Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb just west of Chicago,[2] to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. His parents were well-educated and well-respected in Oak Park,[3] a conservative community about which resident Frank Lloyd Wright said, "So many churches for so many good people to go to."[4] When Clarence and Grace Hemingway married in 1896, they lived with Grace's father, Ernest Miller Hall,[5] after whom they named their first son, the second of their six children.[3] His sister Marcelline preceded him in 1898, and his younger siblings included Ursula in 1902, Madelaine in 1904, Carol in 1911, and Leicester in 1915.[3] Grace followed the Victorian convention of not differentiating children's clothing by gender. With only a year separating the two, Ernest and Marcelline resembled one-another strongly. Grace wanted them to appear as twins, so in Ernest's first three years she kept his hair long and dressed both children in similarly frilly feminine clothing.[6]

Hemingway's mother was a well-known local musician,[7] and taught her reluctant son to play the cello. Later he said music lessons contributed to his writing style, as evidenced in the "contrapuntal structure" of For Whom the Bell Tolls.[8] As an adult Hemingway professed to hate his mother, although they shared similar enthusiastic energies.[7] Each summer the family traveled to Windemere on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan. Ernest joined his father and learned to hunt, fish and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan, early experiences that instilled a life-long passion for outdoor adventure and living in remote or isolated areas.[9]

He attended Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park between 1913 and 1917. He was an accomplished athlete, and competed in boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. He performed in the school orchestra for two years with his sister Marcelline, and received good grades in English classes.[7] During his last two years at high school he edited the Trapeze and Tabula (the school's newspaper and yearbook), where he imitated the language of sportswriters and used the pen name Ring Lardner Jr.—a nod to Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune whose byline was "Line O'Type".[10] Like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist. After leaving high school, he went to work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter.[10] Although he stayed there for only six months, he relied on the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing, such as "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."[11]

World War I

In December 1917, after being rejected by the U.S. Army for poor eyesight,[12] Hemingway responded to an International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement recruitment effort and signed on to be an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross Motor Corps in Italy.[13] In May 1918, he sailed from New York, and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery.[14] That June he arrived at the Italian Front. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion to join rescuers retrieving the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his 1932 non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments."[15] A few days later, he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave.[15]

On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line.[15] Despite his wounds, Hemingway assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he was decorated with the Italian War Merit Cross, the Croce al Merito di Guerra.[note 1][16] He was still only 18 at the time. Hemingway later said of the incident: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you ... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you."[17] He sustained severe shrapnel wounds to both legs, underwent an immediate operation at a distribution center, and spent five days at a field hospital before he was transferred for recuperation to the Red Cross hospital in Milan.[18] He spent six months at the hospital, where he met and formed a strong friendship with "Chink" Dorman-Smith that lasted for decades and shared a room with future American foreign service officer, ambassador, and author Henry Serrano Villard.[19]

While recuperating he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. When Hemingway returned to the United States in January 1919, he believed Agnes would join him within months and the two would marry. Instead, he received a letter in March with her announcement that she was engaged to an Italian officer. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes Agnes's rejection devastated and scarred the young man; in future relationships, Hemingway followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him.[20]

Hemingway returned home early in 1919 to a time of readjustment. Before the age of 20, he had gained from the war a maturity that was at odds with living at home without a job and with the need for recuperation.[21] As Reynolds explains, "Hemingway could not really tell his parents what he thought when he saw his bloody knee." He was not able to tell them how scared he had been "in another country with surgeons who could not tell him in English if his leg was coming off or not."[22]

In September, he took a fishing and camping trip with high school friends to the back-country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.[17] The trip became the inspiration for his short story "Big Two-Hearted River", in which the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams takes to the country to find solitude after returning from war.[23] A family friend offered him a job in Toronto, and with nothing else to do, he accepted. Late that year he began as a freelancer and staff writer for the Toronto Star Weekly. He returned to Michigan the following June[21] and then moved to Chicago in September 1920 to live with friends, while still filing stories for the Toronto Star.[24] In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth, where he met novelist Sherwood Anderson.[24]

