Word: bakers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...book ends on the morning of July 2, 1961, when Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. He was exhausted at the time and had been under treatment for erratic blood pressure, liver ailments and acute melancholia. But, Baker implies, the tragic themes of Hemingway's writing were not contradicted but confirmed by that final act and by Hemingway's entire personal history...
...life was as haunted by death and violence as his stories. "When asked what he is afraid of," his mother wrote of five-year-old Ernest, "he shouts out fraid a nothing."" But he felt compelled to spend half a lifetime proving it. An astonishing number of Baker's pages-and the book's rich lode of rarely seen illustrations-document the journeys Hemingway undertook to various test sites of courage: high school football in Oak Park, 111., three wars, hunting grounds from Idaho to Africa, boxing and bull rings, ski slopes, four marriage beds...
Ernest had a way of attracting further tests. In the early Paris days, his infant son, Bumby (John Hemingway, first child by first wife, Hadley Richardson), cut the pupil of Daddy's right eye with his fingernail. Baker recounts how Hemingway broke a toe on a gate, tore his stomach on a boat cleat, ripped open his hand on a punching bag, and shot himself in both legs while trying to land a shark. He was particularly prone to head injury: four major concussions in one two-year stretch...
Violence characterized many of Hemingway's personal relationships too, as novelist John Dos Passes found out when he visibly and unflatteringly portrayed Hemingway in his novel Chosen Country. Hemingway spoke lividly of training his dogs and cats to "attack one-eyed Portuguese bastards." According to Baker, he called Scott Fitzgerald, who revered him, "a rummy and a liar with the inbred talent of a dishonest and easily frightened angel." Thomas Wolfe he rated as "a one-book glandular giant with the guts of three mice." Once he provoked a fight in a hotel dining room with William Saroyan...
...wooed her during the Spanish Civil War and separated from her in World War II. She complained that he took too few baths-and besides, she had her own career as novelist and journalist to follow. Hemingway classified her with his mother, whom he condemned as "a domineering shrew." Baker appears to stand discreetly in awe of Mary Hemingway (called "Papa's Pocket Rubens" by her husband), who stood by him from...