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anything that ventured into the crosshairs of his scope or came
within scent of his fishing lures: deer, bear, elk, antelope, tarpon,
marlin, lion, pheasant, magpie, you name it.
If
it had fur, feathers,
or scales, Hemingway killed it. The final body count must certainly
have run into the tens of thousands, including by his estimate
122 men, 122 "sures" as he called them, taken in battle some time
during the three wars he took part in as an ambulance driver and
correspondent, without question a world's record for unarmed non–
combatants. Ernest Hemingway was the exterminating angel
himself, and in taking his own life with a shotgun in 1961 he was
obeying the fundamental premise of his being:
life is there to be taken.
If we have not been overly disturbed by this before, we needn't
blame Hemingway. He did everything he could to let us know what
sort of man he was, and could not have been more blunt about it
than in his book about bullfighting,
Death in the Afternoon.
Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pride and
pleasure has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part
of the human race . .. .One of its greatest pleasures ... is the
feeling of rebellion against death which comes from its
administering. Once you accept the rule of death , thou shalt not
kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment. But when
a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking
to himself one of the godlike attributes: that of giving it. This is
one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing.
Hemingway lived to kill, and the techniques he found esthetically
satisfying, those demonstrations of courage and grace under
pressure that quicken the heart of the aficionado, were, his
protestations aside, strictly luxuries. He'd as soon shoot prairie dogs
from a car or machine gun sharks from his boat as run with the bulls
in Pamplona or practice jabs, hooks, and uppercuts on some hapless
fellow writer in a bar. On the subject of his profoundest expertise,
the world took him at his word, that he was a quality man, an
authority on the finer points of killing. But in his private
correspondence he comes across unambiguously as a quantity man,
who took exceptional delight in toting up the score .
Charles shot a bull elk, we shot one together, and I killed one
alone . He killed 2 damned fine bucks and a bear and I killed an
eagle (flying), trapped a coyote and killed a hell of a big bear.