When St. Louis native Hadley Richardson came to Chicago to visit the sister of Hemingway's roommate, Hemingway became infatuated. He later claimed, "I knew she was the girl I was going to marry."[25] Hadley, red-haired, with a "nurturing instinct", was eight years older than Hemingway.[25] Despite the age difference, Hadley, who had grown up with an overprotective mother, seemed less mature than usual for a young woman her age.[26] Bernice Kert, author of The Hemingway Women, claims Hadley was "evocative" of Agnes, but that Hadley had a childishness that Agnes lacked. The two corresponded for a few months and then decided to marry and travel to Europe.[25] They wanted to visit Rome, but Sherwood Anderson convinced them to visit Paris instead, writing letters of introduction for the young couple.[27] They were married on September 3, 1921; two months later Hemingway was hired as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and the couple left for Paris. Of Hemingway's marriage to Hadley, Meyers claims: "With Hadley, Hemingway achieved everything he had hoped for with Agnes: the love of a beautiful woman, a comfortable income, a life in Europe."[28]

Paris

Anderson suggested Paris so that Hemingway could meet the American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, the Irish novelist James Joyce, the American poet Ezra Pound (who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career"[27]) and other writers. Hemingway was then a "tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man."[29] He and Hadley lived in a small walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter, and he worked in a rented room in a nearby building.[27] Stein, who was the bastion of modernism in Paris,[30] became Hemingway's mentor and godmother to his son Jack;[31] she introduced him to the expatriate artists and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter, whom she referred to as the "Lost Generation"—a term Hemingway popularized with the publication of The Sun Also Rises.[32] A regular at Stein's salon, Hemingway met influential painters such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris.[33] He eventually withdrew from Stein's influence, and their relationship deteriorated into a literary quarrel that spanned decades.[34]

Pound was older than Hemingway by 14 years when they met by chance at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company in 1922. They visited Italy in 1923 and lived on the same street in 1924.[29] The two forged a strong friendship; in Hemingway Pound recognized and fostered a young talent.[33] Pound—who had just finished editing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land—introduced Hemingway to the Irish writer James Joyce,[29] with whom Hemingway frequently embarked on "alcoholic sprees".[35] During his first 20 months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the Toronto Star newspaper.[36] He covered the Greco-Turkish War, where he witnessed the burning of Smyrna, and wrote travel pieces such as "Tuna Fishing in Spain" and "Trout Fishing All Across Europe: Spain Has the Best, Then Germany".[37]

Hemingway was devastated on learning that Hadley had lost a suitcase filled with his manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon as she was traveling to Geneva to meet him in December 1922.[38] In the following September the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. During their absence, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published. Two of the stories it contained were all that remained after the loss of the suitcase, and the third had been written early the previous year in Italy. Within months a second volume, in our time (without capitals), was published. The small volume included six vignettes and a dozen stories Hemingway had written the previous summer during his first visit to Spain, where he discovered the thrill of the corrida. He missed Paris, considered Toronto boring, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life of a journalist.[39]

Hemingway, Hadley, and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924 and moved into an apartment on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs.[39] Hemingway helped Ford Madox Ford edit The Transatlantic Review, which published works by Pound, John Dos Passos, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Stein, as well as some of Hemingway's own early stories such as "Indian Camp".[40] When In Our Time was published in 1925, the dust jacket bore comments from Ford.[41][42] "Indian Camp" received considerable praise; Ford saw it as an important early story by a young writer,[43] and critics in the United States praised Hemingway for reinvigorating the short story genre with his crisp style and use of declarative sentences.[44] Six months earlier, Hemingway had met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the pair formed a friendship of "admiration and hostility".[45] Fitzgerald had published The Great Gatsby the same year: Hemingway read it, liked it, and decided his next work had to be a novel.[46]

