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Fifty years ago this week Ernest Hemingway shot himself dead in his Idaho home. One of the Hemingways most astute critics and biographers is Scott Donaldson. Below is an excerpt from Hemingway and Suicide from his book Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days

Death was Hemingway’s great subject, and his great obsession. He wrote about it in his earliest stories and in his last ones. Of his seven completed novels, five end with the death of a male protagonist, and a sixth with the death of the heroine. Only in The Sun Also Rises, with its dying fall of an ending, do the characters survive to live and drink and fornicate another day. Yet that novel’s moral center is located not in the cafes of Paris and Pamplona but in the bullring where Pedro Romero confronts animals bred to kill and be killed with what Hemingway famously called “grace under pressure.” This confrontation—the drama, the ritual, the inevitable death—was also the subject of Death in the Afternoon, his 1929 book on bullfighting in Spain that remains, according to aficionados, the single best work in English on the subject. When the torero failed to kill properly, the bull was dispatched with the short knife, or puntilla. Women loved to see the puntilla do its work, Hemingway wrote. It was “exactly like turning off an electric light bulb” (“Soul”).

There was a trace of the macabre in that remark, and more than a trace in “A Natural History of the Dead”—where he reported in matter-of-fact detail the color change among unburied Caucasian corpses from white to yellow to yellow-green to black, as well as their tendency to swell up in the heat, in his diatribe against the Italian war against Ethiopia, where, he warned, the East African carrion birds would strike a wounded man as quickly as a dead one and tear his flesh from his bones as if he were a zebra or any other prey—and in the grisly “An Alpine IdyIl,” in which an Austrian peasant hangs a lantern from the jaw of his wife’s frozen corpse all one winter. An artist had to look at death squarely and without flinching, Hemingway believed.

But it was not only the demands of craft that drove him to concentrate his gaze on death, a creature he variously personified as “a beautiful harlot” and “the oldest whore in Havana” (qtd. in Baker, A Life Story, 432)—women worth knowing but expensive to go upstairs with. He had something to prove and was forever testing himself against danger. He climbed into the bullring during the amateurs, faced murderous animals in Africa, attended every war of his time. He put himself at risk and suffered the consequences. Hemingway was frequently and grievously hurt in an astounding series of blows to the head and arms and legs.

In 1928 he yanked on what he thought was a commode chain and brought a Paris skylight crashing down on his head, causing a concussion and nine stitches above the right eye. In the spring of 1930 it took six stitches to sew up his right index finger, cut to the bone when he was working on a punching bag. In the summer of that year still more stitches were required to close a facial wound suffered when he was thrown from his horse; that fall he also broke his right arm in an auto accident. In 1935 he shot himself in both legs while trying to kill a shark. A London auto accident in 1944 hospitalized him with a severe concussion and forty-seven stitches. In 1950 he fell on the deck of his boat, the Pilar, and struck his head on a metal clamp, producing a three-stitch cut. In 1954 he barely survived two African plane crashes in two days. Among his injuries were a bad concussion; a ruptured liver, spleen, and kidney; temporary loss of vision in the left eye; loss of hearing in the left ear; a crushed vertebra; a sprained right arm and shoulder; a sprained left leg; paralysis of the sphincter; and first-degree burns on his face, arms, and head. A month later his legs, abdomen, chest, lips, left hand, and right forearm were burned as he tried to fight a brushfire. A less hardy man might not have lived to kill himself.

The above summary, of course, leaves out the worst wound of all, at Fossalta di Piave on the Austrian front, July 8, 1918. Not quite nineteen and a year out of high school, Hemingway joined the American Red Cross in Italy and was shipped to the Austrian front to drive ambulances. He was passing out chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops when a mortar canister landed in his forward trench, immediately killing several others and lodging more than two hundred mortar fragments in his feet and legs. As he dragged another wounded man to the command post, a heavy-machinegun bullet ripped through his right knee. Part of him “died then,” he wrote, and as he lay among the wounded and dying, he contemplated suicide. For years after that wounding he could not sleep at all at night without a light. Yet his physical wounds seem to have stimulated his courtship of danger. He made himself brave, so much so that during World War II he struck General Buck Lanham, a veteran combat soldier, as the calmest man under fire he had ever seen. Hemingway achieved his victory by an act of will and by constantly confronting his trauma. The popular theory that he “was destroyed by a wound (mental, physical, moral, psychiatric),” he wrote Carlos Baker in 1953, was “shit.” When he went back to Fossalta after World War I, he defecated on the spot where he’d been hit.

