Remembering Ernest Hemingway in Sun Valley, Idaho
His spirit lives on…
I didn’t travel to Sun Valley Idaho to write about Ernest Hemingway. As a journalist, I had two assignments: the vibrant local food scene and the area’s year-round attractions. I had a vague recollection that Hemingway had lived in the area.
I had never paid that much attention to Hemingway. When he took his own life in 1961, I was in junior high. I read the Old Man and the Sea in high school and dutifully turned in my book report. Years later, I read The Moveable Feast, about his early years in Paris, where he wrote in an unheated hotel room each day, away from his wife and young child. He mentioned that he always left off his writing with a clear place to begin again the next day, a tip I incorporated into my writing routine.
So, as I explored the Wood River Valley, including the town of Ketchum and the nearby Sun Valley Resort, I felt a bit stunned to discover how much Ernest Hemingway lives on, in a sense, in the local psyche.
It is as if he haunts Sun Valley, but in a gentle way, remembered and beloved for the years that he visited, lived, and worked there. It was as if I could feel him there and I got drawn in.
I encountered reminders of him everywhere. The Community Library in Ketchum has dedicated rooms to his memory, filled with photographs, books and correspondence. His former home, which is private and now managed by the library, conducts a Writer’s in-Residence program and seminars there. From the internet, I was able to see how the library has kept it as it was when Hemingway and his wife Mary lived there.
For example, Hemingway had told Mary that he wanted to write the way that Cezanne painted, so she taped a copy of a Cezanne painting onto the wall for inspiration. It still hangs there, a bit frayed around the edges. Cards sent to the couple are taped to kitchen cupboards. One of Hemingway’s fishing hats sits on a shelf. Mary lived in the house until 1986 and her clothes still hang in the closet.
I learned that a Ketchum museum honors him. And his beautiful memorial, just out of town along the highway, has a bench for contemplation and a stream that meanders by. When I went to his grave in the Ketchum cemetery, it was covered in snow, but I heard from locals and read online that people leave bottles of whiskey, handwritten notes held down by rocks, cigars, money, flowers, pens, and other gifts there for him. One note read, “The world breaks everyone.”
At the Sun Valley Lodge, photos of Hemingway and other celebrities adorn the hallways. In those photos, Hemingway sits at his Royal typewriter working and dines with friends and Hollywood stars. He completed For Whom the Bell Tolls in room 206 and I was able to visit the “Celebrity Suite” devoted to his memory, on the second floor, filled with photos and a Royal typewriter. The room felt spacious and serene, like he could have walked in and sat down at the typewriter at any moment.
All these reminders of his life inspired me to do some research about him. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and the following year was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the committee described as, “his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”
Then writer’s block seized him. He had achieved the highest honors as a writer and yet he couldn’t write. Most writers know what it feels like to face a blank page or blank computer screen, praying that the words will come. Can I do it this time? Is it over for me?
I wish someone could have reached out and said, “It’s all right. You will be okay. You are a brilliant writer. You do have more to say. Don’t give up. Find some peace and solace in the wild and beautiful landscape you so love here. And let people love you because they do.”
But no one could convince him not to give up. He died days before his 62nd birthday. The world missed out on his later years, what else he could have written and his own chance to experience the acclaim that he had earned.
I remember life in 1961. No one talked about emotional problems, went to counseling or worried about alcohol consumption. Mental illness and depression were treated with shock treatments at mental hospitals. When Hemingway was 29, his own father took his life, and he wrote that he felt devastated by that loss. Five of his other family members also died by suicide, including his sister and brother. We know now that Hemingway suffered from severe depression, paranoid delusions, and bipolar disease worsened by alcoholism. He also had hemochromatosis, a genetic disease that can cause fatigue and memory loss.
Just days before he shot himself, he had returned from three months of shock treatments in a mental hospital.
Yet the spirit of Hemingway lives on there, in the Wood River Valley. His own words capture it well, written as a eulogy to a dear friend, lost in a hunting accident in Sun Valley in 1939. They are inscribed on the Hemingway Memorial, out in the wide-open spaces he loved.
“Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
And above the hills
The high blue windless skies
Now he will be a part of them forever.”
Sun Valley remembers him, with warmth and respect, now and possibly forever.
If only he could have known how much his life mattered. If only he could have known how much he’d be missed.
A previous version of this essay appeared in Idaho Magazine, June 2023
© Diane Covington-Carter 2024