I came to Sun Valley and the village of Ketchum, to ski, and to test my recovery from a tibial plateau fracture and surgery. A bonus is that the town’s most famous resident is one of my great literary heroes. He killed himself in the town and is buried here. His story is a dreadful reminder of the sometimes fatal combination of creative genius, alcohol and depression. It is also a case study of the trauma imposed on families by depression. Not only did he commit suicide, but also his father, his brother, his sister and his grand-daughter, the film actress, Margaux Hemingway.

My family has also walked down this road. My much loved mother, Alma suffered from severe depression and it terrified my siblings and I as children. The stain has been passed to me and I’ve struggled with depression since I was a teenager. Fortunately for me I have always been a moderate drinker. Sometimes, I will go for years and not drink at all. I don’t find it satisfying and alcohol, especially beer, usually makes me feel sick. I may even have a low grade alcohol intolerance. This has been a godsend. A lifetime’s devotion to the outdoors, regular exercise plus the rigid routines imposed by study and work have shielded me from the worst effects of this debilitating disease which have often been severe.

Depression cannot be cured but it can be managed. Despite enduring the suffering that only people with the condition can appreciate, rearranging my head with a 12 gauge shotgun has never seemed an option to me. That is like admitting defeat.   Depression can be dealt with. Depression and self medication through alcohol is dangerous and often fatal. My fervent hope is that this condition, which has afflicted two generations of my family so far, has not been passed to my daughters. It stops here.

The cemetery at Ketchum, Idaho. A place of pilgrimage for lovers of literature and those bearing the scourge of depression

Ernest Hemingway first came to Sun Valley in September 1939. He had been invited to stay at the new Sun Valley Lodge as a guest. Sun Valley would become the first ski resort developed in north America.

His son, Pat Hemingway said Papa was attracted to the area not only by the offer from the resort, but also his friendship with poet Ezra Pound, who was from nearby Hailey. Also, during that autumn, Hemingway was becoming estranged from his second wife, Pauline Hemingway, Pat’s mother.

“When that broke up he had to have somewhere to go,” Pat said.

In those years just before WW2, Hemingway was at a high point in his writing career, he wrote what I believe is his best novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Every day, Hemingway wrote or edited in the morning hours until about noon, and then made his way outdoors, often to hunt.

Speaking of Hemingway’s time in Ketchum, “I think he was in search of the vanishing frontier,” said Marty Peterson, a Hemingway scholar. “I think he was in search of a place where he could have some anonymity, where the hunting and fishing was still good. And he found that in Central Idaho.”

Hemingway (l) enjoying the company of Gary Cooper (centre) . The woman on the right is, I think, a very young Ingrid Bergman. Cooper and Bergman would later star in the film adaptation of Hemingway’s great novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Note they are drinking Bollinger. They have taste.

Hemingway made new friends in Sun Valley. The group included Sun Valley Resort’s chief guide, Taylor Williams, resort photographer Lloyd Arnold, Arnold’s wife, Tillie Arnold and eventually, a young Picabo rancher named Bud Purdy.

In the autumn of 1939, Hemingway stayed with his girlfriend, writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn, in Suite 206 of the Sun Valley Lodge, which he soon dubbed “Glamour House.” Hemingway worked diligently on “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and soon became enamoured with duck hunting at Silver Creek, near Picabo, and pheasant hunting at points south, near Shoshone, Dietrich and Gooding.

Purdy said Hemingway seemed to like the area because of its geography—which reminded him of Spain—and the people—who were friendly, a little rough around the edges and didn’t make a fuss about his celebrity. Purdy often took Hemingway hunting for ducks, mostly mallards, on Silver Creek, a popular waterfowl migration stop.

“We just jump shot,” Purdy said. “He didn’t like sitting in the blind. … He was a good guy to be out with.”

That November, Gellhorn left for Scandinavia on a work assignment. Through the rest of summer, Hemingway hunted, read and completed numerous chapters of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” before leaving Sun Valley in December to return to his home in Cuba.

Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway. Cooper (right) is holding a double barrel, side-by-side, 12 gauge shotgun. The powerful weapon held by Cooper is the same type of gun Hemingway used to end his life. Hemingway (L), holds a pair of 12 gauge shotgun shells in his right hand.

Hemingway returned to Sun Valley Resort the following September with Gellhorn and his three sons, Jack, Pat and Gregory. He completed editing work on “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” played tennis and hunted birds, at times with a new friend, actor Gary Cooper. He and his family returned again in the autumn of 1941 as war raged in Europe.

Pat Hemingway said Papa taught his sons how to shoot and hunt, generously allowing them to discharge 200 or 300 rounds of ammunition per day. Being a “social hunter,” Papa liked having his kids and friends around, but also liked his hunts to be well organized. “We mostly hunted ducks, doves and pheasants,” he said. “And we did a lot of rabbit hunting in those days.”

Rabbit hunting was common in the early 1940s, Pat Hemingway said, when the animals—some of them diseased—would descend upon agricultural lands by the thousands. Indeed, Purdy recalled one rabbit hunt in the Dietrich area during which a group of 20 or so hunters, including Hemingway and Cooper, shot about 400 or 500 of the rodents.

Purdy said Hemingway enjoyed the art of hunting but was also fond of shooting. “He liked to hunt not just to kill stuff,” Purdy said. “It was the thrill of the hunt. A lot of times he didn’t get a lot of birds and he didn’t seem to mind that.”

The only story Hemingway ever wrote about Idaho, called “The Shot,” was based on his hunts around Ketchum. The story included a Saturday night bar fight in the mining town of Patterson, during which Papa reportedly dropped a huge, angry miner with several left hooks. It was published in “True” magazine in April 1951. “He always prided himself on being a very good rifle shot,” Pat Hemingway said.

During World War II and until the autumn of 1946, Hemingway was unable to get back to Idaho. Although some evidence suggests Hemingway sometimes loved to shoot for shooting’s sake, there is no doubt his time in Idaho revealed a gentler side. Purdy said he made friends easily and always spoke in a quiet voice. In addition, he said, Hemingway never boasted about his work or his stature as a writer, even after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

“He never talked about his writing,” Purdy said. “And we never talked about politics. I think he was a Democrat, but I’m not sure of that … He was a real gentleman, I think.”

The only time Hemingway spoke about his writing to Purdy, the rancher recalled, was during a lunch at the Alpine Club in Ketchum, now Whiskey Jacques. “He decided he wanted something to drink, so he went across the street to get some wine,” Purdy said. “He was really feeling good. He said, ‘I wrote a thousand words today and it’s worth a dollar a word.’”

Hemingway “liked to party,” Purdy noted, but never drank while they were out hunting, with exceptions amounting to a few sips from a bota bag when all the shooting was done. “He wasn’t an alcoholic at all. No way,” Purdy said.

Under the three Spruce trees

During the autumn of 1946, Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, stayed at MacDonald Cabins, on the south side of Ketchum—now the Ketchum Korral. He worked on “The Garden of Eden,” a novel he never finished but which was ultimately complete enough to be published posthumously in 1986. Hemingway returned to Ketchum and Sun Valley in the autumn of 1947 and stayed through Christmas that year. During that stay, he enjoyed the company of Hollywood stars such as Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, who played the lead roles in the film version of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

In 1946 and 1947, Hemingway’s doctor in Sun Valley forbade him to go hunting in the mountains; he had put on weight and his blood pressure was high. Still, he ventured out to shoot ducks and pheasants.

After leaving Idaho in January 1948, Hemingway did not return for a decade. During those times, Peterson said, Hemingway was busy with numerous projects and settled into his life in Cuba, where he pursued perhaps his greatest outdoor passion, deep-sea fishing. He wrote “Across the River and Into the Trees,” which I loved as a teenager and “The Old Man and the Sea,” a novella that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

In the fall of 1958, Hemingway returned to Ketchum and continued to hunt. In 1959, Ernest and Mary Hemingway purchased for $50,000 a house outside Ketchum along the Big Wood River. It had excellent views of the river and the nearby Boulder Mountains.

