KETCHUM, Idaho . The room where he killed himself is small, a foyer in the house that overlooks the mountains and the Big Wood River just north of here. You stand inside that room, time-frozen on the morning of July 2, 1961, and imagine a shotgun blast, imagine his wife, Mary, rushing down from the bedroom to find that Ernest Hemingway had just blown his brains out.
He’d worked on “A Moveable Feast” in this house, the memoir about when and where he was happiest. Here, during his last days of a life going dark in the glorious light of Sun Valley, he certainly wasn’t. Happier times were in 1939, when he labored on “For Whom the Bell Tolls” at the Sun Valley Lodge, room 206.
Just when you think you can quit him, hate him, make fun of him, Hemingway continues to fascinate. Woody Allen brought him to life, a boorish and boozy caricature, in “Midnight in Paris.” The actor Bradley Cooper goes manic after finishing “A Farewell to Arms” in the film “Silver Linings Playbook.” Storming into his parents’ bedroom, he blurts out, “Can’t somebody say let’s be positive, let’s have a good ending to the story?” And terrific books, from Paul Hendrickson’s biography, “Hemingway’s Boat,” to the novel about the writer’s first marriage, Paula McLain’s “The Paris Wife,” bring fresh perspectives to the dark night of Papa’s soul.
Not by design, I’ve been visiting the life shrines of the 20th century’s greatest writer - in Paris, at Lake Maggiore in Italy, at his home in Key West, and here at his final residence in Idaho. Mysteries about the source of his genius and his character flaws were not answered in this accidental pilgrimage. Sexist, bully, anti-Semite, adulterer, proud Paleo: how could such a great writer be such an awful human being?
But at each stop along the way, many clues emerged, until a rather obvious answer presented itself to the question of when and where he was happiest.
You start in Sun Valley. The Nature Conservancy protects the heart of Silver Creek, one of the world’s great fly fishing waters, as well as the splendid residence where Hemingway took his last breath. You can see what drew him here. “Best of all he loved the fall,” Hemingway wrote, in a eulogy to another resident, though he could have been describing his own feelings, “the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams, and above the hills the high blue windless skies.”
In his last years, Hemingway could no longer find that joy in nature and simple things. He was racked by depression, bipolar mood disorders and alcoholism, and had recently been treated with electroconvulsive shock therapy. He had delusions that could be described as psychotic. He was struggling with a novel and the Paris memoir; on many days, the words would not come. The question arises, as with Vincent Van Gogh or any other great artist cursed with mental illness: What would Hemingway on meds be like? Would he even be Hemingway?
In Key West, a driving distance of nearly 3,000 miles from here, you hear all the tales of debauchery and good political fights. With his second wife, Pauline, Hemingway lived during the 1930s in a Spanish Colonial built of native rock in the Old Town. He drank to excess, brawled with friends and lovers, but managed to be at his typewriter in a second-floor studio at dawn. He labored to put out 800 or so words a day . a lesson for all writers who wait for tardy muses. There he wrote, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “To Have and Have Not” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
From his letters, and accounts of the time, he was too restless, emotionally, to be happy in Key West. Fame had reshaped him; he needed conflict. When you stare at the walls and feel the claustrophobia of his work room, when you imagine him reaching for a few good words, you understand why he said, after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, that “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”
Lake Maggiore, where the southern Alps bind Italy and Switzerland, is a place to find the better things in life. Young Hemingway was wounded in the Great War, his legs peppered with shrapnel while he worked as an ambulance driver. On a convalescent leave, he came to the lakeshore village of Stresa. You wonder how could he leave. He’d fallen in love with a nurse, and fallen out of love with war. The book that came from those experiences, with scenes set at Lake Maggiore, was “A Farewell to Arms.” The novel has a tragic ending (thus, the Bradley Cooper rant). For Hemingway, fairy tale settings do not produce fairy tale stories.
But in Paris, at least, he found something real and deep in another mythic setting, though it would not be lasting. He moved there with Hadley Richardson, his first wife, in the 1920s. “Honestly acquired knowledge,” Hemingway wrote, is what makes good literature. In Paris, he acquired plenty of it . living above a sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, crafting “The Sun Also Rises” at the Closerie des Lilas, arguing about art and authenticity with Gertrude Stein, reassuring F. Scott Fitzgerald that his penis wasn’t too small.
He was poor, unknown, struggling, in love with Hadley, and never happier. “We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other,” he wrote. “That is the sort of happiness you should not tinker with but nearly everyone you knew tried to adjust it.” He came to this conclusion when he was broken man, and would soon end his life in the foyer of this house in Idaho. Among his many regrets: “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”
