. His drinking finally began to catch up with him: he put on a great deal of weight, and was diagnosed with diabetes. Many of his friends passed away during the 1940s, including Fitzgerald in 1940; Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce in 1941; Gertrude Stein in 1946; and Max Perkins, his longtime editor, in 1947.
Things seemingly turned around in the 1950s with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. But as soon as he returned to form in such a public fashion, death knocked at his door. In 1954, he was involved in two plane crashes over as many days on an African safari. He walked away from the first crash relatively uninjured, but he wasn’t so lucky the next day.
“His injuries from the second crash included a ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, two cracked vertebrae, paralysis of the sphincter muscle and various third-degree burns,” Dardis wrote. “But worst was the skull fracture incurred while butting his way out of the broken door of the plane after the crash. This was the most serious of all his concussions, and its aftereffects continued for years.” Hemingway stumbled to a nearby bar to recuperate from his injuries.
Hemingway retired to Cuba, where his drinking continued to cause him health problems. “If you keep on drinking this way you won’t even be able to write your name,” his principal physician, Dr. Herrera Sotolongo, warned him. There was, of course, no way Hemingway was going to give up alcohol. “Drinking was as natural as eating and to me as necessary,” he wrote in A Moveable Feast.
In 1955, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature for The Old Man and the Sea. He cut off his acceptance speech at two minutes, however, because “I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say, and not speak it.” He was praised as an elder statesman by new talents on the literary scene, such as Norman Mailer, who even urged the Democrats to draft Hemingway for president in 1956.
The recognition was bittersweet: words became harder and harder for Hemingway in his alcoholic haze. He thought often of putting the pen down for good. “Unlike your baseball player and your prizefighter and your matador, how does a writer retire?” he asked A. E. Hotchner. “No one accepts that his legs are shot or the whiplash gone from his reflexes. Everywhere he goes, he hears the same damn question: What are you working on?”
What Hemingway was working on, it turned out, was an exit strategy.
How did Hemingway outlive so many of his contemporaries? As Fitzgerald noted early on in their friendly rivalry, “Ernest is quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.”
Hemingway’s megalomania reached a paranoid fever pitch in 1960. “It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell,” Hemingway told Hotchner while they were riding in a friend’s car through Idaho, where he’d moved a year earlier. “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.”
He saw FBI agents everywhere. As he and Hotchner drove past a bank after midnight, he asked his friend to pull over to the side of the road. Hemingway pointed at two bank employees working inside the office. “Auditors,” he said. “The FBI’s got them going over my account.” Later during Hotchner’s visit, Hemingway cut a dinner short after allegedly seeing two FBI agents at the bar.
The paranoia bothered his wife and friends, but what could they do? Hemingway was as productive as ever. He was working on a manuscript that would be published as A Moveable Feast, as well as on a 90,000-plus-word profile of two matadors for Life. However, “he often spoke of destroying himself and would sometimes stand at the gun rack, holding one of the guns, staring out the window,” Hotchner wrote.
In December 1960, Hemingway underwent eleven electric shock treatments at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. The treatments failed to have any noticeable effect on Hemingway’s visions. “In January he called me,” Hotchner wrote. “His delusions had not changed or diminished. His room was bugged, and the phone was tapped. He suspected that one of the interns was a Fed.” A second round of shock therapy that June similarly had no effect.
Hemingway eventually believed that Hotchner had “turned” on him and accused his friend of “pumping him” for information to feed to the FBI. “This man, who had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid—afraid that the FBI was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option,” Hotchner wrote.
However, to quote the movie version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Decades later, Hemingway’s friends and family learned that at the heart of Hemingway’s paranoia lay a kernel of truth: “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,” Hotchner wrote. “In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.”
One of Hemingway’s favorite sayings was, “Man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” But when Hemingway loaded his shotgun for the last time on July 2, 1961, he was both destroyed and defeated. The man who had once said, “I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won’t kill myself,” had finally reached the end of his line.
Should blame be laid at the feet of the FBI agents who were indeed monitoring Hemingway’s actions? To find the answer, one need only look at the long list of other suicides in Hemingway’s family: his father, Clarence; his sister, Ursula; his brother, Leicester; and his granddaughter, model Margaux Hemingway.
Countless writers have been inspired by Hemingway to pick up a pint and a pen at the same time. Horror writer Stephen King rationalized his drinking with what he calls “the Hemingway Defense.” As articulated in King’s memoir, On Writing, the Hemingway defense goes something like this: “As a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.”