The Final Descent: Hemingway's Last Years

Monday, August 16, 1999

In the vestibule of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, at 7:30 AM on July 2, 1961, two shot-gun blasts—heard on the last page of this last volume of Michael Reynold's massive four-volume biography—ended the life of Ernest Hemingway. He was 61, physically and mentally shattered, and looked and acted 90. Reynolds tells the familiar story in enormous detail, much of it new.

Of those details, more in a moment. But first let us remind ourselves why Hemingway is so important. Through the attrition of ordinary use and abuse, words experience sickness and death. The major writer makes them live again. As T.S. Eliot put it, he purifies the language of the tribe. Between 1925 (In Our Time) and 1929 (A Farewell to Arms) Hemingway did this with extraordinary consistency.

He did it by combining simplicity of vocabulary with various ways of generating powerful suggestion. Much of the meaning remained unstated but nevertheless powerfully felt. Sometimes this use of language moved toward eloquent silence. The important, the ultimate things cannot be said. Here, for example, in rhythm, diction, and the detail chosen, the prose expresses the emotional numbness of a wounded and hospitalized soldier:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails.

Every detail of such writing, in this case drawn from the short story 'In Another Country,' requires you to think.

Among critics, I am slightly out of line in rating A Farewell to Arms Hemingway's best novel. One part of the book's overall 'figure in the carpet,' as James called it, locates the protagonist, military ambulance driver Frederic Henry, behind a window, looking out. As the novel famously begins:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.

Again, the apparently simple sentences are rich in suggestion. The observer, inside the house, is temporarily safe, the scene tranquil, except for the troops. Marching to the Front, many will soon die, as is suggested by the dust they raise. These 'simple' sentences reverberate throughout the novel. Looking out of various windows, Frederic sees death in multiple forms—artillery firing, snow falling, a military cemetery full of fresh graves—and he takes refuge in various rooms: transitory though civilized hotels and the emotional 'home' of his love for Catherine, a nurse.

All of this bears down upon the following three sentences late in the novel. Frederic and Catherine are in their final hotel room, in Lausanne, waiting to go to the hospital where she will die in childbirth. What has gone before endows the following sentences with rending Virgilian-elegiac power:

The windows of the room looked out on a wet garden with a wall topped by an iron fence. Across the street, which sloped steeply, was another hotel with a similar wall and garden. I looked out at the rain falling in the fountain of the garden.

Every word here counts. We all inhabit such hotel rooms. Transitory 'rooms' are man's fate. From its very first sentence this novel has worked to achieve this passage. And how else could the novel end, other than it does, with Frederic at last outside the window? 'After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.' This novel puts war in the foreground, but its real subject is our nakedness before death. We are all finally outside the window, like the soldiers of the opening.

As these passages suggest, far from being the 'tough guy' of his later mask, Hemingway was deliquescently sensitive. Biographers attempt to trace this vulnerability to his childhood, to his 1918 wound, and so on; Reynolds gives us enough data for us to make up our own minds, and he rides no thesis.

After 1929 Hemingway descended into disaster both literary and personal, one indication of which was an increasing verbosity. He pontificated, no longer associating with writers and painters but with movie actors and socialites. Then appeared his non-fiction works about bullfighting and big-game hunting, in which he is the central wordy figure. As Edmund Wilson put it, he became his own worst invented character.

Hemingway's life also slid out of control. His first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, was wrecked in 1927 by the predatory Pauline Pfeiffer. Martha Gellhorn descended on him in 1936 at Sloppy Joe's in Key West and ousted Pauline. Hemingway's drinking became gargantuan—right up there with Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill.

Reynolds presents decisive evidence that Martha and his sons perceived a different man emerging in 1943-44 as he guzzled liquor and chased fantasy U-boats on his yacht Pilar in the Caribbean. He finally went to Europe, assaulted Omaha Beach in the third wave, and wrote great journalism about this. But he rushed into Paris ahead of General LeClerc, liberated the Ritz Bar, and stayed drunk for a week. His fourth wife, Mary Welsh, saw it through to 1961 with an impossible man, unpredictable, violent, vicious, and depressed.

His physical clumsiness, auto accidents, plane crashes, and assorted foolishness brought him multiple concussions. His Across the River and into the Trees (1950) was a self-parody and a critical disaster. He accumulated vast quantities of manuscript that he proved unable to shape or cut. Where once he had written 500 careful words per day, now words poured forth without control.

The condition of the manuscript material he left behind, which can be viewed at the Kennedy Library in Boston, is scary. It consists of thousands of handwritten pages, much of it scrawled, chaotic, banal, trivial—verbal elephantiasis.

By the time he was 61, Hemingway was a physical and mental wreck beset by failing memory, rocketing blood pressure, liver and heart disease, paranoid suspicions, and clinical depression. He was a walking pharmacy of drugs, some perhaps dangerously incompatible. He tried to walk into an airplane propeller. The theme of suicide had been present in his fiction since his first story in In Our Time, 'Indian Camp' (1925), and suicide ran in his family. But in 1961 he knew it was exit time.

The Final Descent: Hemingway's Last Years

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