A house in Idaho where Ernest Hemingway wrote his final works before killing himself has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The two-storey, 2,sq-ft house, which he bought in , was already owned by the Nature Conservancy.
Hemingway killed himself in the main entryway of the house, which is located in Ketchum, Idaho, in It is thought Hemingway committed suicide at 61 because he was losing the ability to write to the same standard as before. Paul Lusignan, a historian with the National Register, said the house was listed because of its ability to provide insights about the author. No time has been set for the funeral services, which will be private. Coroner Ray McGoldrick said tonight that he would decide tomorrow, after speaking to Mrs.
Hemingway, whether to hold an inquest. The writer was discharged from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. He had been treated there last year for the same conditions and had been released Jan. About a month ago, Mr.
Hemingway's physician at the clinic described his health as "excellent. The author had been worried about his weight, pounds. He was six feet tall. Hemingway and his wife, who drove from Rochester, arrived Friday night at this village on the outskirts of Sun Valley.
Chuck Atkinson, a Ketchum motel owner who has been a friend of Mr. Hemingway for twenty years, was with him yesterday. He said, "He seemed to be in good spirits. We didn't talk about anything in particular. I think he spent last night at home. However, Marshal Les Jankow, another friend and the first law officer to reach the scene, said residents had told him that Mr. Hemingway had "looked thinner and acted depressed. After the war he retired with his fourth wife to Cuba, where he fished for marlins and wrote The Old Man and the Sea, won the Nobel Prize, was lionised wherever he went — but was killed in an unfortunate firearm accident.
That's the official story. In the years after his death, however, the jigsaw pieces of a counter-life gradually began to emerge. His war record, for instance. Hemingway was only 18 when he signed up for the First World War — but it was as a non-combatant. He had a defective left eye, inherited from his mother, which kept him out of battle. He went to Italy to man the Red Cross canteens and evacuate the wounded.
Helping a wounded man to safety one evening, he was shot in the leg and hospitalised in Milan, with three other patients and 18 nurses. Though his dalliance with Sister Agnew von Kurovsky was unconsummated, he fell in love with European culture and manners, swanned about in an Italian cloak, drank wine and affected a clipped delivery borrowed from a British officer, Eric Dorman-Smith.
In Paris, where he enjoyed a temporary idyll with his first wife Hadley and their baby John or "Bumby" , Hemingway started to make his name as a writer — but also to display dangerous mood swings, irascibility, spite and a compulsion to turn against those who helped him. He dumped Hadley and the baby and took up with Pauline Pfeiffer, a decision for which he was racked with nightmares of guilt, and moved to Key West, Florida.
For some reason, he became obsessed with bullfighting: the glorification of blood, the spilt horse-guts, the matador's passes with the cape and sword, the art of killing. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway seemed to be working out some personal philosophy about death, but it was hard to follow. The critic Max Eastman complained that his prose style had become the equivalent of "false hair on the chest".
Unable to participate directly in killing bulls, Hemingway decamped to Mombasa where he could legitimately blaze away at lions and kudu. Not content with land-based mayhem, he bought a foot cruiser called the Pilar to fish, in Key West and Havana, for marlin and other aquatic creatures twice the size of himself. Between and , he seemed to spend months posing beside up-ended fish trophies, the self-burnished image of the muscular man of action, handsome, tanned, drinking with the sailors in Sloppy Joe's bar.
He went to Spain during the civil war, not to fight, like George Orwell, but because he was commissioned to report on it for the North American Newspaper Alliance — and because his new love, Martha Gellhorn, was going there.
He stressed many times that he wasn't taking sides, and didn't want to see the USA embroiled in a foreign war. In Madrid, despite the bombardment, he had the time of his life — enjoying caviar and vodka at the Gaylord Hotel, the Russian HQ, making a movie called The Spanish Earth and supplying its gravelly commentary, writing his broadly fictional dispatches for newspapers that criticised them as "very inefficient".
He looked the part of a hunky warrior, but he was a lucky dilettante, who could have left Spain any time he liked. He wrote a play about Madrid in called The Fifth Column, about Dorothy, a plucky female journalist, who falls for Philip, a tough, intrepid, hard-drinking spy masquerading as a war correspondent.
Self-projection turned into self-parody. It was a tough assignment. He took a room at the Dorchester, where he held court as the Great American Writer and went to parties, receiving compliments on his beardy, macho wonderfulness. When he was concussed in a car accident that followed a drunken party with Robert Capa the photographer, Martha Gellhorn — who'd travelled to England in a ship packed with high explosives — visited him in hospital and laughed at his footling mock-heroics.
As though stung into action, he headed for the war, joining the invasion fleet to Normandy and, later, General Patton's armoured divisions. He was a so-so war correspondent who was simultaneously a sort-of-warrior.
At the liberation of Paris, he was found in a hotel with a small private army. When asked to leave by a French general, he liberated the Traveller's Club and the Ritz, taking a room at the latter to entertain his new love, Mary Welsh It's easy to be spiteful about Hemingway.
All his posturing, his editing of the truth, his vainglorious fibbing can obscure his undoubted bravery. He loved being in the thick of the war — the tank advance through the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge — dodging bullets, watching men being shot to hell all around him. But it's hard to shake off the feeling that what he was doing wasn't bravery, but psychotic self-dramatisation.
And when you inspect the image of Hemingway-as-hero, you uncover an extraordinary sub-stratum of self-harming. You discover that, for just over half of his life, Hemingway seemed hell-bent on destroying himself. It was about the time he was finishing A Farewell to Arms, in , when he learnt that his father Clarence had shot himself in the head with a Civil War revolver, that Hemingway's life first began to crack apart.
The most obvious external evidence was a succession of bizarre physical accidents, many of which were bashes on the head. One, in Paris, left him with a split head needing nine stitches, after he yanked the chain in the bathroom, thinking it was the lavatory flush, and pulled the skylight down on top of him.
After graduation from high school Hemingway became a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star but he soon left to join an American ambulance unit headed for the Italian front in World War I. The novelist, a man of six feet and about pounds, was married four times and had the three sons by his first two marriages. The woman who was widowed by his death, the former Miss Mary Welsh, also a writer, married Hemingway in They traveled the world together.
He called her Miss Mary and she called him Papa. They ended in divorce. Hemingway and Mary made their home on a farm in Cuba about 10 miles from Havana for several years. He did sideline writing for periodicals while serving as corespondent for the Toronto Star. The medal cited his work as the book published in the three previous years that was most likely to become a classic. John Wayne Dies at 72 of Cancer. The Associated Press is an independent, not-for-profit news cooperative headquartered in New York City.
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