AZ’s “DIARY OF A DAMNED MAN”

“Papa” Hemingway bit into life as if it were a big bloody burrito.  He merrily bulldozed his way through the world like Santa Claus with a painful case of priapism. He was so cartoonishly macho, it’s easy to picture him chewing off his own umbilical cord when he was born.
Perhaps uncomfortable with the implied effeminacy and sensitivity of his role as a literary luminary, Hemingway “proved” his mettle by drinking, hunting, deep-sea fishing, and fist-fighting indigenous Third World peoples.
He savored the hemorrhaging spectacle of a good bullfight.
He chased poontang like a cat cornering a cockroach.
To his credit, he threatened writers and assaulted photographers.
When his leg was ripped open by mortar fire during World War I, Hemingway relished the experience as one might enjoy a strawberry dipped in Kool Whip. In 1954, when two flaming plane crashes within two days left him with burns, a concussion, a ruptured kidney, and double vision, he walked out of the African jungle swilling rotgut liquor and laughing at premature obituaries.
 His scrotal gusto was so pronounced, it bordered on a death wish. He once told a German journalist that death was “just another whore.” He was fond of saying that “man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
While hunting with friends in 1932, he casually mentioned that he’d kill himself “if it came to that.” He gave another friend and unsolicited demonstration of how to point a shotgun at yourself and trip the trigger with your toe.
But by the late fifties, as he wandered about his home in Idaho munching peanut-butter-and-onion sandwiches, friends noticed that “Big Ernie” was getting a bit loopy. His ruddy complexion was gone and his once-beefy arms were reduced to celery sticks as his huge 6-foot frame dropped down to under 160 pounds. 
He was being treated at Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems from his excessive drinking and hard living. The loss of his legendary physical prowess and resilience had exacerbated his lifelong battle with hereditary depression which had claimed the life of numerous generations of Hemingways, including his father and two sisters.
Doctors at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic diagnosed Hemingway as “depressive-persecutory” in 1960, and he was treated with a least seven electroshock treatments, deepening his misery by blowing out his memory and thus crippling his writing ability. “It was a brilliant cure,” he told a visitor, “but we lost the patient.”
He returned from the hospital with his suicidal urge strengthened. One morning in April of 1961, his wife Mary caught him in the vestibule holding a shotgun and two shells, gazing dreamily out the window at the Sawtooth Mountains. A charter plane was readied to wing him back to Mayo.
As his party was leaving for the plane, he told them he had forgotten something back at the house. He dashed inside, bolted the door, and headed for the gun rack. A friend kicked in the door finding him loading a shell into his shotgun, and tackled him, prying the weapon from his hands.
The next day a heavily sedated Hemingway was placed in the plane. While aloft, he tried to open the cabin door and leap. He was restrained and further sedated. When the plane made a pit stop in Wyoming after engine difficulty, Hemingway attempted to run into another plane’s propellers but was again tackled and restrained.  Once his plane was again aflight, he again tried to leap from the cabin door.
He received more electroshock therapy at Mayo, almost entirely wiping out his ability to concentrate. When a visiting friend asked him why he wanted to kill himself, he replied with desperate passion, “What do you thing happens to a man going in sixty-two when he realizes that he can never don any of the things he promised himself in the good days? Or when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? … If I can’t exist on my own terms, than existence is impossible. Do you understand? That is how I’ve lived, and that is how I must live!”
At the height of his powers, Hemingway invented a spare, non-adjectival prose style from which American writers have never recovered. When it came time to kill himself, he did it the same blunt, inelegant manner in which he wrote.
After his second discharge from the Mayo Clinic, he and his wife took a scenic, unhurried drive back to Idaho, notably mainly for Hemingway’s paranoia that the police would arrest him for transporting alcohol. The couple had a pleasant dinner at home. The next morning, July 2, 1961, he tiptoed down to the gun rack in his red robe while Mary slept, grabbed a silver-inlayed double-barrel shotgun, rested the gun butt on the floor like he had demonstrated before, tripped both triggers, and blew most of his head clean off his shoulders. Only his chin and lower half of his mouth was still connected to his body.
Having spent years with his teeth buried in Life’s jugular vein, Hemingway finally turned and bit off his own head.