With his wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, in 1923, where he became fascinated by bullfighting.[47] The Hemingways returned to Pamplona in 1924 and a third time in June 1925; that year they brought with them a group of American and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, Donald Ogden Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden (recently divorced), her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb.[48] A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (July 21), he began to write the draft of what would become The Sun Also Rises, finishing eight weeks later.[49] A few months later, in December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer, who was from a wealthy Catholic family in Arkansas and had moved to Paris to work for Vogue magazine where she met the Hemingways, joined them in January. Against Hadley's advice, Pfeiffer urged Hemingway to sign a contract with Scribner's. He left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with the publishers and, on his return, began an affair with Pfeiffer during a stop in Paris, before returning to Schruns to finish the revisions in March.[50] The manuscript arrived in New York in April; he corrected the final proof in Paris in August 1926, and Scribner's published the novel in October.[49][51][52]

The Sun Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation,[53] received good reviews and is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work".[54] Hemingway himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.[55]

Hemingway's marriage to Hadley deteriorated as he was working on The Sun Also Rises.[52] In early 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pfeiffer, who came to Pamplona with them that July.[56][57] On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a separation; in November she formally requested a divorce. They split their possessions while Hadley accepted Hemingway's offer of the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises.[58] The couple were divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married Pfeiffer in May.[59]

Before his marriage to Pfeiffer, Hemingway converted to Catholicism.[60] They honeymooned in Le Grau-du-Roi, where he contracted anthrax, and he planned his next collection of short stories,[61] Men Without Women, which was published in October 1927,[62] and included his boxing story "Fifty Grand". Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands ... the best prize-fight story I ever read ... a remarkable piece of realism."[63]

By the end of the year Pauline was pregnant and wanted to move back to America. John Dos Passos recommended Key West, and they left Paris in March 1928. Hemingway suffered a severe injury in their Paris bathroom when he pulled a skylight down on his head thinking he was pulling on a toilet chain. This left him with a prominent forehead scar, which he carried for the rest of his life. When Hemingway was asked about the scar, he was reluctant to answer.[64] After his departure from Paris, Hemingway "never again lived in a big city".[65]

Key West and the Caribbean

Hemingway traveled with Pauline to Kansas City, Missouri, where their son Patrick was born on June 28, 1928. Pauline had a difficult delivery; he wrote a fictionalized version of the event as a part of A Farewell to Arms. After Patrick's birth, they traveled to Wyoming, Massachusetts, and New York.[66] He was in New York with Bumby and about to board a train to Florida, when on December 6, 1928 he received a cable telling him that his father Clarence had killed himself.[note 2][67] Hemingway was devastated, having earlier written to his father telling him not to worry about financial difficulties; the letter arrived minutes after the suicide. He realized how Hadley must have felt after her own father's suicide in 1903, and said, "I'll probably go the same way."[68]

Upon his return to Key West in December, Hemingway worked on the draft of A Farewell to Arms before leaving for France in January. He had finished it in August but delayed the revision. The serialization in Scribner's Magazine was scheduled for May, but as late as April, he was still working on the ending, which may have been rewritten as many as seventeen times. The completed novel was published on September 27.[69] Biographer James Mellow believes A Farewell to Arms established Hemingway's stature as a major American writer and displayed a level of complexity not apparent in The Sun Also Rises. (The story was turned into a play by war veteran Laurence Stallings that was the basis for the film starring Gary Cooper.)[70] In Spain in mid-1929, Hemingway researched his next work, Death in the Afternoon. He wanted to write a comprehensive treatise on bullfighting, explaining the toreros and corridas complete with glossaries and appendices, because he believed bullfighting was "of great tragic interest, being literally of life and death."[71]

During the early 1930s, Hemingway spent his winters in Key West and summers in Wyoming, where he found "the most beautiful country he had seen in the American West" and hunted deer, elk, and grizzly bear.[72] He was joined there by Dos Passos, and in November 1930, after bringing Dos Passos to the train station in Billings, Montana, Hemingway broke his arm in a car accident. The surgeon tended the compound spiral fracture and bound the bone with kangaroo tendon. Hemingway was hospitalized for seven weeks, with Pauline tending to him; the nerves in his writing hand took as long as a year to heal, during which time he suffered intense pain.[73]

