After the news spread, there was every kind of speculation about Hemingway’s death.1 It just did not make sense to anyone apart from a handful of insiders, especially after Mary put out the story that something had gone wrong while he was cleaning one of his guns. He had handled firearms all his life. How could the man who had taken so many risks—who had been on the front lines in three wars—die by accident in his own home? Emmett Watson, the journalist from Seattle who had scooped his rivals on Hemingway and Castro, made it his job to find out.
When Watson got to Ketchum, he felt like “every writer on earth was already there” to cover the funeral. Teaming up with another reporter, he worked Ketchum the way he would the backstreets of his hometown, avoiding the prominent citizens but interviewing everyone else “from bartenders, to . . . hunting pals, to maids, to waitresses, to his typist” to uncover the truth.2 “Hemingway’s Death Is Suicide” ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on July 7 with the kind of details that would settle arguments.3
But Watson could not explain why the man who admonished us first to endure—one of his favorite sayings was “il faut d’abord durer”—would take his own life.
His many friends and readers began to search for the facts that would help them to understand Hemingway’s death. Could it have been an incurable illness, perhaps something rare like hemochromatosis? Was there an old war wound that would not heal? Perhaps there had been trouble with Mary, or a financial crisis? And how much did the loss of the Finca contribute?
Over the years, a kind of consensus emerged: no one thing had driven this supremely talented man to suicide.4 It was more complicated, and less satisfying, than that. Depression—what he called the “black ass”—had stalked him for much of his life, and gotten worse as time went on. Originally a simple pleasure, drinking became a complication, a multiplier of demons. Old age came early—and forcefully—for him, ushered in by the many accidents that had befallen him since the 1920s. The Cuban Revolution was at first an uplifting tonic and then another depressing complication; by 1961 there was little hope of resuming his life in Cuba or even seeing his beloved Finca again.
He could not even keep hold of his memories. Up to now, they had filled his mind and found new life in his short stories and novels. But the electroshock treatments at Mayo made him foggy, and took away the clarity for which he was famous. Without his memories he doubted he would ever be able to write again.
In 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary, A. E. Hotchner reopened the bidding about Hemingway’s death. This considerably younger but still intimate friend, witness to events in the last months of Hemingway’s life, advanced yet another theory that he called “Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds.”5 After reviewing the well-known explanations, Hotchner focused on the depression and paranoia that were part of the writer’s life for most days in the 1950s. Hotchner wrote about the biographers who had portrayed Hemingway’s obsessive worries about the FBI as delusions, and then about the file that the FBI had released in the 1980s in response to a claim under the Freedom of Information Act.
According to Hotchner, the file showed that Hemingway had not been wrong about the Bureau. Granted, the first entries date back to 1942, and are about the Crook Factory and the wartime hunt for fascists in Cuba. But, per Hotchner, the Bureau did not forget Hemingway when the war was over: “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.”6 The FBI may have tapped the phone outside his room after all. Hotchner concluded that Hemingway had sensed the surveillance, and that it “substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.”7
It is now clear that Hotchner understood Hemingway’s state of mind better than he understood the Bureau’s intent. A close reading of his FBI file shows that Hemingway was never under surveillance.8 The FBI did not take the first step: the file opens with the ambassador’s decision to use Hemingway to run an amateur counterintelligence bureau. The embassy announces the plan, and the Bureau reacts. First Hoover wants to know about the writer’s background, and then he wants, above all, to avoid any unpleasant surprises that could embarrass the organization he had created in his own image.
At odd intervals in the years that followed, the Bureau continued to collect information on Hemingway that happened to come its way, sometimes from the writer himself, sometimes from other branches of the government, like the Department of State. A few entries were from newspapers. One or two reports came from confidential informants who met Hemingway socially and reported their impressions secretly to Hoover’s men. Some of what they reported made the director worry that Hemingway might be writing a book that would cast him and his agents in a bad light. But he did not suspect Hemingway of any crimes, and the Bureau did not launch a formal investigation into his activities. Its agents did not tap his phones, open his mail, or follow him. In 1961, Hemingway’s doctor brought the FBI in on his patient’s case, not the other way around.9
The Bureau’s hypothesis about Hemingway was always that he was not a communist, but simply a hard-core antifascist. Even after his death, Mary wanted to make sure that did not change. In 1964, after the Cuban post office issued a commemorative Hemingway stamp, Mary took the trouble to ask the journalist Quentin Reynolds to pass a message to Hoover. She wanted him to know that no one in the family had authorized the stamp, or supported the Cuban Revolution. Hemingway had welcomed Castro for ousting the right-wing dictator Batista. But “[h]e didn’t know Castro well. Mary [said] he met Castro at a fishing party and talked to him for five minutes—period.”10 Hoover accepted the information at face value, writing and signing a memo for the file, his last known word on the case: “Knowing Hemingway as I did, I doubt he had any communist leanings. He was a rough, tough guy & always for the underdog.”11
No matter how the Bureau viewed Hemingway, Hotchner is right that Hemingway was anxious about the Bureau. Hoover and his agents knew only a little about the various “subversive” activities in the writer’s past, and nothing about his meetings with the NKVD. They did not hound Hemingway to death. But he was never able to forget what he did for the causes he cared about—especially his own brand of antifascism and his support for Castro—and fretted that his actions had put him on the Bureau’s radar. His obsessive worry about government surveillance deepened his depression and made his final illness worse. He could not rest, “knowing” that federal agents were coming to arrest him for crimes that were not entirely imaginary.
