However, in 2011, Aaron Edward Hotchner, the writer’s biographer and long-time friend came out with the most viable explanation to date. Hotchner was Hemingway’s trusty companion during the last 13 years of his life, joining him on various escapades in Cuba and Europe.
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According to him, the writer was faced with two major ordeals in his later life.
First was a conviction that his most lucrative years as an author were long gone and that he would never be able to produce literary work of the likes of For Whom The Bell Tolls or The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway had confessed to Hotchner that he felt unable to finish his mission as a writer on the one hand, while also ruling out the notion of retiring as he considered retirement to be impossible for a writer.
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The second idea that plagued Hemingway, and ultimately led him to suicide, was a fear of being followed by the FBI. Hotchner recalls in detail bursts of paranoia during the last years of his life, spent in his reclusive resort in Ketchum, Idaho.
As early as 1959, Hemingway seems to have been seriously distraught by the notion that he was being constantly followed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he claimed bugged his home and even his automobile.
In the
NY Times interview, Hotchner painfully recalled a situation when he arrived to visit Hemingway in Idaho, together with Forrest “Duke” MacMullen, the writer’s old hunting pal. It was November 1959, and the three friends had arranged a pheasant shooting trip.
Instead, Hutchings and MacMullen were met with a mad old man who
appeared to be haunted by various demons, whom he called “the feds“:
“It’s the worst hell. The most goddamned 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.”
His ramblings continued until he went silent, only to burst into another rant about the federal agents going through his financial accounts. During dinner in a local bar with the writer and his wife, Mary, Hemingway asked them to leave early as he was convinced that the two men sitting close to their table were also federal agents.
The situation looked grim. Mary expressed her worries to Hotchner, for she was strugging to cope with her husband’s crippling paranoia.
By the end of the month, the author was admitted to the psychiatric section of St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, using a fake name to avoid publicity.
There he was subjected to 11 electric shock treatments, believed back then to be helpful with mental illness.
Of course, such torture only worsened his state.
Less than two years after, the writer put a shotgun to his head, ending a complex and beautiful life filled with inner turmoil.
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It was proven that his phones were tapped and that his correspondence was monitored. Evidence implies that even the telephone at St. Mary’s Hospital was under surveillance as well.
After learning of this, Hotchner summarized his feelings towards Hemingway and the fact that he, like everyone else, was convinced that what the writer was experiencing was just a product of mental illness:
“In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.”
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/...hemingway-fbi/