His third child, Gloria Hemingway, was born a year later on November 12, 1931, in Kansas City as "Gregory Hancock Hemingway".[74][note 3] Pauline's uncle bought the couple a house in Key West with a carriage house, the second floor of which was converted into a writing studio.[75] While in Key West, Hemingway frequented the local bar Sloppy Joe's.[76] He invited friends—including Waldo Peirce, Dos Passos, and Max Perkins[77]—to join him on fishing trips and on an all-male expedition to the Dry Tortugas. Meanwhile, he continued to travel to Europe and to Cuba, and—although in 1933 he wrote of Key West, "We have a fine house here, and kids are all well"—Mellow believes he "was plainly restless".[78]

In 1933, Hemingway and Pauline went on safari to Kenya. The 10-week trip provided material for Green Hills of Africa, as well as for the short stories "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber".[79] The couple visited Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in Kenya; then moved on to Tanganyika Territory, where they hunted in the Serengeti, around Lake Manyara, and west and southeast of present-day Tarangire National Park. Their guide was the noted "white hunter" Philip Percival who had guided Theodore Roosevelt on his 1909 safari. During these travels, Hemingway contracted amoebic dysentery that caused a prolapsed intestine, and he was evacuated by plane to Nairobi, an experience reflected in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". On Hemingway's return to Key West in early 1934, he began work on Green Hills of Africa, which he published in 1935 to mixed reviews.[80]

He purchased a boat in 1934, naming it the Pilar, and began to sail the Caribbean.[81] He arrived at Bimini in 1935, where he spent a considerable amount of time.[79] During this period he worked on To Have and Have Not, published in 1937 while he was in Spain, which became the only novel he wrote during the 1930s.[82]

Spanish Civil War

In 1937, Hemingway traveled for Spain to cover its Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), despite Pauline's reluctance to have him work in a war zone.[83] Both he and Dos Passos signed on work with the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens as screenwriters for the anti-fascist film The Spanish Earth released that year.[84] Dos Passos left the project after the execution of José Robles, his friend and Spanish translator,[85] which caused a rift between the two.[86]

Hemingway was accompanied by the journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, whom he had met in Key West a year earlier. Like Hadley, Martha was a St. Louis native and, like Pauline, had worked for Vogue in Paris. According to Kert, Martha "never catered to him the way other women did".[87] In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress which opened in Valencia. The congress was arranged to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war, and was attended by many other writers including André Malraux, Stephen Spender and Pablo Neruda.[88] While in Madrid with Martha late in 1937, Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, as the city was being bombarded by the Francoist army.[89] He returned to Key West for a few months, and returned to Spain twice in 1938, where he was present at the Battle of the Ebro, the last republican stand, and was among the British and American journalists who among the last to leave the battle as they crossed the river.[90][91]

Cuba

In early 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. This was the separation phase of a slow and painful split from Pauline, which began when Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn.[92] Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they rented "Finca Vigía" ("Lookout Farm"), a 15-acre (61,000 m2) property 15 miles (24 km) from Havana. Pauline and the children left Hemingway that summer, after the family was reunited during a visit to Wyoming; when his divorce from Pauline was finalized, he and Martha were married on November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.[93]

Hemingway moved his primary summer residence to Ketchum, Idaho, just outside the newly built resort of Sun Valley, and moved his winter residence to Cuba.[94] He had been disgusted when a Parisian friend allowed his cats to eat from the table, but he became enamored of cats in Cuba and kept dozens of them on the property.[95] Descendants of his cats live at his Key West home.

Gellhorn inspired him to write his most famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he began in March 1939 and finished in July 1940. It was published in October 1940.[96] His pattern was to move around while working on a manuscript, and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Cuba, Wyoming, and Sun Valley.[92] It became a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and, in the words of Meyers, "triumphantly re-established Hemingway's literary reputation".[97]

In January 1941, Martha was sent to China on assignment for Collier's magazine.[98] Hemingway went with her, sending in dispatches for the newspaper PM, but in general he disliked China.[98]

A 2009 book by former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev suggests during that period he may have been recruited to work for NKVD "on ideological grounds" under the code name "Argo".[99][100]

They returned to Cuba before the declaration of war by the United States that December, when he convinced the Cuban government to help him refit the Pilar, which he intended to use to ambush German submarines off the coast of Cuba.[17]

