In late January 1954, a rumour gained currency around the world: Ernest Miller Hemingway, recognised as one of the world’s top writers, was missing and presumed dead.

Obituaries that later proved premature were already being written. Just the preceding year, Hemingway had won the Pulitzer Prize with his celebrated novella, The Old Man and the Sea.

The award had rekindled the writer’s flagging popularity. His other publication, Across the River and Into the Trees, published in 1950, had been met with unfavourable reviews.

Hemingway’s popularity would be firmly restored in October 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize, as if to compensate him for two plane crashes earlier in the year.

As rumours of his death spread like bushfire in early 1954, Hemingway and his fourth wife of 10 years then, Mary Hemingway, were nursing injuries in Butiaba, in the then Tanganyika.

This was during Hemingway’s second and longer safari in East Africa (The first had been in 1933 and had resulted in the publication of Green Hills of Africa).

Those injuries were the result of a crash on January 24, 1954, after Captain Reginald Cartwright, the pilot of a de Havilland Rapide aircraft, was unable to take off from a dilapidated airstrip at Butiaba.

The plane crashed halfway down the airstrip, burst its right wing tank and began to burn.

The pilot and two passengers, Mary and Captain Roy Marsh, got out and fled. Hemingway was the last to get out.
Thinking he was trapped inside, he head-butted a door open and ran towards his companions. “...His hair was on fire and he was crying,” recalled a Butiama village elder named Abdul, who witnessed the crash when he was in his teens.
Abdul was talking to Michael Palin, who had been commissioned by the BBC to retrace Hemingway’s life for a three-part series to commemorate, in 1999, the centenary of the writer’s birth.

The series having been run, Palin went back to his notes and compiled Hemingway Adventure, probably the most comprehensive study of the American author’s life.

It records important events in Heming way’s adventures, from his birth in Oak Park, Chicago, on July 21, 1899, to his death, by suicide, on July 2, 1961, just two-and-a-half weeks to his 62nd birthday.

The crash at Butiama left Hemingway with burns and injuries from which he never fully recovered.

It was, incidentally, the second air crash Hemingway and Mary had been involved in within three days. A few days earlier, they were returning from a trip to the then Belgian Congo in a light plane piloted by Marsh.

Having viewed Lakes George and Albert from the air, the pilot had flown low over Murchison Falls in Uganda to let the Hemmingways view the magnificent torrent.
Heading on to Entebbe from there, the plane’s tail and propeller clipped a telegraph wire, sending the plane tumbling down towards the crocodile-infested banks of the Nile.

By the time the plane settled in dense scrub, Mary had suffered two broken ribs. The Hemingways had to camp nearby, in elephant-infested territory.

A boat cruising down the Nile the next day transported them up to Butiaba, where the second crash occurred.
Hemingway had many brushes with death during his sojourns in East Africa.

One of the most memorable, and which he wrote about years later, was when, during an earlier safari, he suffered a debilitating bout of amoebic dysentery near Mt Kilimanjaro.

It inspired the famous short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which explores the psychology of a dying writer being eaten away by gangrene as he awaits help from Nairobi.

The writer had another baptism by fire just a few weeks after the plane crashes.

Having travelled to the Kenyan coast and pitched camp near Shimoni, he somehow felt compelled to help put out a bushfire nearby.

Probably because of his weak physical state, he fell into the fire and sustained serious burns.

Mishaps aside, Hemingway’s life was dogged by depression, self-doubt, emotional and creative instability and misery.

That was despite the deceptive exuberance that runs through books like Green Hills of Africa and True at First Light, the posthumous mixture of fact and fiction assembled by his second son, Patrick, from an incomplete manuscript discovered after his death.

True at First Light was described by The Times as “the most important book to appear in 1999”.

Having first been married in 1921, when barely 22, Hemingway was already into his fourth marriage by the time he committed suicide in 1961.

Particularly troubled was his third marriage, to acclaimed journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn — whom he married in 1940 and divorced in 1945.

The writer’s eventual suicide was hardly unexpected, given that Hemingway’s family had been through four generations of severe depression.

His father, Clarence Edmunds Hemingway, a medical doctor, shot himself dead in 1928, just a few months after the birth of Hemingway’s second son, Patrick.

Patrick was born to Hemingway and second wife Pauline Pfeiffer on June 28, 1928, a year after Hemingway divorced his first wife, Hadley Richardson.

Patrick, who was familiar with East Africa, having visited Kenya and worked as a game warden in Uganda, had spent a lot of time with his father during his childhood and adolescence.

This was the period the writer was married to Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh.

Suicide

Like a scourge, suicide seems to have been passed on to later generations. Thirty-five years after the writer’s suicide, his granddaughter, Margaux Louise Hemingway, killed herself.

She took an overdose of drugs in her studio apartment in Santa Monica, California in 1996, aged only 41. Margaux had earlier embarked on successful modelling and film careers.

It was reported that suicide ran in her immediate family, too. Her brother and sister were also said to have killed themselves.

Hemingway’s last-born son, Gregory was a self-confessed transvestite who often wore women’s clothes and eventually had a sex change operation.

A medical doctor like his grandfather, he too had mental breakdowns. Gregory died in 2001, just one year after his stepbrother Jack. Gregory was a reckless driver.

In one instance, elder brother Patrick suffered head injuries in Key West after an underage Gregory crashed the car they were travelling in. Patrick became delirious and consequently had a mental breakdown.

Gregory’s penchant for cross-dressing got him into serious trouble one day in September 1951. He was arrested in Los Angeles after he entered a women’s restroom in a movie theatre.

His father was outraged when informed about it by Pauline, the estranged second wife and mother of both Patrick and Gregory.

Pauline had flown over from San Francisco to protect the family name. But there was a bitter quarrel with her former husband, who blamed her for not having brought up Gregory properly.

So shocked was Pauline that she suffered abdominal pain that evening. She was rushed to theatre in serious condition and died the next day on the operating table.

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