Tag: Hemingway

Ernest’s last inscription

bristowbovey

When Ernest Hemingway was undergoing electro-convulsive treatment for depression and paranoia in 1961, he was cared for by the Franciscan nuns of St Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. He inscribed a copy of The Old Man and the Sea for Sister Immaculata, hoping to write another for her when “the writing luck is running well again”. He added, and underlined: “And it will.” He was 61 years old, and his handwriting was so clear and elegant and firm you read it and you share his hope. Sixteen days later he killed himself with his favourite shotgun.

Robert Capa meets Ernest Hemingway

bristowbovey

I thought I’d seen most of the photographs of Ernest Hemingway, a very photographed man, but somehow I’d never seen this one, in the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, taken by the great war photographer Robert Capa in 1941, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Hemingway steps from a canoe, carrying a bottle of wine and a shotgun, his face in shadow. Twelve years earlier his father killed himself with a hand gun, and Hemingway’s mother sent him the gun as a memento. Exactly twenty years later, in Ketchum, Idaho, just around the corner from where this photo was taken, Hemingway would kill himself with his favourite Boss & Co bird-hunting shotgun. I think this photograph might be staged: there are no water droplets visible in the canoe from the paddle; the bottle appears to be full.