“ ‘Fraid a nothing,” Hemingway proclaimed at age three, but that was childish braggadocio. His fiction provides another story, particularly the autobiographical tales about Nick Adams, like Hemingway himself a boy born, bred, and hurt in the Middle West and badly wounded in the war. Particularly significant is the discarded beginning of “Indian Camp,” the first Nick Adams story in Hemingway’s first full-scale book, In Our Time. Nick at nine or ten years old has been taken camping by his father, a doctor, and by his Uncle George. The two men go fishing at night, leaving Nick alone in the tent. If there’s an emergency, he’s to fire three shots with the rifle to summon them back. Lying in the dark, Nick begins to think about a hymn he’d heard in church, “Some day the silver cord will break.” While they were singing the hymn he realized for the first time that he himself would have to die, and now—alone in the stillness of the night—he suddenly becomes very afraid of dying and fires the three shots. When his father. and uncle return as promised, Nick makes up a yarn about a fox or a wolf fooling around the tent. Uncle George is_. upset about this obvious fib, which has interrupted his fishing, but Dr. Adams shows more understanding. “I know he’s an awful coward,” he says, “but we’re all yellow at that age” (Nick Adams Stories, 14).

Hemingway chose to cut this opening, probably because it makes explicit what is otherwise conveyed implicitly in the course of this and other stories about Nick Adams: that unlike later protagonists he is a boy and then a youth things happen to, and that he does his cautious best to avoid trouble. (That in writing about Nick the author was thinking of his own boyhood seems clear: in the manuscripts Nick is sometimes called Ernest or Wemedge, one of Ernest’s nicknames.) Deleting this opening satisfied Hemingway’s famous dictum about the dignity of fiction, like icebergs, depending on keeping seven-eighths of its base beneath the surface, but it also deprived the ending of some of its force.

As the story proceeds, Dr. Adams is called in the wee hours of the morning, to leave his tent and go to the Indian camp at the end of the lake. There he performs a caesarean delivery without anesthetic on an Indian woman who has been in labor for two days. She screams in pain but, Dr. Adams explains to Nick, he does not hear the screams because they are not important. Nick hears them, though, and refuses to look as his father goes about his work. Also listening is the woman’s husband in the upper bunk. The other Indian men have left the camp to get away from the sound of the screaming, but the husband has cut his foot with an axe and cannot leave the bunk. When the operation, a success, is finally over, Dr. Adams basks in the glory of his accomplishment, but his postoperative exhilaration is brief. “Ought to have a look at the proud father,” he says expansively. “They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs.” When he pulls the blanket back, he sees—and so does Nick—that the woman’s husband has cut his throat from ear to ear.

In the rowboat afterwards, Nick asks his father the kinds of questions about dying, and suicide, that have been troubling him.

“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?” “I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.” “Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?” “Not very many, Nick.” “Do many women?” “Hardly ever.” “Don’t they ever?” “Oh, yes. They do sometimes.” . . . “Is dying hard, Daddy?” “No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.” (Complete Short Stories, 69–70)

Five years after this story was written, Ernest Hemingway’s father, a doctor with special training in delivering babies, took his own life.

Hard as Hemingway tried to disavow the manner of his father’s death, he could hardly slough off his genetic inheritance. It has now been established that Dr. Hemingway was subject to bouts of depression, though at the time of his death every effort was made to cover them up. Melancholia ran in the family. Ernest’s only brother and one of his four sisters also committed suicide. As Archibald MacLeish said of Ernest in the mid-1920s, “I’ve never seen a man go through the floor of despair as he did” (qtd. in Hynan, “Portrait”). The severity and the frequency of these periods of depression increased with age, and by the late 1950s were joined by traces of paranoia. During his final years Hemingway was convinced that the authorities—the FBI, the IRS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service—were out to get him and that close friends were trying to kill him by arranging automobile or airplane accidents.

