Bad Hemingway

July 2, 1961. Ketchum, Idaho. The sound of a discharging Boss & Co. shotgun disturbs the calm. The shotgun had been purchased by the homeowner from Abercrombie & Fitch; at that time a retailer of firearms and excursion goods to the well-heeled and not a mere clothier. The butt of the shotgun rests in the hallway. The trigger pulled, the twin barrels no longer rest against the forehead of that most macho man of letters, Ernest Miller Hemingway. Beyond any power of rescue, his final suicide attempt is a success.

Hemingway had repeatedly received electroconvulsant therapy for his recurring bouts of depression. In an ironic twist, the resultant memory loss became a central focus for his suicidal ideation. It has been speculated that Hemingway suffered from hemochromatosis, a concentration of iron in the blood that causes depression. The condition is hereditary, and certainly Hemingway's father Clarence, as well as his siblings Ursula and Leicester, also ended their own lives.

Such an expression of deep emotional turmoil may seem surprising for the famously hard-boiled writer; viewed another way, it was entirely in keeping for a man who believed in writing vividly of factual experience and leaving it to the reader to provide the emotional response. There is a poetic economy to the obliteration of Hemingway's abused mind that could not be equaled by any words it might have produced.

* * *

Hemingway had a prodigious impact on American writing - talents from Elmore Leonard to Hunter S. Thompson have cited him as a formative influence on their work. But perhaps the most tangential offshoot from the great man's oeuvre is... well, let me tell you the story.

1929. Venice, Italy. The bar of the Hotel Europa is redolent with the smoke of cigars smoked by cigar-smoking men, and dark with the dark darkness of old leather. A foreigner sits at the bar. He is an American. He hails from Boston. He is talking in urgent hushed tones with the bartender, one Giuseppe Cipriani. It has been some time since the American, an erstwhile regular named Harry Pickering, has patronized this establishment. His appetites are such that the absence has been noted.

He explains to Sr. Cipriani's sympathetic ear that the Pickering family are less amenable to his habits of imbibing than the owners of the Hotel Europa. Cipriani nods with understanding. He understands. Pickering reveals the awful truth: he has been cut off by his family. He is penniless. He has no money with which to buy drink, and so he does not buy drink. He does not drink.

The generous Cipriani extends to his grieving patron a loan - some 10,000 lire. Pickering celebrates with a drink. But the story does not end there.

1931. Venice, Italy. The Hotel Europa is much as before; Giuseppe Cipriani still works the bar with tireless patience and recklessly spendthrift largesse. Only Pickering is different: for Pickering has returned, returned not the penniless and teetotal Pickering of two years earlier, but a new Pickering. A Pickering who buys a drink with a deft flutter of lire. A Pickering who announces he is repaying Cipriani's loan. A Pickering who, moreover, adds a further 40,000 lire of his own. The money is an investment. Cipriani and Pickering are to open a bar of their own, a bar that is not the bar of the Hotel Europa but another bar. This bar is to be named "Harry's Bar".

And "Harry's Bar" it remains today, situated on the Calle Vallaresso. Today the bar is owned and operated by Arrigo Cipriani, son of the generous Giuseppe. Arrigo is an Italian name; translated into English, it is rendered as "Harry". Arrigo was born one year after the bar opened. He is a trained lawyer, but "Harry's Bar" - it is now a restaurant, and not merely a bar - is his life's work, as it was his father's before him. Seven decades have steeped these walls with history. The Bellini was born here in a whiff of peach fumes; the Carpaccio, too, is a child of Harry's Bar. Both nod to Venetian painters of times past; but it is an artist of a different sort who immortalized this place in "Across the River and into the Trees".

That artist was Hemingway. For Hemingway was that artist.

An artist of letters, whose palette was composed not of paints but of the varied alcohols supplied by Harry's Bar, and by bars that are not Harry's Bar, but that like it are bars, Hemingway is just one of the luminaries who have sat in this storied place and partaken of its bounty. But he is the only one singled out by another Harry's Bar - this one in Florence, and not Venice, which is another city - as the subject of a rather peculiar literary contest.

In fact, it was not the original Harry's of Florence, but a replica in Century City, L.A., that began the tradition. In 1977, "Bad Hemingway" was born. The object: produce "one very good page of very bad Hemingway", as the original New Yorker ad read. The prize: a round trip to Italy and a free meal at the Harry's Bar of Florence. This, of course, is the wrong Harry's Bar altogether.

If Hemingway were still alive, he'd be very depressed about all this.