Ernest Hemingway was one of the most published foreign writers in our country during the Iron Curtain. Many members of the intelligentsia even had his portraits on the wall. But could this great American writer be considered a role model? After all, many stories about him are nothing more than tales, invented by him.
The end of the Pope
In the early morning of July 2, 1961, Hemingway fired a shotgun into his mouth. This was a real blow to his admirers around the globe. Why did he commit this fatal act?
Shortly before the tragedy, the writer turned to one of his closest friends with a strange, at first glance, question: "What happens to a person when he suddenly realizes that he will no longer write the books that he vowed to write?"
As you know, at that time Ernest Hemingway was working on a volume of memoirs about Paris - the city that sheltered him when he was just entering the literary path and did not have a penny to heart. "There is no way I can get this damn thing done," Hemingway complained to a friend. "I know that the book is beautiful, I know what it should be, but I don't know how to put it on paper."
Loaded gun
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It is no secret that there were repeated attempts at suicide. Twice the writer was seen loading a gun, to the box of which was attached a suicide note addressed to Mary, his fourth wife. When Hemingway flew to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to receive shock therapy and get rid of the depression that tormented him, he tried to open the cabin hatch and jump out of the plane. On the same day, while refueling on the ground, the writer had to be dragged by force away from the rotating propeller …
Alas, all attempts to keep the Pope (as he was often called) from attempts on his own life, in the end, were in vain. After returning from treatment to his home in the Ketchum Mountains, Idaho, Hemingway spent only one night there. And the next morning a fatal volley burst out …
Hero or inventor?
“Pope” did his best to support the image of “a man of action” for those around him, who was in no way inferior to his literary heroes. Indeed, literature does not know a second such inventor … And meanwhile, inspiration left him, which is not surprising, because the writer was increasingly addicted to alcohol …
After the war, Hemingway managed to create a masterpiece only once - it was the story "The Old Man and the Sea", written in 1952. And even then this happened only thanks to an ambitious desire to get the Nobel Prize by all means, which two years earlier, to the indescribable rage of Ernest, went to his compatriot William Faulkner …
For almost 15 years, American publisher Alfred Hotchner wrote down almost everything that his idol and friend uttered … For example, the tales of how Hemingway fished Hitler's submarines from the coastal waters of Cuba or won victories over formidable predators … And about how the writer with the help rolled into a tube of newspaper, he pacified the tiger and saved the frightened trainer …
And about a hefty black bear that interfered with traffic until Hemingway forced him to go home in disgrace, putting him to shameful flight … that a huge predatory beast was urinating on the floor …
These stories about Hemingway quickly spread around the world, but now even the most zealous admirers of the writer doubt their authenticity, and few people already believe, for example, that the Nobel laureate indulged in love pleasures with the girlfriend of the gangster "Diamond Legs" on the stage of New York nightclub, or how cleverly he seduced the bride of an African leader when he went on safari with his wife Mary, as well as the fact that he spent the night with Mata Hari and found her "somewhat heavy in the hips" …
The latter is sheer nonsense, because when young Hemingway first arrived in Europe, this spy courtesan had been lying in the damp earth for more than a year …
So, Hemingway lied, and lied recklessly, not caring about the consequences … Why? One day, in a rush of candor, he said: "Big lies are much more believable than any truth, and those who write books can very well become very lucky liars." Well, he succeeded …
And yet, if the novels of Ernest Hemingway, like his life, sometimes sinned with exaggerated heroism, then in the stories he really reached the heights of the art of fiction and stood on a par with the recognized leading figures of this literary form - Guy de Maupassant and Scott Fitzgerald.
Once he wrote the following words: "I would like to be remembered by people as a writer, and not as a person who has been in the war, not as a hunter, drunkard and tavern brawler."
Probably, this extraordinary person nevertheless understood that he wasted both his strength and a large part of his great talent in vain. Who knows, perhaps the realization of this bitter truth made him pull the trigger?
Yuri Suprunenko