Fifty years after his death, he still looms as America’s literary giant. But late in his life, as his talent slipped and his paranoia grew, the great storyteller struggled to live up to his own image — right to the brutal end.

-

by Paul Hendrickson

-

-

-

-

We know what happened on Sunday morning, July 2, 1961. A writer who’d lost the prairies of his childhood in Illinois, the woods of his Michigan teenage summers, the seemingly illimitable fishing riches of the Gulf Stream off Havana, and now, or so he was convinced, the center of who and what he was stepped inside a five-and-a-half-by-seven-and-a-half-foot space at the entryway of his Idaho house and destroyed himself.

-

He aimed for just above the eyebrows, and nothing went awry. He’d been home from Mayo Clinic for two days, having been driven back from Minnesota to Ketchum in a Hertz rental car in the company of his wife and an old boxing friend whose Manhattan gym he used for his workouts. His wife had gone to bed the night before in the big bedroom that occupied most of the upper floor of their charmless two-story block house, which sat a couple of hundred yards up the steep slope from the west bank of the Big Wood River. He’d taken the small room down the hall.

-

From their respective bathrooms, as they readied for sleep, they’d called out to each other snatches of an Italian folk song. At about 7:25 am, Mary Hemingway was brought awake to what sounded like two muffled thumps. It was, she later said, like the sound of bureau drawers pulled out too far and falling to the floor. She rose on one elbow and called out her husband’s name. She threw back the coverlet and ran down the hall. One of the twin beds was mussed, but he wasn’t in it. She reversed direction, went to the head of the stairs, held for half a second, and tore down the 20-odd steps, across the living room to see what her husband had done.

-

If that is the ending truth about Ernest Hemingway, that he took his own life with a 12-gauge Boss shotgun 19 days shy of his 62nd birthday, there are other truths about him too, none more central than this: that all of his writing, every bit of it, even at its self–parodistic Papa-cult worst, was about the living of this life. The being of this life.

-

In that sense, there is a moment. It’s not a landmark moment, but it is revealing. The moment is July 21, 1934. It is his 35th birthday. He is a full five years removed from his last novel, A Farewell to Arms, which had cemented his place in modern literature. And though he will go on to publish For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea — both classics — you could make a case, as so many later critics will, that by this moment — middle of the ’30s, middle of his 30s — the arc of his powers as a writer has already crested.

-

It is his first-ever angling day in Cuban waters, 90-odd miles across the Straits of Florida from Key West, aboard what’s destined to become — has already become, really — the most beloved material possession of his life, his new fishing cruiser Pilar. He’s had her since May, and he’s come to Cuba for the remainder of the summer fishing season because that’s where the monsters are.

-

For the next 27 years, through two more wives, the Nobel Prize, all his ruin, this 38-foot motorized vessel will be intimately his, and he hers. She’s not a figment or a dream or a literary theory or somebody’s psychosexual interpretation — she’s actual. Onto her varnished decks, hauled in over her low-cut stern on a large wooden roller, will come uncounted marlin and broadbill swordfish, tuna, sailfish, kingfish, snook, wahoo, tarpon, horse-eye jack, pompano, dolphin, barracuda, bonito, and mako shark, which, as Hemingway once said, is the one that smells oddly sweet and has those curved-in teeth that give it its Cuban name, dentuso.

-

The man at the helm is rugged, handsome, youthful, dark-haired, trim-waisted, owner of a killer grin and an even more killer ego, the reigning monarch of American literature, a sportsman and sensualist glorying in the physical world. He is still living at this moment with his second wife, Pauline, and their two young boys, Patrick and Gigi, in Key West, a sand-bitten and Depression-sagging outpost at the bottom of America. It’ll be another five years before the ever-restless man relocates to Cuba. By then his marriage to Pauline, who had essentially stolen him from his first wife, Hadley, will be over. A lot else will be over, too, if not exactly behind.

-

But never mind that. On this day, the current is strong and to the east. That amazing belt of deep, blue water, the Gulf Stream, of which Hemingway thinks almost mystically, has come in close today; the tide has apparently pushed it in. The first mate baits up Pauline’s rod, spitting for luck on the giant hook and the two-pound cero mackerel. Bang, almost immediately a fish.

-

“Yi! Yi! A marlin! He’s after you, Mummy! He’ll take it!” Hemingway shouts, even before the first slack. (The art of slacking, of holding back before you try to set the hook, is counter-intuitive, counterreflexive, which is probably why Hemingway is so damn good at it — in both fishing and literature.) In the 12-minute fight that follows, the fish makes several jumps. It goes on a deep run. It tries to sound. Pauline keeps pumping and winding. They get it to the boat and roll it over the stern. The fish is very small, it turns out, but it’s a marlin all right. They document the moment with the big -Graflex camera that’s brought up from below.

-

They anchor at Playa Bacuranao, a cove at the mouth of the Rio Bacuranao. Hemingway pours Castilian wine into tumblers filled with chopped ice. He toasts his wife. The cook brings up a meal from the galley and stands in the companionway, admiring his efforts. The group sings along with Jimmy Durante — something about “hot pattatas” — whose inka-dinka-doo voice is scratching from the portable phonograph propped on a shelf in the cockpit next to the wheel. They begin trolling westward, back toward Havana, past the harborside village of Cojimar. They steer into the late–afternoon sun, feeling little of its blister, since they’re fishing off the back of the boat and are protected by the long shade of the cockpit.

-

Five days from now, on the 26th, a real marlin, of at least several hundred pounds, will come up, showing purple on the surface, fins spread out on either side like gull wings. “Get me the harness! The harness!” Hemingway will scream. His glasses will get fogged. His clothes will soak through. The crew will be holding the back of the fighting chair and bringing him ice water to rinse his mouth. After a tremendous fight, he’ll have the damn thing so close to the stern — and at the penultimate moment of tension, on both the man and the rod, the sharks will torpedo in, and one of them will dive at the nearly defeated marlin and slice the line close to the leader swivel. The fisherman will curse and slowly reel in and go below to change and rub himself down with alcohol. But by that night, it will be OK. This is worth noting, not because of the lost fish, but because of the character of the man. In these years the losses and the rages still seemed manageable.

-

—

To continue reading The Last Days of Ernest Hemingway, click through to the second page.

Follow us on on Facebook and on Twitter: @MensJournal and @MJGearGuy