Posted on 07/21/2015 6:52:22 AM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
July 21, 1899: Ernest Hemingway is born in Oak Park, Ill.
Hemingway didn’t become known as a “literary he-man” without taking a few risks — in art and in life. From his birth on this day, July 21, in 1899, to his death in 1961, he had nearly as many real-life brushes with death as he assigned to his similarly he-manly fictional characters.
He’d been obsessed with death ever since he confronted it — and nearly succumbed to it — on an Italian battlefield during World War I, according to TIME. And although he ultimately died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 61, while suffering from a number of disabling physical and mental illnesses, the idea of facing down death at the hands of an enemy soldier, or on the horns of a bull, had long captivated him and infused his writing. Remarking on his concise but vivid prose, TIME noted in 1961: “Everything in Hemingway is seen as it might be looked at by a man on the day he knew he would die.”
True to his larger-than-life fortitude, Hemingway seemed to court death wherever he went — and to do so with vigorous good humor. Here are some of the many ways he almost went before his time:
1. Shredded by an Austrian mortar shell. During World War I, Hemingway served on the Italian front lines as an ambulance driver with the Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, per TIME, he was “so badly wounded in a burst of shellfire that he felt life slip from his body, ‘like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner,’ and then return. He emerged with 237 bits of shrapnel (by his own count), an aluminum kneecap, and two Italian decorations.”
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
And death never got him until he took it voluntarily.....living, and dying, on his own terms.
Till he took the coward’s way out.
I don’t know why they call it that
I can certainly imagine a circumstance where someone knew there was nothing that could be done for their health, they felt they were a drain on their family, and there really was no benefit to going on.
I don’t think I would like to spend my last days draining my bank account to enrich doctors and hospital administrators. Life insurance wont pay for suicide though...
I think in the end he was going nutsy. I remember reading a reason he drank was to stop the words flowing in his head, it was the only way he could escape his work....
voluntary suicide is going to be a big thing because of Obamacare - next 20-30 years, people are just going to off themselves rather than go thru end of life ordeals as if you were at the DMV awaiting service. Sneering minority “folks” wagging the finger at you . . .
“Life insurance won’t pay for suicide.”
That’s why you need to get a little creative.You don’t think all those single car accidents late at night are all accidents,do you?
Or killed while cleaning a gun?
Some Life insurance policies will cover suicide after the first two years.
But the SIXTH time...
Hemingway revealed as failed KGB spy
Notes from Stalin-era intelligence archives show 'agent Argo' as a willing recruit in 1941
Up till now, this has been a notably cheerful year for admirers of Ernest Hemingway – a surprisingly diverse set of people who range from Michael Palin to Elmore Leonard. Almost every month has brought good news: a planned Hemingway biopic; a new, improved version of his memoir, A Moveable Feast; the opening of a digital archive of papers found in his Cuban home; progress on a movie of Islands in the Stream.
Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was for a while on the KGB’s list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.
Its section on the author’s secret life as a “dilettante spy” draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name “Argo”, and “repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us” when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to “give us any political information” and was never “verified in practical work”, so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade. Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?
The latter reading would chime with his attempts to assist the US during the second world war in his fishing boat El Pilar, patrolling waters north of Cuba in search of U-Boats, making coded notes but only one sighting.
Revelations made in recent years have not been kind to some of the writers and artists who made their reputations in the Spanish civil war. George Orwell’s list of public figures who were crypto-communists, prepared for a Foreign Office propaganda arm in 1949, sullied his saintly image when it was published six years ago. Research in Soviet archives led Antony Beevor to call Andre Malraux a “mythomaniac”. Robert Capa has been accused of faking the best-known photo of that conflict. The virulent hatred of Arabs of Martha Gellhorn - Hemingway’s third wife, who covered the civil war with him - has been exposed. And now it’s the turn of Hemingway himself, the biggest name of all, to lose some of his lustre.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-failed-kgb-spy
I’ve read just about everything the man wrote, much of it more than once. I even own a volume of his not-so-great poetry. I’ve done an awful lot of reading about Hemingway’s life, too. To me, far and away the saddest thing I know about Hemingway’s life was not his mental illness and ultimate suicide, but his rejection of Christ Jesus. His grandparents were missionaries and his father was a friend of famed evangelist D.L. Moody and he spent time in their home, yet Ernest rejected the faith he was steeped in as a youth. Seeming to need to make his rejection clear, at times he wrote of Christ with disgusting irreverence. All the acclaim, booze, women, and manly pursuits couldn’t fill the giant hole in his soul, but he refused to bow to the One who could.
I admire Ernest the writer, but I don’t admire Ernest the man. I pity him.
No. He was pretty much hard-wired for suicide. It runs in his family - Mariel now is a spokesman for research into genetic-based suicide. Also, at the end, Hemingway had terrible paranoia. He was seriously mentally ill.
Finally. I have something in common with the famous.
he had PTSD. Noticed it in The Sun Also Rises.
Hey, around these parts you're pretty famous. ;-)
He considered our lovely middle to upper-class suburban village (Oak Park, Illinois) as constricting, unsophisticated, provincial and boring (exactly the opposite of what it was....it was highly stable and laden with professionals, creative folk and academics)...and, seeking adventure and upon graduating high school Hemingway immediately left town vowing never to return....and he didn't, except once, to attend the funeral of a family member.
Over my lifetime, I read most of Hemingway's books...and I found many of them rather tedious, some are extremely boring.
Strangely enough, because his story lines were set in exotic foreign places where interesting, turbulent, historic, colorful events were taking place (bullfights, civil wars, safaris, etc.) his novels and short stories made the best dang movies you could imagine...and I saw and loved almost every last one of them.....For Whom the Bell Tolls (Cooper, Bergman).....To Have and Have Not (Bogie & Bacall).....A Farewell to Arms (Cooper, Hayes).....The Sun Also Rises (Power, Gardner, Flynn).....The Killers (Lancaster, Gardner).....The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Peck, Hayward, Gardner).....and the list goes on.....
This abundance of classic movies by a single American author can hardly be rivaled or surpassed.
Leni
...only to do the job himself.
As long as it’s your decision, not G-d’s, that’s all that’s important.
When he was 42 years old?
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