If you Google Hemingway’s death, this comes up as one of the most often asked questions in relation to your current search.  First off, reader, I would like to address the elephant in the room. Hemingway is dead. He does not presently die anymore. He died. Which almost makes me love the question even more. This means that most of the people who Google Hemingway’s death, struggle with tense. Or, it means that Hemingway, like the hero in a story, is alive until you read his death.

I would love to explain this away by saying that these searches come from young teens doing research papers on Old Man and the Sea, but I can’t help but think I’d be kidding myself. And you, for that matter.  So let’s not let it irk us, instead let’s move on promptly.

I’ve read some Hemingway. In fact, Old Man and the Sea was one of those books that I’d managed to read at the exact right time in my life. On top of that, A Moveable Feast was the first book that I bought and read completely on the same day. I’d appropriately purchased the book in a used book store then went across the street to a cafe and read the thing from cover to cover. Meanwhile, For Whom the Bell Tolls remains to be at the top of a very short list of books I will never finish. So, to start this whole thing off, I’m sure you can tell I’m coming from a pool of mixed feelings on Hemingway.

I Googled Hemingway’s death because I was curious about the year. That was an easy curiosity to settle as the year is quite clearly stated as the first search result. The following curiosity wasn’t so easily handled. I stumbled on an article published by the New York Times that explains that Hemingway had died. In the article his wife, Mary, explains that she felt the fatal shot was an accident.

A notable tidbit here is that Hemingway’s father committed suicide in a similar fashion, and he did so with Hemingway’s grandfather’s pistol. 

It seems coincidental to say the least that Hemingway would kill himself in the same way his father did, especially because of the evidence in Hemingway’s writing that shows how his father’s suicide affected him. I personally don’t judge coincidences. I have taken enough psychology classes to know the arguments against causation v.s. correlation. If you’re interested in checking my source, you can find the link below this post.

I’m not sure why this opinion expressed by his wife challenged my views on Hemingway so. One moment I’m walking into work, the next my coworker is telling me stories of how Hemingway had been quoted saying something prolific. The problem with this last idea, I was quick to point out, is that Hemingway is often mis-attributed with so many terrific quotes. Honestly, most of these sayings are so hard to trace, that I believe anything within the realm of relative insight during the height of Hemingway’s popularity has been attributed to him. 

This time, however, I was wrong. Hemingway wrote a book called Across the River and Into the Trees. In the book he expresses some grand ideas about how no one ever really listens to anyone. I like the quote, and I’m glad that Hemingway can be attributed to it without any doubt.

Let’s get back to his death, though, because really, the debate with my coworker about the quote and my Googling the answer lead to my questioning all reality. 

Did Hemingway shoot himself by accident?

The truth? I don’t know the truth, and honestly, there is so much speculation and so many loose ideas tied to the idea that it’s genuinely hard to say. If you read up on the event, you might find that later his wife admitted that he did in fact commit suicide. You might also see that he had started to drink heavily and display signs of depression during the second half of his life. Along with that, some articles say that he wrote a letter to his mother-in-law saying that he would “probably go the same way…” (The Vintage News)

The same sources will also tell you that Hemingway was extremely accident prone. For instance, he survived several plane crashes, was injured in a few wars, and suffered from blood poisoning at one point while on safari. Is it really so hard to believe that his accident prone nature caught up to him before his depression did? And maybe he never wrote his mother-in-law about his dark fate. There’s potential that he’d been misattributed to a few other ideas that we want to attach him to. Some neighbors are quoted saying that Hemingway seemed normal just one day before his death, while others say he’d lost a significant amount of weight and seemed distant and quiet, out of sorts.  

I’ll let you make up your mind for yourself, reader.  I just feel like there’s more to the story than we’re actually seeing, and maybe more story than truth.

Until next time, reader. Here are a few sources:

The New York Times – http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-obit.html
The Vintage News – (https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/07/25/after-his-father-committed-suicide-ernest-hemingway-wrote-ill-probably-go-the-same-way/)