The Hero of the Code

All stories, if continued for enough, end in death, and he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you.

Ernest Hemingway, the storyteller who wrote those lines, was brushing his teeth. It had been, his wife later recalled, a "calm, good-natured" dinner, and she was sitting in her bedroom in their house in Ketchum, Idaho, when an Italian song she had not thought of for years came into her mind--Tutti Mi Chiamano Bionda (Everybody Tells Me I'm Blonde). Mary Hemingway walked across the hall to her husband's room to sing it for him. "I said, 'I have a present for you.' He listened to me, and he finished cleaning his teeth to join me in the last line."

Next morning, shortly after 7 a.m., a pajama-clad Hemingway went downstairs and from the gun rack took his favorite gun, which, like almost everything he owned, was not merely a thing but a ceremonial object. A twelve-gauge, double-barreled shotgun inlaid with silver, it had been specially made for Hemingway. He put the gun barrel in his mouth and pulled both triggers. The blast blew his whole head away except for his mouth, his chin, and part of his cheeks.

The small, quiet funeral took place four days later in the placid village cemetery of Ketchum. To the north, the peaks of the rugged Sawtooth Mountains were still capped with snow. To the east lay the lavish summer greenery of the Wood River Valley. Around the rose-covered coffin gathered only about 50 people, mostly Idaho neighbors and some of Hemingway's always-varied circle of friend--a doctor, a rancher, a hotel man, a onetime operator of a gymnasium. "0 Lord," prayed Father Robert Waldmann, pastor of Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Church, "grant to thy servant Ernest the remission of his sins. Eternal rest grant unto him. 0 Lord."

Brooding Judgment
Mary Hemingway kept insisting that somehow her husband's death had been an accident. Plainly it could not have been. Moreover, Hemingway had been ill and depressed for a long time. His blood pressure was high, and his doctor suspected incipient diabetes. His eating and drinking were restricted--to shrink more than 40 lbs. from the bearlike physique in which he had always taken a small boy's pride. Literary visitors last winter found Hemingway inarticulate and insecure, pathetically doubting not only his current creative powers but the value of all he had ever done. In two lengthy stays at the Mayo Clinic he got shock treatments for depression. Recently, the death of his friend Gary Cooper depressed him further.

Suicide as a way of ending the story of a life had been much on his mind. Hemingway's physician father, also ill with hypertension and diabetes, had died by his own hand in 1928. Indeed, Hemingway had brooded and passed judgment upon it in print. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan thinks about his suicide-father, "that other one that misused the gun," and calls him a coward. Elsewhere, Hemingway suggested that there was nothing cowardly in suicide--if used to hasten what otherwise might be a slow and messy death. Some years ago, his mother, as a present, sent him the Civil War pistol with which his father had shot himself.