IV
As I write there comes the news of the death of Ernest Hemingway. He received an almost fatal wound in World War I, and this apparently centered all his mind upon the idea of death. It became an obsession with him—something not merely to write about but to inflict upon living creatures. His idea of recreation was to kill large wild animals in Africa, and half-tame bulls in Mexico, and small game in America, and great fish in the sea. He wrote about all these experiences with extraordinary vividness and became the most popular writer in America, and perhaps in the world. When he died, the Saturday Review gave thirty pages to his personality and his writings, almost two thirds of the reading matter in that issue. I read a good part of it, and found myself in agreement with just one paragraph, by a contributor:
To the present critic, who is amazed by and genuinely admires the lean virtuosity of Mr. Hemingway, the second most astonishing thing about him is the narrowness of his selective range. The people he observes with fascinated fixation and then makes live before us are real, but they are all very much alike: bullfighters, bruisers, touts, gunmen, professional soldiers, prostitutes, hard drinkers, dope fiends.
Nowhere in the thirty pages did I find any mention of the fact that all this extraordinary writing was done under the stimulus of alcohol. A decade or so ago there was published in Life an article by a staff man who had been permitted to accompany Hemingway and a well-known motion picture actress about the city of New York for a couple of typical days. The writer described Hemingway as unable to go for an hour without a drink of liquor. As a result of this practice his health broke, and after a long siege in hospitals he put himself out of his misery by putting both barrels of his beautiful shotgun into his mouth and blowing off the top of his head.