Friday, December 30, 2011

“All I know now is war”, the nineteen-year-old continued. “Everything else seems like a dream.”

More than you ever wanted to know about Ernest Hemingway, who shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho some 100+ miles from my hometown when I was 15 and fascinated by a "local" story about someone famous in Idaho. It's a lengthy and detailed read that starts with the story of Hemingway's war injury where he was wounded (not as a soldier) but as a medical volunteer. He had been in Italy and war only two weeks.
“All I know now is war”, the nineteen-year-old continued. “Everything else seems like a dream.” 

 Hemingway died fifty years ago, shooting himself in the head in the early morning of July 2, 1961, at the house he shared with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, in Ketchum, Idaho. The last ten years of the marriage, which began in 1946, had been marked by insult, paranoia and violence. “It is more than a year since he actually hit me”, Mary told her husband’s publisher, Charles Scribner, in 1950. An entry in her journal for October 1951 says: “E. followed me to my bathroom and spit in my face”. The information that follows is almost as startling: “Next day he gave me $200”.
Between the youthful war hero and his bullying reflection you can fit three failed marriages, two messed-up children, five car accidents, two plane crashes (on succeeding days), one self-shooting (beside the fatal one), murderous safaris, vertiginous celebrity, precarious wealth, and a peculiar type of literary success that seemed, in his eyes, to spell “failure”. 

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