World War II

Hemingway was in Europe from May 1944 to March 1945. When he arrived in London, he met Time magazine correspondent Mary Welsh, with whom he became infatuated. Martha had been forced to cross the Atlantic in a ship filled with explosives because Hemingway refused to help her get a press pass on a plane, and she arrived in London to find him hospitalized with a concussion from a car accident. She was unsympathetic to his plight; she accused him of being a bully and told him that she was "through, absolutely finished".[101] The last time that Hemingway saw Martha was in March 1945 as he prepared to return to Cuba;[102] their divorce was finalized later that year.[101] Meanwhile, he had asked Mary Welsh to marry him on their third meeting.[101]

Hemingway accompanied the troops to the Normandy Landings wearing a large head bandage, but he was considered "precious cargo" and not allowed ashore.[103] The landing craft came within sight of Omaha Beach before coming under enemy fire and turning back. Hemingway later wrote in Collier's that he could see "the first, second, third, fourth and fifth waves of [landing troops] lay where they had fallen, looking like so many heavily laden bundles on the flat pebbly stretch between the sea and first cover".[104] Mellow explains that, on that first day, none of the correspondents were allowed to land and Hemingway was returned to the Dorothea Dix.[105] Late in July, he attached himself to "the 22nd Infantry Regiment commanded by Col. Charles "Buck" Lanham, as it drove toward Paris", and Hemingway became de facto leader to a small band of village militia in Rambouillet outside of Paris.[106] Paul Fussell remarks: "Hemingway got into considerable trouble playing infantry captain to a group of Resistance people that he gathered because a correspondent is not supposed to lead troops, even if he does it well."[17] This was in fact in contravention of the Geneva Convention, and Hemingway was brought up on formal charges; he said that he "beat the rap" by claiming that he only offered advice.[107]

He was present at the liberation of Paris on August 25th; however contrary to legend, he was not the first into the city nor did he liberate the Ritz.[108] While there, he visited Sylvia Beach and met Picasso with Mary Welsh, and in a spirit of happiness, forgave Gertrude Stein.[109] Later that year, he observed heavy fighting at the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.[108] On December 17, 1944, he traveled to Luxembourg. In spite of illness, to report on The Battle of the Bulge. As soon as he arrived, however, Lanham referred him to the doctors, who hospitalized him with pneumonia; he recovered a week later, but most of the fighting was over.[107] He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery in 1947, in recognition for having been "under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions".[17]

Cuba and the Nobel Prize

Hemingway said he "was out of business as a writer" from 1942 to 1945 during his residence in Cuba.[110] In 1946 he married Mary, who had an ectopic pregnancy five months later. The Hemingway family suffered a series of accidents and health problems in the years following the war: in a 1945 car accident, he "smashed his knee" and sustained another "deep wound on his forehead"; Mary broke first her right ankle and then her left in successive skiing accidents. A 1947 car accident left Patrick with a head wound and severely ill.[111] Hemingway sank into depression as his literary friends began to die: in 1939 William Butler Yeats and Ford Madox Ford; in 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald; in 1941 Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce; in 1946 Gertrude Stein; and the following year in 1947, Max Perkins, Hemingway's long-time Scribner's editor, and friend.[112] During this period, he suffered from severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and eventually diabetes—much of which was the result of previous accidents and many years of heavy drinking.[113] Nonetheless, in January 1946, he began work on The Garden of Eden, finishing 800 pages by June.[114][note 4] During the post-war years, he also began work on a trilogy tentatively titled "The Land", "The Sea" and "The Air", which he wanted to combine in one novel titled The Sea Book. However, both projects stalled and according to Mellow his inability to continue was "a symptom of his troubles" during these years.[115][note 5]

In 1948, Hemingway and Mary traveled to Europe, staying in Venice for several months. While there, Hemingway fell in love with the then 19-year-old Adriana Ivancich. The platonic love affair inspired the novel Across the River and into the Trees, written in Cuba during a time of strife with Mary, and published in 1950 to negative reviews.[116] The following year, furious at the critical reception of Across the River and Into the Trees, he wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, saying that it was "the best I can write ever for all of my life".[113] The Old Man and the Sea became a book-of-the-month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1953, a month before he left for his second trip to Africa.[117][118]

