Revisiting Ernest Hemingway and Baseball: Sanity, Success, and Suicide

Abstract

But must think, he thought. Because it is all have left.That and baseball. wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked the way hit him [the big Mako shark] In the brain. (79)1The suicide of Robin Williams August 11, 2014, sparked a barrage of analyses, the bulk of them allying him with Ernest Hemingway> who died by his own hand in 1961. One indisputable conclusion appears among those controversy-filled analyses: the reasons the two geniuses moved to life-ending decisions remain unknown. In anticipating queries from readers of Papa Hemingway, authored in 1966 by close friend for fourteen years, right up to the end, A. E. Hotchner confessed that I cannot tell you why(xi). Forty-eight years later, a doctor of Clinical Psychology with almost half-a-century of experience sounded similar while declaring TV's popular Dr. Drew wrong in his conclusions about the comic's suicide: the Idaho professional argues that Certainly we can never know the thoughts and emotions he [Williams] privately experienced that eventually led him to end his own life (Hueftle). A later analysis, Madness and the Muse, while mentioning Williams and Hemingway in impressive review of research its topic, is forced to end with a frustrated and frustrating indecisiveness (Bartlett). Appearing even more recently, Persistent Myth of the Mad Genius merely reinforces that same indecisiveness (Tavris).Yet, neither controversy nor uncertainty disguises interest that the two shared. Both the writer and Williams enjoyed baseball. The latter was a committed fan, and a long-time admirer, of his adopted city's National League team, the San Francisco Giants (Cassavell). But Hemingway was different. He fancied himself aficionado of baseball almost as much as he regarded himself as the American expert of the bull ring... states Paul Hendrickson (317). That belief, he harbored and cultivated over the bulk of his lifetime until it emerged-full blown-in the last novel of his creation published before his death. The Old Man and the Sea was an immediate success throughout the world, proclaimed Charles Scribner, Jr., in his Introduction to the 1952 edition of the work, adding that it was specifically cited when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Hemingway in 1954 (9)Overthe decades, scholars and critics have lavished abundant commentary lifelong fascination with the sport.2 Even as eleven-year old, it has been noted, he authored a poem about the Chicago Cubs (Gietschier 28), and, a few years later, as a high schooler, he wrote essays under the pseudonym Ring Lardner, Jr., out of respect for the baseball writer he most respected (Smith xxv-xxvi). Lardner's prose, too, left its imprint Hemingway, his mind and his fiction. In his often-praised Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker notes that Hemingway at one point even discoursed in a letter to a friend on the excellence of Ring Lardner, whom he then placed as high as 'Jupiter tiptoes' (51).But adolescent admiration did not equate with adult preference and prowess. Long before his proclamation of 1942 that a writer's standard of fidelity to the truth should so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be (qtd. in Baker, Hemingway's Ancient Mariner 157), Hemingway had abandoned any thought of casting his short novel in the first-person made famous in acclaimed works of Lardner's like Alibi Ike and in the less-than-literate English allowing their author to amuse the nation's sports fans. Hemingway had immersed himself in Lardner's brash, self-deluding diamond personalities and their unconventional language and had found them entertaining but lacking, unsuitable for the multilayered work involving baseball that he was to write into reality years later. An omniscient point of view was to combine with a minimalist conventional English to allow him to unfold a narrative not simply about fishing, old man, and a boy but, symbolically, about America's National Pastime, its most majestic performer ever, and the fate of the sport's dynasties and their record-setters. …