Hemingway ‘driven to suicide by the FBI’ (?!??)

[Ed Jewett]

Hemingway driven to suicide by the FBI'
Posted on July 4, 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books...lance.html

By Jon Swaine, New York

AE Hotchner said he believed the FBI's monitoring of the Nobel Prize-winning author, over suspicions of his links to Cuba, "substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide" 50 years ago.

Hotchner wrote in The New York Times that he had "regretfully misjudged" his friend's fears of federal investigators, which were dismissed as paranoid delusions for years after his death.

In 1983 the FBI released a 127-page file it had kept on Hemingway since the 1940s, confirming he was watched by agents working for J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal interest in his case.

Hotchner described being met off a train by Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho, in November 1960, for a pheasant shoot with their friend Duke MacMullen.

Hemingway, struggling to complete his last work, complained "the feds" had "tailed us all the way" and that agents were poring over his accounts in a local bank that they passed on their journey.

"It's the worst hell," Hemingway said. "The goddamnedest hell. They've bugged everything. That's why we're using Duke's car. Mine's bugged. Everything's bugged. Can't use the phone. Mail intercepted."

Later that month he was committed for psychiatric care at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he received electric shock treatment. He attempted suicide several times before being released.

A few days after returning home to Ketchum, he shot himself in the head with his favourite shotgun aged 61.

"In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest's fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file," wrote Hotchner, the author of Papa Hemingway'.

"I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide," he said.

This entry was posted in Books, Cover-ups, Intelligence Agencies.

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From Wikipedia:

During his final years, Hemingway's behavior was similar to his father's before he himself committed suicide;[156] his father may have had the genetic disease hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration.[157] Medical records made available in 1991 confirm that Hemingway's hemochromatosis had been diagnosed in early 1961.[158] His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also committed suicide.[159] Added to Hemingway's physical ailments was the additional problem that he had been a heavy drinker for most of his life.[114] Writing in "Ernest Hemingway: A Psychological Autopsy of a Suicide", Christopher Martin evaluates the causes of the suicide: "Careful reading of Hemingway's major biographies and his personal and public writings reveals evidence suggesting the presence of the following conditions during his lifetime: bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probable borderline and narcissistic personality traits".[160] Martin claims suicide was inevitable because Hemingway "suffered from an enormous burden of psychiatric comorbidities and risk factors for suicide", although without a clinical evaluation of the patient, Martin concedes a diagnosis is difficult.[160]


Burwell, Rose Marie (January 26, 1996). Hemingway: the postwar years and the posthumous novels. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-48199-6.

Martin, Christopher D. (2006). "Ernest Hemingway: A Psychological Autopsy of a Suicide". Psychiatry 69 (4): 351361. doi:10.1521/psyc.2006.69.4.351. ISSN 00332747. PMID 17326729.

[Charles Drago]

That's an old shotgun.

[Jan Klimkowski]

"It's the worst hell," Hemingway said. "The goddamnedest hell. They've bugged everything. That's why we're using Duke's car. Mine's bugged. Everything's bugged. Can't use the phone. Mail intercepted."

Later that month he was committed for psychiatric care at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he received electric shock treatment. He attempted suicide several times before being released.

This is the early 1960s, when Behaviourism dominated shrink thinking and ECT was being used in an abusive, reckless and often criminal (MK ULTRA) fashion.

It's also an era when The Paranoia Scam was one of Their favourite games.

So, yes, make Hemingway paranoid, shock him with the electrodes and experimental drug concoctions in a white-walled prison, and watch Ernest decide to take the Path of Action. Self-erasure.

It's a plausible scenario.

Hemingway's psyche would have been a Prize, a Trophy, for the covert shrinks to mess with.

However, just as plausibly, Papa was plenty mad enough already and was capable of most anything.

[Ed Jewett]

The thing that struck me was his travels... places he'd been and the times he'd been there... no doubt, memories, contacts and insights there that are fodder for the people who need to read minds.

Believe it or not, I've never read much of Hemingway; in the future, I think I shall place an order for some used copies of most everything and have it shipped to my nursing home to be placed next to my rocking chair. Along with Conrad and Faulkner.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Along with Conrad

I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth the strange commingling of desire and hate.

Heart of Darkness.
1902.