Conference in our Spanish school for a docufilm about Ernest Hemingway

Luis Gati and Andrés Arenas Gómez, biographers of Ernest Hemingway, recently held a conference in our school about the causes of death of the author. In order to understand the reasons behind his “suicide”, they traced his life right back to his childhood. Since he was a child, he had had connections in some way to death, or rather an indifference towards it. This was due mainly to his volunteering in the war, where he experienced death at first hand for the first time.

His alcohol-dependent personality and his difficult character both had a tremendous influence upon his final decision to end his life, since bipolar disorder, played a huge role throughout Hemingway´s life, seeing him change rapidly from experiencing incredible highs to terrible lows.

His biographers prefer to use the term “neglect of life” when referring to Hemingway´s death, and in this way blame the people in his immediate environment who didn’t give importance to certain facts of his personal health and also blame all those who could have helped him but yet didn’t. They place some of the blame on the Mayo Clinic, where Hemingway was admitted for depression, where he received electric shocks and where, 50 years later, they still refuse to release the author’s medical files.

Hemingway practiced his death, and even showed his plans to his friends. “This is how I am going to kill myself”, he said, provoking panic in those present and, in the days leading up to his death, he started to say this sentence with increasing frequency. Other facts that endorse the claims of those who call Hemingway´s death “suicide by negligence” is the fact that the scene of his death was cleaned within hours. Upon the announcement of his death, the word “accident” was first used, but then only 72 hours later the word “suicide.”

They admitted him discreetly to the Mayo Clinic, with the intention of not alerting the press to the fact that the Nobel Prize winner had been admitted. Hemingway realised that they were causing problems to his plans of committing suicide. He told his wife Mary that he was already cured, and although she had taken him to the clinic, he continued regardless in the same way, trying to kill himself. They admitted him again. The second time they discharged him, his wife was terrified. The clinic said that he was cured.

Mary took him home and it was the 2nd of July in the morning when his suicide attempt was certain. His wife Mary hadn´t done anything to stop Hemingway from reaching the key to the cupboard where the weapon was stored. Abandonment of person and homicide by negligence; according to his biographers, the word “suicide” goes between commas.

This conference will make up part of the docufilm “The world of Hemingway” by Giuseppe Reccia, in which reality and fiction are mixed around the life of the American writer. The film will be partly filmed in Tarragona and partly in Pamplona, as well as featuring shots from Italy, Cuba and Lima (Peru), the only place in Latin America apart from Cuba that Hemingway visited. It will also include this sequence of Bilbao, the conference filmed in our school.