In January 1954, while in Africa, Hemingway was almost fatally injured in two successive plane crashes. He chartered a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo as a Christmas present to Mary. On their way to photograph Murchison Falls from the air, the plane struck an abandoned utility pole and "crash landed in heavy brush". Hemingway's injuries included a head wound, while Mary broke two ribs.[119] The next day, attempting to reach medical care in Entebbe, they boarded a second plane that exploded at take-off, with Hemingway suffering burns and another concussion, this one serious enough to cause leaking of cerebral fluid.[120] They eventually arrived in Entebbe to find reporters covering the story of Hemingway's death. He briefed the reporters and spent the next few weeks recuperating and reading his erroneous obituaries.[121] Despite his injuries, Hemingway accompanied Patrick and his wife on a planned fishing expedition in February, but pain caused him to be irascible and difficult to get along with.[122] When a bushfire broke out, he was again injured, sustaining second-degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm.[123] Months later in Venice, Mary reported to friends the full extent of Hemingway's injuries: two cracked discs, a kidney and liver rupture, a dislocated shoulder and a broken skull.[122] The accidents may have precipitated the physical deterioration that was to follow. After the plane crashes, Hemingway, who had been "a thinly controlled alcoholic throughout much of his life, drank more heavily than usual to combat the pain of his injuries."[124]

In October 1954, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He modestly told the press that Carl Sandburg, Isak Dinesen and Bernard Berenson deserved the prize,[125] but he gladly accepted the prize money.[126] Mellow says Hemingway "had coveted the Nobel Prize", but when he won it, months after his plane accidents and their worldwide press coverage, "there must have been a lingering suspicion in Hemingway's mind that his obituary notices had played a part in the academy's decision."[127] Because he was suffering pain from the African accidents, he decided against traveling to Stockholm.[128] Instead he sent a speech to be read, defining the writer's life:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.[129][130]

Hemingway was bedridden between late 1955 and early 1956.[131] He was ordered to stop drinking so as to mitigate liver damage, advice he initially followed but eventually disregarded.[132] In October 1956, he returned to Europe and visited ailing Basque writer Pio Baroja, who died a few weeks later. During the trip, Hemingway again became sick and was treated for a variety of ailments including liver disease and high blood pressure.[131]

In November 1956, while staying in Paris, he was reminded of trunks he had stored in the Ritz Hotel in 1928 and never retrieved. Upon re-claiming and opening the trunks, Hemingway discovered they were filled with notebooks and writing from his Paris years. Excited about the discovery, when he returned to Cuba in early 1957, he began to shape the recovered work into his memoir A Moveable Feast.[133] By 1959 he ended a period of intense activity: he finished A Moveable Feast (scheduled to be released the following year); brought True at First Light to 200,000 words; added chapters to The Garden of Eden; and worked on Islands in the Stream. The last three were stored in a safe deposit box in Havana, as he focused on the finishing touches for A Moveable Feast. Author Michael Reynolds claims it was during this period that Hemingway slid into depression, from which he was unable to recover.[134]

The Finca Vigía became crowded with guests and tourists, as Hemingway, beginning to become unhappy with life there, considered a permanent move to Idaho. In 1959 he bought a home overlooking the Big Wood River, outside Ketchum, and left Cuba—although he apparently remained on easy terms with the Castro government, telling The New York Times he was "delighted" with Castro's overthrow of Batista.[135][136] He was in Cuba in November 1959, between returning from Pamplona and traveling west to Idaho, and the following year for his 61st birthday; however, that year he and Mary decided to leave after hearing the news that Castro wanted to nationalize property owned by Americans and other foreign nationals.[137] On July 25, 1960, the Hemingways left Cuba for the last time, leaving art and manuscripts in a bank vault in Havana. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Finca Vigía was expropriated by the Cuban government, complete with Hemingway's collection of "four to six thousand books".[138]

