By Stuart Mitchner
Sixty-five years ago on a hot New York morning in early July, a familiar white-bearded face grinned at me from the newsstand on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street. The big black banner headline HEMINGWAY KILLS HIMSELF was on the front page of the Daily Mirror. The New York Times was more discreet:
Hemingway Dead of Shotgun Wound;
Wife Says He Was Cleaning Weapon
I bought both papers. The Times gave him a full page of tributes that included a letter he wrote to a young writer who had sent him a story: “I can’t help you, kid. You write better than I did when I was 19…. I would as soon start it over at 19 any time.” The letter was signed, “Your friend.” If you were a young writer, you felt that he was talking to you. It’s safe to say that quite a few young writers all over the world were feeling what you felt.
First Hang Yourself
When asked what he’d consider “the best intellectual training for the would-be writer,” Hemingway offered the following response: “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.”
In the same Paris Review interview, conducted three years before he ended his life, Hemingway said: “You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.”
“The Malady of Power”
Flat out on my desk in all its handsome, hefty 202-page immensity is the November 1935 issue of “Esquire: The Magazine for Men” featuring Hemingway’s “The Malady of Power,” subtitled “A Second Serious Letter.” The article begins on page 31 and breaks to page 198, which may explain why I almost never got to the most interesting part. The opening is vintage Hemingway: “If you tell it to them once they think it is marvelous. When you tell it to them again they say, ‘We heard that before somewhere. Where do you suppose he got that from?’ If you tell it to them a third time they are bored to death and they won’t listen to it.”
In the next paragraph Hemingway promises to “wrap it all up in a series of anecdotes so that perhaps you will not taste the castor-oil in the chop suey sandwich,” meaning President Roosevelt’s “reported statement to a group of Representatives that he could, if he would, put the U.S. into war in ten days.” The statement quoted in the title comes from the Manchester Guardian correspondent who declared that one of the first symptoms of the “malady of power” was “suspicion of the man’s associates,” as well as “great touchiness on all matters, inability to receive criticism, belief that he was indispensable, and that nothing had ever been done rightly until he came into power and that nothing would ever be done rightly again unless he stayed in power.”
Referring to himself as “your correspondent” (as he routinely does in his Esquire articles), Hemingway suggested that “the fate of our country for the next hundred years or so depends on the extent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambition. If he is ambitious only to serve his country, … we and our children, and their children, will be very fortunate. If he is ambitious personally, to leave a great name, or to eclipse the luster of the name he bears, which was made famous by another man, we will be out of luck because the sensational improvements that can be made legally in the country in time of peace are being rapidly exhausted.”
A decade later, the President was dead, the Second World War was history, and Hemingway was writing for Collier’s. His last dispatch, “War in the Siegfried Line,” dated November 19, 1944, is among those collected in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (Scribner’s 1967). William White’s introduction begins by quoting from a letter early in Hemingway’s career, that the “newspaper stuff” he has written “has nothing to do with the other writing which is entirely apart…. No one has any right to dig this stuff up and use it against the stuff you have written to write the best you can.” White then points out several instances where Hemingway himself has done just that.
Hurricane Ernest
In “The Malady of Power,” Hemingway refers to America’s “next hundred years” as if it depended on “the extent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambition.” Given character flaws like suspicion of one’s associates, touchiness on all matters, inability to take criticism, and belief that he was indispensable, I thought beyond FDR to the current occupant of the White House. However, a look online led to an article in the September 17, 1935 issue of the New Masses.
Conspicuously absent from White’s collection is Hemingway’s coverage of the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. “Who Murdered The Vets?” begins with three questions, playing off the title: “Whom did they annoy and to whom was their possible presence a political danger? Who sent them down to the Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months? Who is responsible for their deaths?” The next paragraph refers to wealthy people, yachtsmen, fishermen such as President Hoover and President Roosevelt who knew to avoid the Keys during the hurricane months of September, October, and November.
A September 7 letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins was written in the immediate aftermath of the disaster: “We were the first to Camp Five of the veterans who were working on the highway construction. Out of 187 only 8 survived….The veterans in those camps were practically murdered. The people in charge are said to have wired Washington for orders…. Harry Hopkins and Roosevelt who sent those poor bonus march guys down there to get rid of them got rid of them all right.”
It’s worth noting the way Hemingway the writer keeps surfacing in his reportage: “Had just finished a damned good long story and was on another when this started with the warning on Saturday. They had all day Sunday and all day Monday to get those vets out and never did it. If they had taken half the precautions with them that we took with our boat not a one would have been lost…. Feel too lousy now to write. Out rained on, sleeping on the deck of the run boat through all that business so ought to remember it, but damned if I want it for my novel [To Have and Have Not].” This comes on the heels of his admission that “the original of the Rummy in that story of mine One Trip Across was drowned at the Ferry Slip.” In fact, the “Rummy” is one of the principal characters in To Have and Have Not, the role memorably played by Walter Brennan in the 1945 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
From “A Book of Days”
Before Hemingway’s problem with President Roosevelt took me in another direction, my plan had been to take a whirlwind tour of births, deaths, and anecdotes between July 9 and 15 documented by Neal T. Jones in A Book of Days for the Literary Year, as in this brief sample: on July 9, 1735, 25-year-old Samuel Johnson marries a wealthy widow 30 years his senior, who thinks him ‘the most sensible man I ever saw in my life”; July 10, 1871, Marcel Proust is born “during the turbulent summer of the Paris Commune”; July 11, 1955, Edith Sitwell remembers Virginia Woolf in a letter to a friend (“I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her ‘a beautiful little knitter’); July 12, 1817, Henry David Thoreau is born in Concord and on the same day in 1536 Erasmus dies in Basel (‘When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes’); July 13, 1798, William Wordsworth visits Tintern Abbey and writes a poem about it; July 14, 1916, Tristan Tzara delivers the first Manifesto of Dada; July 15, 1878, Gustave Flaubert writes to Guy de Maupassant, “You MUST work more than you are doing” and on the same day in 1908 Jean Cocteau publishes his first poem.”
Natural Causes
On July 6, 1962, almost exactly a year after Hemingway killed himself, William Faulkner died, of “natural causes.”
President John F. Kennedy’s statement cited the Master: “Since Henry James, no writer has left behind such a vast and enduring monument to the strength of American literature.”
The hearts of young writers do not beat faster, however, at the thought of vast and enduring monuments. There’s too much of the cemetery in that summation of the man who at his best creates the prose equivalent of the aurora borealis.
Kennedy’s statement on Hemingway’s death was that “Few Americans have had a greater impact on the emotions and attitudes of the American people than Ernest Hemingway…. He almost singlehandedly transformed the literature and the ways of thought of men and women in every country in the world.”