Subject: Re: Hemmingway and WP
From: Alphonse Vinh (Yinshih@AOL.COM)
Date: Wed Jul 14 1999 - 23:53:00 EDT
Nikki:
NPR is having a special anniversary story on the 21st of July about Hemingway
as reported by Susan Stamberg. I've worked on that story with her. At the
National Portrait Gallery in Washington, we have an extraordinary Hemingway
Portrait Exhibition which runs through the end of October. Certainly,
Hemingway was one of the most photogenic of our major writers.
I went to hear Patrick Hemingway talk about his father last week. He was
reticent about various aspects of Ernest Hemingway's life, but one could see
the pain of Hemingway's suicide reflected in Patrick when he obliquely
refered to the year of his father's death.
Ernest Hemingway's last years were extremely difficult and he was certainly
mad at various points. When he decided to kill himself in 1961, Hemingway was
facing the strong possibility of being institutionalised in a mental asylum
by his wife Mary. He was increasingly depressive and paranoid--and he knew
it. Moreover, Hem knew his writing days were over. And that he could not bare
along with his impending madness.
Hemingway's one great American literary contemporary was William Faulkner.
When Faulkner heard of Hemingway's suicide, he said, "I don't like a man who
takes the easy way out." This was the stoical Faulkner who liked to say, "The
only way through suffering is to go through it." Hemingway also liked to say,
"Il faut durer." But in the end, given the choice of falling into degrading
insanity and dependency, Hemingway chose death, which is an option in the
Stoic tradition. Seneca talked about letting go of the slip tying one to the
boat anchored in the harbour if one's dignity would be compromised. Indeed,
the Roman philosopher chose to open his veins in his bath rather than suffer
the degradations of monstrous torture and humiliation before execution under
Nero's orders.
Given the Stoic broadsword ideals of the Percy family and given the
legacy of suicide in Walker's lineage, I can well understand his ambivalence
towards Hemingway whose ideas and words echo through Will Barrett's father in
"The Second Coming."
//Alphonse
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