Idaho and suicide

Hemingway continued to rework the material that was published as A Moveable Feast through the 1950s.[133] In mid-1959, he visited Spain to research a series of bullfighting articles commissioned by Life magazine.[139] Life wanted only 10,000 words, but the manuscript grew out of control.[140] For the first time in his life he could not organize his writing, so he asked A. E. Hotchner to travel to Cuba to help him. Hotchner helped trim the Life piece down to 40,000 words, and Scribner's agreed to a full-length book version (The Dangerous Summer) of almost 130,000 words.[141] Hotchner found Hemingway to be "unusually hesitant, disorganized, and confused",[142] and suffering badly from failing eyesight.[143] He left Cuba for the last time on July 25, 1960. Mary went with him to New York where he set up a small office and attempted unsuccessfully to work. Soon after he left, traveling without Mary to Spain to be photographed for the front cover of Life magazine. A few days later the news reported that he was seriously ill and on the verge of dying, which panicked Mary until she received a cable from him telling her, "Reports false. Enroute Madrid. Love Papa."[144] He was, in fact, seriously ill, and believed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown.[141] Feeling lonely, he took to his bed for days, retreating into silence, despite having the first installments of The Dangerous Summer published in Life that September to good reviews.[145] In October, he went back to New York, where he refused to leave Mary's apartment, presuming that he was being watched. She quickly took him to Idaho, where they were met at the train station in Ketchum by local physician George Saviers.[141]

He was concerned about finances; fretted that he would never return to Cuba to retrieve the manuscripts that he had left in a bank vault; and he missed his home, his books, his life there.[146] He became paranoid, believing that the FBI was actively monitoring his movements in Ketchum.[143][note 6] Mary was unable to care for her husband and it was anathema for a man of Hemingway's generation to accept he suffered from mental illness. At the end of November, Saviers flew him to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota on that pretext that he was to be treated for hypertension.[146] He was checked in under Saviers's name to maintain anonymity.[145]

Meyers writes that "an aura of secrecy surrounds Hemingway's treatment at the Mayo" but confirms that he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as many as 15 times in December 1960 and was "released in ruins" in January 1961.[147] Reynolds gained access to Hemingway's records at the Mayo, which document ten ECT sessions. The doctors in Rochester told Hemingway the depressive state for which he was being treated may have been caused by his long-term use of Reserpine and Ritalin.[148] Of the ECT therapy, Hemingway told Hotchner, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient."[149] In late January 1961 he was sent home, as Meyers writes, "in ruins". Asked to provide a tribute to President Kennedy in February he could only produce a few sentences after a week's effort. A few months later, on April 21, Mary found him with a shotgun in the kitchen. She called Saviers, who admitted Hemingway to the Sun Valley Hospital under sedation. Once the weather cleared, Saviers flew again to Rochester with his patient.[150] Hemingway underwent three electroshock treatments during that visit.[151] He was released at the end of June and was home in Ketchum on June 30. Two days later he "quite deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961.[152] Meyers writes that he unlocked the basement storeroom where his guns were kept, went upstairs to the front entrance foyer, "pushed two shells into the twelve-gauge Boss shotgun ... put the end of the barrel into his mouth, pulled the trigger and blew out his brains."[153]

When the authorities arrived, Mary was sedated and taken to the hospital. She returned to her home the next day where she cleaned the house and saw to the funeral and travel arrangements. Bernice Kert writes that it "did not seem to her a conscious lie" when she told the press that his death had been accidental.[154] In a press interview five years later, Mary confirmed that he had shot himself.[155] Family and friends flew to Ketchum for the funeral, officiated by the local Catholic priest, who believed that the death had been accidental.[154] An altar boy fainted at the head of the casket during the funeral, and Hemingway's brother Leicester wrote: "It seemed to me Ernest would have approved of it all."[156]

Hemingway's behavior during his final years had been similar to that of his father before he killed himself;[157] his father may have had hereditary hemochromatosis, whereby the excessive accumulation of iron in tissues culminates in mental and physical deterioration.[158] Medical records made available in 1991 confirmed that Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961.[159] His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also killed themselves.[160] Hemingway's health was further complicated by heavy drinking throughout most of his life.[113]