Ernest Hemingway - 50 years ago

Fifty years ago today, July 2, I picked up the Sunday News & Courier (name prior to merging with The Evening Post) and read that Ernest Hemingway had killed himself with his favorite shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. I was shocked by the act of suicide. It was against God's law and against Catholic teaching. Back in those days I was probably more of a practicing Catholic than Hemingway, although he was also born into the faith.

I was shocked and felt let down that this bigger than life personality would take a "coward's" way out. Nothing could justify suicide, I thought. It was immaterial that I knew him only through a study of his life and reading his books and articles and watching movies based on his work. He was a young man's giant; he lived the kind of life lessor men only dreamed. The news of his suicide was just that; a story written less than 24 hours after he was found dead. No time for details. No time to explore why, although there were vague explanations: accident, cancer, money problems. Only in later years did we learn he suffered from terrible depression the last few years of his life.

He was laid to rest a couple of days after his suicide in a graveside service. No Mass in a Catholic church; he had too many wives it was said. It probably had more to do with the suicide than his wives.

And the world moved on. Something and someone else took center stage.

Over the years I have softened my views of Hemingway's suicide and the man. Somewhere along the line I recognized none of us really know what lies in the heart of another man or woman. We do not recognize the personal demons. Deep understanding is ever more difficult when our personal connection is remote to say the least. We regret the inadequacies years ago in treating depression. Even today it remains a challenge for the patient and the doctor.

Several years ago I went to Key West and toured Hemingway's house. It is a beautiful place stuffed with leather chairs made from the hides of big game he shot and full of memorabilia of a life well lived. Books abound. Those he wrote and those he collected. (Years after his death his wife Mary had to take his library to New York for controlled storage and chemical elimination of pests and insects that threatened to destroy the library.)

There is an elevated walkway from the house proper to his writing workshop. This overlooks the pool. There is a penny embedded in the concrete walk around the pool. Legend is that Hemingway put it there while the work was being done. He told the contractor "You have all the rest of my money. You might as well have this.

I went to Sloppy Joe's, Hemingway's favorite bar, a short walk from his house. Here I drank a beer in mid-morning as he might have done and sucked up the atmosphere and thought good thoughts about the man. I still have those thoughts.

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