As we sit around the camp-fire listening to the jolly gurgling yodels of ‘The Singing Cowboy’ I try to envisage Ernest wrestling with the problems of true declarative sentences to the accompaniment of ‘Home, Home on the Range’ and I realise why he was tempted to take the rich man’s shilling and head for Sun Valley.
We leave the Hargrave Ranch with some regrets. Ellen and Leo are remarkable hosts, independent-minded and full of strong opinions; they seem truly happy here doing things their way, caring a lot for the land and not a fig for convention. They laugh a great deal, tell good stories and seem able to charm the most up-tight urbanite. For what it’s worth I think Hemingway would have liked them. Who knows, they might even have persuaded him to join in with a verse of ‘Happy Trails’ after a good day’s bear-shooting.
Sun Valley lies nearly four hundred miles due south of the Hargrave Ranch, where the big skies of Montana give way to the steeper valleys of Idaho, the potato state. Hemingway’s accommodation at the Sun Valley Lodge, Parlor Suite 206, can be obtained for $389. All mod cons and handy for the tennis courts where, as the Second World War broke out in Europe, he and his soon-to-be third wife Martha Gellhorn took on Mr and Mrs Gary Cooper.
I’m more interested in the later years when, for a short while, Hemingway made Idaho his permanent home. So I drive on past the tennis courts and the expensive cabins and into the nearby town of Ketchum.
Along the side of the road runs the old railway track that brought tourist prosperity to this small mining town. Now it’s tarmacked. Today’s car-bound tourists jog and cycle along it. A few of its elegantly curved steel bridges survive, and in the town itself remnants of the old red-brick, heavily corniced main street architecture can be found scattered amongst the new shopping malls and the park-and-ride schemes. Hemingway’s old haunts, like the Casino Bar and Christiania’s Restaurant (where he ate the night before his death) co-exist alongside boutiques like ‘Shabby Chic Fabrics’ and ‘Expressions In Gold,’ which would have had him turning in his grave.
Despite the amiable prettiness of Ketchum this is a melancholy place for the Hemingway follower, inextricably caught up with his final years, when, forced to leave Cuba by ill-health and political change, he came to live with Mary in an isolated house at the north end of town. I search for the house, down Warm Springs Road and right on East Canyon Run, without really wanting to find it. Throughout this journey I’ve driven up Hemingway driveways and knocked on Hemingway doors with a certain spring in my step, as if some of the man’s energy and buoyancy were keeping me going. Now I’m at the simple pine-bark arch which marks the edge of his last property, lifting the chain that’s slung across the road, knowing that I can no longer pretend that my travelling companion is immortal.
The man who lived here at 400 East Canyon Run was prematurely old, forgetful, paranoid and often desperately unhappy. At the end he believed FBI agents were tailing him (he thought he saw two of them sitting in Christiania’s restaurant the night before he died). He attempted suicide with almost comical persistence, grabbing at shotguns whenever the opportunity arose. He was anxious about money and pathetically dependent on his wife Mary. This house is not a place where the tragedy of his life can be avoided or glossed over. Which makes it, in a way, more important than any of the others.
It is practical rather than beautiful, tucked into a gentle hillside overlooking the stony course of the Big Wood River. Across the river and through the trees is the highway that runs north to the dramatically rising peaks of the Sawtooth range. It’s known as the Topping House (ironically) after the architect of the Sun Valley Lodge, who designed this in the same style, with walls of concrete poured into wood moulds, giving a first impression of a superior log cabin, but in fact being something much stronger. It was built in the 1930s, ‘above the flood-plain, unlike those new ones across the river’, remarks our guide, Trish, pointedly.
Trish has let us into the house which is owned by the Nature Conservancy and not open to the public. Since Mary Hemingway’s death in 1986 it has been maintained, like other Hemingway houses, in the way it was when he lived here. Apart from allowing us access, the Nature Conservancy are happy for me to be filmed spending the last night of my journey here. I know, as soon as I enter the house, there is no question of my doing that.
To someone who has spent ten months of the past year recreating Hemingway’s life it’s bound to come as a bit of a shock to be faced with the place where that life ended, but I feel something more than shock. Just as the sitting-room in his house in Havana gave me the feeling that he and his friends had only just left, so I find myself inside his house in Ketchum, standing in the eight- by five-foot porch-way where he shot himself as if it had just happened and I were the first man on the scene.
Yet it is nothing special, a perfectly ordinary entrance to a house, the sort of place where you slip off your hiking boots or muddy shoes, calling for a cup of tea after a long walk. It has a light brown lino floor, a small window with wild flowers in a jar on the sill. The crew are passing in and out, bringing the gear up the stairs from the garden. But I can’t stop my imagination reminding me, with indecent vividness, of the final moments of Ernest Hemingway, raked over and repeated in all the biographies.
Seven o’clock on a perfect summer Sunday in July 1961. Hemingway, always an early riser, comes down the stairs (there they are - to the right of the fireplace behind me), and crosses the room to the kitchen. Does he ignore or enjoy the wide and wonderful panorama of river, trees and mountains beyond, which he couldn’t fail to have seen through the picture windows? Stepping up into the kitchen (I can hear his freezer humming from where I stand), he found the key to the gun room, selected a double-barrelled Boss shotgun, loaded two shells, walked through to where I’m now standing, turned the gun on himself and, somehow, fired both barrels into his head.
Blood, death and appalling injury would not have shocked Hemingway. He had been shooting living creatures since he was a boy, he’d seen men blasted apart by mortar shells before his eighteenth birthday, he’d wiped out lions and leopard and rhino, and seen the horns of a bull pass through a man’s thigh.
What terrified him most was not losing his life but losing his mind. Losing the ability to write. One of the saddest memories in this heart-breaking house must be that recalled by his doctor George Saviers, of Hemingway, the Nobel Prizewinner, breaking down in tears when he found himself unable to find words to compose a simple message for President Kennedy’s inauguration in February 1961.
I’m glad to finish the filming and leave behind this house with photos of Ernest and Mary in happy times and bathroom towels marked ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’, and the shelves of books and racks of period magazines and the inevitable African game trophies on the walls. Two distinctive memories will always vaguely disturb me though. One is a lustily gruesome painting above the stairs of two Spanish abattoir workers in the act of skinning a bull; the other, two small boxes carefully preserved in a glass display-cabinet in the sitting-room. One contains 5 mm cartridges, the other .22 rifle bullets.
Next morning. It’s a beautiful July Sunday in Ketchum cemetery, on the far side of the Big Wood River from the house. It’s a small cemetery, whose wrought-iron gates offer the only touch of flamboyance. The graves are modest, some marked by nothing more than a metal tag with a single word inscription - ‘Baby’ or ‘Unknown’. The well-trimmed grass around them has been cut from the wild sagebrush scrub that covers the foothills behind and would, if it were allowed, push its way through the fence and reclaim the cemetery. This is still a hard land to live in.