Ernest Hemingway’s father
committed suicide, and ultimately three of his sons, including Ernest, did as
well. It’s normal to fear death, but there must be a special anxiety that
something like depression or other mental illnesses will inexorably lead one to
suicide if one’s father did it and if you fear the illness runs in the family.
There were factors behind the Ernest’s father taking this action, including
financial troubles and a troubled marriage. Hemingway finally attributed his
father’s suicide to cowardice, but along the way he turned totally against his
mother, blaming her and proclaiming her in a letter as a great American bitch. He
wasn’t nice about it. It’s not pretty stuff, but the suicide of a parent is a devastating
business on the children left behind because of the emotional havoc it can
wreak. It didn’t help that Hemingway was an addicted alcoholic, either. I like The Sun also Rises a lot, but it’s
surprising, when you look at it from this angle, how much attention is paid to
drinks and drinking in that slender novel. The ‘70s came up with sex, drugs and
rock’n’roll. The ‘20s were about sex, booze and jazz. Still a pretty potent
threesome. When Hemingway took his own life with a shotgun, he was done with
life. He was getting elderly and tired, couldn’t do most of the things that had
brought him so much pleasure in his life, but a life of heavy drinking, not
age, had most to do with that. His wife and friends knew what he had in mind, and
had him almost constantly under guard. He got away, though, and he did it. For
B., who claims the news brought him to tears, it must have been a scary
thought. I think because he knew why Hemingway did it and that he was
developing similar circumstances in his own life.
B. would have us believe that his
father’s suicide was the thing that made
his life resonate with Hemingway’s. I believe it was the drinking. B.’s
biographers are pretty clear that Berryman’s father was murdered, his death
almost certainly not a suicide, and Berryman knew it at some level. To come
clean with admitting that threatened two foundational things in his life: A decent
relationship with his mother, and the use he made of a father’s suicide in his
work. So, he may well have struck a pose that he eventually depended on
maintaining, and in The Dream Songs there
has only been one subtle reference so far, that I can recall catching, where
one might detect even a hint of his knowing that his father’s death could have
been something other than the official suicide. So the corresponding emotional
state that he might have with Hemingway regarding their fathers may well be
forced or even false. But there’s no reason to doubt B.’s tears in that Indiana
dining room. Why the tears? When someone dies, and we grieve over it, we’re
often grieving for ourselves. B. didn’t have quite Hemingway’s drive for
adventure—war and combat, big game hunting, marlin fishing, bullfighting—but he
did share Hemingway’s driving appetite for sex, and his driving need for drink,
and like Hemingway, he channeled much of this drive into his work and crafted
an impressive string of successes with that. But he could also see where it led
for Hemingway and where it was leading for him, and fathers didn’t have as much
to do with his suicidal anxiety as he claimed. It wasn’t directed as much
outward onto a lost father, it was more inward, directed against the alcoholic
self.
I don’t mean to seem
unsympathetic or harsh: suicide or murder, either would be disastrous for a kid
to have to incorporate into his emotional fabric, and clearly, B. struggled
with deep-seated emotional disturbances all his life. But as for what he
claims, and what seems to have been, they don’t quite jive. That in itself is
interesting enough. But it throws onto this poem a harsher light than the
simple pathos the author probably intended and was asking for. Maybe “harsher
light” isn’t the right term. I think “a more complex sadness” would be better.
That there was sadness in his life is not at issue.
Good stuff.
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