Exactly 50 years ago last Friday night going into Saturday morning — 1 July into the 2nd — in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway asked his wife Mary to sing an Italian song, ‘Tutti mi chiamano bionda’, everyone calls me blondie. After they had both gone up to bed he silently padded down the stairs, stepping softly so as to make no sound, went to the basement storage room, took out a double-barrelled shotgun, inserted two shells, went back up to the hall, leaned against the hard steel with his forehead and pulled the trigger. The newspapers reported it as an accident. I read about it the next day in my aunt Sophia’s garden in Athens, and decided right then and there that the writing life was the one for me.
Strange coincidence that half a century later the dates of the week would be identical. Fifty years might seem a lifetime to you young whippersnappers, but it’s only yesterday to me. How clear it still is. The great man, unable to live up to his title as the world’s heavyweight literary champion (Norman Mailer’s invention), goes out like a champ, with a bang. He’d been in the wars too long. And it was a graceful exit, despite the mess. An overdose would have been very un-Hemingwayesque. In Papa’s fiction tragic heroes died by bullet, like the Swede in ‘The Killers’, who is warned by Nick Adams that two pros are in town to kill him, but who stays in bed, looking at the wall, tired of running. Papa is out of fashion now, but so is sportsmanship, manhood, gallantry, even heterosexuality. And let’s not even mention Christianity.
What is there to say about Hemingway that hasn’t already been said or written? He was the first literary pop star before the p-word was invented.
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