Re: Hemmingway and WP


Subject: Re: Hemmingway and WP
From: G.K. Barranger (nikkibar@wild.net)
Date: Thu Jul 15 1999 - 15:23:07 EDT


Alphonse Vinh wrote:
>
> 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
You got it. But it wasn't only the family problem that turned WP
negative on the point but I think the Church as well.

Nikki



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