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Ernest Hemingway: Later Years, Quotes, Biography, Education, Facts, Writing (1999)

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• published: 05 Mar 2016
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Through the end of the 1950s, Hemingway continued to rework the material that would be published as A Moveable Feast.[134] In the summer of 1959, he visited Spain to research a series of bullfighting articles commissioned by Life magazine,[140] returning to Cuba in January 1960 to work on the manuscript. Life wanted only 10,000 words, but the manuscript grew out of control. For the first time in his life unable to organize his writing, he asked A. E. Hotchner to travel to Cuba to help. Hotchner helped him trim the Life piece to 40,000 words, and Scribner's agreed to a full-length book version (The Dangerous Summer) of almost 130,000 words.[141] Hotchner found Hemingway to be "unusually hesitant, disorganized, and confused",[142] and suffering badly from failing eyesight. On July 25, 1960, Hemingway and Mary left Cuba, never to return. Hemingway then traveled alone to Spain to be photographed for the front cover for the Life magazine piece. A few days later, he was reported in the news to be seriously ill and on the verge of dying, which panicked Mary until she received a cable from him telling her, "Reports false. Enroute Madrid. Love Papa."[144] However, he was seriously ill, and believed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown.[141] He was lonely and took to his bed for days, retreating into silence, despite having had the first installments of The Dangerous Summer published in Life in September 1960 to good reviews.[145] In October, he left Spain for New York, where he refused to leave Mary's apartment on the pretext that he was being watched. She quickly took him to Idaho, where George Saviers (a Sun Valley physician) met them at the train.[141] At this time, Hemingway was constantly worried about money and his safety.[143] He worried about his taxes, and that he would never return to Cuba to retrieve the manuscripts he had left there in a bank vault. He became paranoid, thinking the FBI was actively monitoring his movements in Ketchum.[146][147] The FBI had, in fact, opened a file on him during World War II, when he used the Pilar to patrol the waters off Cuba, and J. Edgar Hoover had an agent in Havana watch Hemingway during the 1950s.[148] By the end of November, Mary was at wits' end, and Saviers suggested Hemingway go to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he may have believed he was to be treated for hypertension.[146] The FBI knew Hemingway was at the Mayo Clinic, as an agent later documented in a letter written in January 1961.[149] In an attempt at anonymity, Hemingway was checked in at the Mayo Clinic under Saviers' name.[145] Meyers writes that "an aura of secrecy surrounds Hemingway's treatment at the Mayo", but confirms he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy as many as 15 times in December 1960, and in January 1961 was "released in ruins".[150] Reynolds was able to access Hemingway's records at the Mayo, which indicated that the combination of medications given Hemingway may have created the depressive state for which he was treated. Three months later back in Ketchum, in April 1961, one morning in the kitchen Mary "found Hemingway holding a shotgun". She called Saviers who sedated him and admitted him to the Sun Valley hospital; from there he was returned to the Mayo Clinic for more electro shock treatments.[152] He was released in late June, and arrived home in Ketchum on June 30. Two days later, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, Hemingway "quite deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun.[153] He had unlocked the basement storeroom where his guns were kept, gone upstairs to the front entrance foyer of their Ketchum home, and according to Mellow, with the "double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often it might have been a friend", he shot himself.[154] Mary called the Sun Valley Hospital, and a doctor quickly arrived at the house. Despite his finding that Hemingway "had died of a self-inflicted wound to the head", the initial story told to the press was that the death had been "accidental". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway