AMERICANWAY

LITERATURE DESPITE HEMINGWAY’S winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his novella The Old Man and the Sea, and then the No- bel Prize in Literature the following year , the decade of the 1950s would come to mark the writer’s downturn. He was known to be accident-prone, and the list of injuries he had sustained during his adventure-fi lled life was growing (including a ruptured kid- ney and liver, as well as numerous concus- sions), plus he had also battled hepatitis ; his body was beginning to give out on him. His words in a saved (but unused) draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech foreshad- owed the events to come. “There is no lone- lier man than the writer when he is writing except the suicide. Nor is there any happier, nor more exhausted man when he has writ- ten well. If he has written well everything that is him has gone into the writing and he faces another morning when he must do it again. There is always another morning and another morning.” The writer struggled to live as stoically as the characters he created. To some he was a caring and loyal friend, to others a bully and a philanderer. In late 1960, suffering from depression and hypertension, he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. There, electroshock treatment was performed on him roughly a dozen times. He left the hospital a shell of his former self and endured diffi culties with both memory and writing. He also began suff ering from intense paranoia, most notably fearing the FBI and the IRS. In April 1961, Hemingway twice made attempts to end his life. Another stay at the Mayo Clinic followed, as did more rounds of shock treatment. Released from the barred windows and close surveillance of his hospital room in late June of that year, he would not let control of his life be taken from him again. As you look back at Hemingway’s life, the sudden unexpected exhilaration that initial- ly greeted you as you explored and embraced his bold adventure is, in the end, replaced with an overwhelming emptiness at the trag- ic way it turned out. Unfortunately, though, mental illness, particularly depression, ran deep within his family. His father commit- ted the same purposeful exit in 1928 , and, in the years to come, the fi nal act of suicide would continue with his brother, a sister and, fi nally, a granddaughter . Bud Purdy flashes back to the last din- ner he had with Hemingway at Christiania Restaurant and remembers his friend’s paranoia. According to Purdy, Hemingway, sporting a comb-over to hide his baldness and looking closer to being in his late 70s rather than just 61, feared that a couple of guests at a nearby table were FBI agents spying on him. His paranoia had grown to epic proportions by that time. I then ask Purdy about Hemingway’s death, and the old rancher sums it up plainly. “He liked life. He liked living … walking and writing. Life wasn’t worth it when he couldn’t live like he wanted to.” AARON SKIRBOLL is a freelance writer and the author of The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven: How a Ragtag Group of Fans Took the Fall for Major League Baseball.

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