To a friend, General Buck Lanham, Hemingway wrote: “This place … was a wonderful buy. I plan to live here in the shooting months, which correspond to the hurricane months and the early northers in Cuba. My health and Mary’s needs a change of climate from the subtropics for part of each year.”

While residing at his Ketchum estate, Peterson said, Hemingway did a substantial amount of editing and rewriting of “A Moveable Feast,” a memoir of his days as a young writer in Paris. But all was not well. Friends and family noticed changes in Papa as he battled various health ailments. And he was having trouble writing.

“You must remember that he was pretty well a broken person when he came to Idaho in those final years,” Pat Hemingway said.

Ernest Hemingway’s grand-daughter Margaux

Ernest Hemingway died of a self-inflicted wound from his favourite, double- barrelled shotgun in the front foyer of his Ketchum house in July 1961. He was 61 years old. I suppose if you want to find relief then a double-barrelled shotgun will certainly get the job done. By a strange coincidence, the father of my best friend through high school, ended his life the same way – with a double barrelled shotgun. It was a shock at the time. He had coached me in shooting and I really liked him.  Alcohol was also involved in that incident.

The blast from Hemingway’s shotgun was heard around the world. So ended the life of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. There have been five suicides in the Hemingway family over three generations — Hemingway’s father, Clarence; siblings Ursula and Leicester, as well as Ernest and his grand-daughter Margaux.

“The ending of his life was kind of traumatic to me. He was such a great guy,” Purdy said. “I guess if he couldn’t write, it got so life wasn’t worth living for him.”

Pat Hemingway said that people should not remember his father as a great hunter, fisherman or father; he should be remembered as a writer who crafted stories like few others could.

“He was to writing what Einstein was to physics,” he said. “He was undoubtedly one of the greatest writers in the 20th century in any language.”

Hemingway is buried in the Ketchum Cemetery, and his grave his now sheltered by three mature spruce trees.

Extracts form The Sun Valley Guide (http://www.svguide.com/svg_hem.htm) and Kieran Kelly

 The old year wanes. Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. Thankfully I say goodbye to 2015. What a year it’s been. As I reflect on the last 12 months, I remember the music I’ve discovered and the books I’ve read. They have been an inseparable part of the journey and a great comfort to me along with a supportive body of friends. It’s funny where literature takes you.

As a small child, living on a remote country property, I was the beneficiary of my mother’s loneliness and her retreat into the world of books. Our small farmhouse was always full of books. Nothing much else, but certainly lots of books. This was facilitated by the public libraries in country towns, in those long gone days, where country people could order books through the library and have them delivered with the mail. This came three times per week. It was a forerunner of Amazon for poor people. My mother had very eclectic tastes and I was forced to adopt the same regimen.

One day, I had run out of my own books to read from the library and was rummaging through her pile when I discovered a book – a very big book – From Here to Eternity by James Jones. I was about 16 at the time. The book had been published the year before I was born. This was the first book I ever read about war. My mother, bless her memory, never stopped me reading any of her books. I didn’t know it at the time, but the book would become a classic of American letters. It made James Jones’s reputation, and along with Norman Mailer’s, The Naked and the Dead, became one of the towering monuments to American involvement in word World War II, particularly in the Pacific.

In 1953, the year after I was born, From Here to Eternity, was made into a blockbuster film, starring Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine, Montgomery Clift and Deborah Kerr. The awarding of the film role to Sinatra, who was then a struggling singer, was the basis of the story in the Godfather movies, where the film producer is made “an offer he couldn’t refuse.” The role made Sinatra’s career.

I subsequently went through the ritual of many Australian males my age of being conscripted for Army service in Vietnam in 1972. As someone from a virulently anti-Communist, Catholic family and the beneficiary of years of instruction in handling firearms, which are another tool for running a farm, the thought of going to Vietnam held no fears for me. Conscription did not seem like a big deal. I didn’t know much about the Vietnam War in 1972 when my number came up in the ballot, simply that it was Us versus the Communists and that was okay with me. We were the good guys.  Gough Whitlam spoiled the party, cancelled conscription and I never boarded the plane.