This lifelong rebel resented the authority they represented. Just as he was for the underdog, Hemingway was against anyone who (he thought) was an instrument of oppression. From 1937 until the end of his life, he did everything he could to fight fascism, especially the virulent European strains. Theirs was the worst kind of authority, not only oppressing the underdog but also stifling the arts. The militant writer attacked American and British politicians who did not share his agenda, and he saw traces of fascism in American institutions, like the FBI and HUAC. In Cuba he passionately supported the revolutionaries against the established order and once again found that his own government’s agenda was different from his.
He especially resented government intrusion into his private life. From 1942 on, this naturally conspiratorial man worried he was under some kind of surveillance. He pushed back when he thought the FBI was undermining his work at the Crook Factory and was angry when he learned that wartime censors in Miami were reading his mail. In 1944, he could barely bring himself to answer the Army inspector general who questioned him about being a fighter instead of a reporter at Rambouillet. He hated having to lie about the record that showed he had been a part of the action, not just an observer.
During the early years of the Cold War, he worried even more about what the government might have in store for him, to the point where it made him think twice about what he was writing and publishing. The man who had “honestly and undauntedly” reproduced “the hard countenance of the age” in the 1930s took to censoring himself in the 1950s.12
Hemingway said the government was watching him because it viewed him as untrustworthy because he had been a “pre-mature anti-fascist.” He never mentioned the best reason the government might have had to watch him: this premature antifascist had signed up with the NKVD. That he had never actually spied for the Soviets was immaterial; good people were hauled up in front of committees for far less during the McCarthy years. It was far from unreasonable for him to worry that his secret could derail his career.
Writing, Hemingway told the Nobel committee, was a lonely life. He might have added that secrets can make a writer even lonelier. He could have lightened his burden by sharing it, but he almost certainly did not. In his letters he stopped short of telling the whole truth to Lanham, the man he trusted most, and likely said even less to Gellhorn, Mary, or Hotchner. He certainly revealed nothing to the federal government or to the public. The cost of isolating himself—of locking up his explosive secret—was dire; worry descended into obsession and delusion.
Could this chapter of the Hemingway biography have ended differently? Many former communists, like his acquaintance Koestler, openly turned their backs on “the God that failed.”13 More than one American who spied for the NKVD walked into the nearest FBI office and told the agents everything he (or she) knew, and then spoke out against Comrade Stalin. For some it was cathartic, a good way to come in out of the cold. But Hemingway could not renounce communism, because he had not been a communist, and he could not imagine how to tell the complicated story of his relationship with the NKVD in a way that would make sense to anyone willing to listen. Besides, his makeup made it difficult for him to turn on his former allies; he detested “stool pigeons” and “turncoats.”
Ambassador Bonsal suggested one way out in the summer of 1960: go back to the United States and speak out against Castro’s excesses. This would put him right with America. But that too was a near-impossible choice. Hemingway had not given up on the Cuban Revolution. Longer than other Americans, he nurtured hopes for its future and he could not bring himself to denounce a guerrilla chieftain who had carried a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls in his rucksack and overthrown a right-wing dictator.
Hemingway did not share much with Bonsal during their last meeting at the Finca. He said a few words about his love for America and his attachment to Cuba. While he understood what the ambassador was telling him, he did not go on to say that he still planned to continue living by his own rules—as he had for most of his life. Living by his own rules had enabled him to create a wonderful, pioneering body of work. He had, almost single-handedly, changed the way Americans looked at the world and wrote about what they saw and felt.
Living by his own rules allowed him to take risks that were not just restricted to writing. Between 1937 and 1960, he was deeply engaged in politics and intrigue, first for the Spanish Republic, then with the Soviets, and next for his own country during World War II. After the Cold War started, he lowered his political profile in America, but he was hardly a passive observer of events in Cuba during the 1950s.
From the day he saw the bodies of the veterans strewn on a Florida beach in 1935, the political Hemingway was almost as active and independent as the literary Hemingway. For the most part, he worked on his own and did what he thought needed to be done, seizing opportunities as they came along, as he did when he met the NKVD recruiter Golos in 1940. He thought he could make his own foreign policy. Like other powerful men who have become spies, he believed that he could control his relationships with the Soviet—and American—intelligence bureaus. He was only partly right. Surprisingly good at this, his second career, he was not the expert he thought he was. The ultimate professional when it came to writing, in politics and intrigue he was a gifted but overconfident amateur. Until it was too late, he did not pause to consider the costs he would one day have to pay for his secret adventures.