Fifteen years later, with memories of Vietnam long gone, I was looking for something to read in the old Grahmes’ bookstore on the corner of Pitt and Hunter Streets, now long gone. I spied a book called The Devil’s Guard by George Robert Elford. It was the cover that got me first. Loved the cover. Still do. He is such a cranky looking dude and he’s having a very bad day and doesn’t want to be disturbed. It was a fictionalised account of a French Foreign Legion infantry battalion, which unfortunately found itself at the centre of the Vietminh assault on French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. This was a tumultuous defeat for the French, a challenge to the Americans and the beginning of what we know today as the Vietnam War. While this book is fictional, it was a ripper of a read, and made me intensely curious about this period of Asian history and how Australia got wrapped up in it. Over the next decade I read most if not all the great books that came out of the Vietnam war.

I still have most of them although some were destroyed in the fire in my apartment in 2014. The list is:

Fire in the Lake                                                                         Frances Fitzgerald 1972
A Rumour of War                                                                     Philip Caputo 1977
If I Die in a Combat Zone                                                       Tim O’Brien 1973
Dispatches                                                                                 Michael Herr 1977
Fields of Fire                                                                             Jim Webb 1978
Going after Caccaito                                                               Tim O’Brien 1978
Thirteenth Valley                                                                     John M Del Vecchio 1982
Chickenhawk                                                                            Robert Mason 1983
The Tunnels of Cu Chi                                                            T Mangold & J Penycate  1986
The Battle of Long Tan                                                           Lex McAulay 1987
About Face:
The Odyssey of an American Warrior                                  Colonel David Hackworth 1990
Highways to a War                                                                   Christopher Koch 1995
Novel without a Name                                                              Duong Thu Huong 1995
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann
and America in Vietnam                                                           Neil Sheehan 1998

This is the order in which the books were published, not the order in which I read them.

Some of these books are fact, some are fiction. Only one, The Battle of Long Tan is Australian. They are all great books and I even included one – Novel Without a Name – written by a North Vietnamese soldier. I finished this particular period of literary inquisition in 1998 with Neil Sheean’s book, which was a retrospective, written years after the war, about rebel US general, John Paul Vann. Great book. There has not been a decent book published about Vietnam and its aftermath in the last 18 years.

The frist book I have read about Vietnam in over 15 years

Or so I thought. About five years ago I was reading the book reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald when I spied a review of the top 10 books published in 2010. One, Matterhorn, by a retired marine, Karl Marlantes, was a novel based on his service in Vietnam. The review compared this book to The Naked and the Dead and Farewell to Arms. I thought it interesting that a book would get such a wrap, given that the Vietnam war was dead and buried as a source of literary inspiration. For old times’ sake and sentiment, in 2012, I bought a copy at Pages and Pages bookstore in Mosman. It sat unloved and unopened on my bedside table ever since. It’s a big book – about 600 pages long – and given the subject matter, I just couldn’t get into it in the intervening years.

That changed about a month ago. I decided I was tired of the unopened book sitting there gathering dust, and wasn’t going to let it terrorise me anymore. I picked it up and the slog began. Late this evening I finally finished. It probably does rank with Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s Thin Red Line as a consummate story about men and war. These types of books are not to everyone’s taste. I like them, not because they glorify war, but because they describe how men respond when placed under extreme pressure. I like mountaineering books for the same reason. Out of pressure and group activity grows friendship and mutual reliance. I think these are subjects worthy  of literary treatment. Marlantes, like Norman Mailer, like James Jones and Sebastian Junger, who have all written about war, is also a great storyteller in the classic American tradition.

Once I got going I couldn’t put it down.

So as 2015 draws to a close – the year of a broken leg and a very sore neck – I have been indulging in a retrospective and trawl through my past, both in terms of my near-miss going to Vietnam and a group of books that I enjoyed very much. There are worse ways to finish the year