He was never the same physically after the two disastrous plane crashes in Africa. “I should have stayed in that second kite at Butiaba,” he said. He had high blood pressure, and his liver was badly damaged by years of drinking to excess. Like his father before him, he showed signs of incipient diabetes. His once powerful frame grew frail. Michael Bessie, who saw him in April 1961, thought he looked like “a wounded animal who should be allowed to go off and die as he chose.” Later a series of remedial procedures at the Mayo Clinic, including electroshock therapy, failed to restore his vigor or brighten his outlook—though he was artful enough to secure his release by persuading the doctors that he was no longer suicidal. From the clinic he scrawled a last note to General Lanham. “Buck, stop sweating me out. Sweat only flying weather and the common cold.

Worst of all, he could no longer write. “Mornings when work does not come are long mornings,” Oates has him think. Work was the final justification, the ultimate reason to live, and up to the end he sat at his desk waiting patiently through the morning, up to one p.m., the words would not come. The man who mastered a new American prose style was already dead.

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Selected titles from the acclaimed 24 Frames series: 1) The Cinema of Japan and Korea 2) The Cinema of Latin America 3) The Cinema of Spain and Portugal

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“What do you do?” Joyce inquired. I told him about Shakespeare and Company. The name, and mine too, seemed to amuse him, and a charming smile came to his lips. (From Shakespeare Company, by Sylvia Beach)

James Joyce and Sylvia Beach both liked to play with words. The name of her Paris bookstore, like T.S. Eliot’s “Shakespeherian Rag,” threw together the erudite and the everyday, bringing the bard down an affectionate peg or two (“my associate, Bill Shakespeare,” she calls him in one of her letters). Another of her coinages was “Bloomsday,” the spritely phrase she invented to commemorate June 16, 1904. It was the date on which James Joyce first stepped out with Nora Barnacle, and also, of course, the date on which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus stepped out in the pages of Ulysses (1922).

Joyce’s Irish epic, published just in time for his fortieth birthday, had Parisian roots as well as Dublin ones. “After years of wandering,” Beach told the Radiophonique Institut in 1927, Joyce “had come to France to finish his book, ULYSSES.” Paris was the spiritual home of the Irish artist in exile. Oscar Wilde, who died here in 1900, had established the standard. And Joyce, though not so direct a victim of the English courts, was a victim of English censorship, and sometimes he liked to adopt the Wildean pose. “‘Melancholy Jesus,’ Adrienne and I used to call him,” says Beach, and on his first visit to Shakespeare and Company, “he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde.” In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus declares that Wildean paradox could no longer sustain Irish art, but the image of the suffering Wilde held its fascination for Joyce.

Wilde had been eviscerated in London, but it was at home in Dublin that Joyce sustained the emotional wounds that drove his art. Occasionally these were renewed by new barbs. The contrarian G.B. Shaw, elder statesman of Irish letters, responded to Beach’s invitation to buy a copy of Ulysses with a flamboyant refusal. He detailed—in gleeful prose—the sordidness of the book, and suggested to Beach that she misunderstood what kind of novels the Irish reading public would pay for. But while Shaw counted on Dublin to be philistine, in Paris, as in Zurich and Trieste, Joyce found a home he could write in. “Mr. Joyce…has many friends in Paris,” Beach wrote to Harriet Weaver in 1922: “The French writers…have received him with open arms and have the greatest admiration for him.” A 1924 article noted that the author of Dubliners and Portrait was a local celebrity whose draw was more than literary: “Mr. Joyce, with his strikingly good-looking face,” confessed Morrill Cody, “has indeed attracted many people to the shop.”

At today’s Shakespeare and Company on the rue de Bûcherie, the attraction seems no less great, as crowds gather throughout the year to explore the shop’s many nooks, rub elbows with fellow travelers, and perhaps leave with a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses or Beach’s memoirs. This year, Bloomsday celebrants who find themselves in Paris can see David Norris, the Irish politician, activist, and scholar, performing his one-man Joyce show at the Centre Culturel Irlandais. And if they’re near the Arc de Triomphe, they can stop by the James Joyce Pub for a pint of Guinness served up by an Irish staff against the backdrop of a dozen stained-glass windows narrating the plot of Ulysses.

So what shall we do on this Bloomsday in Paris? It is early afternoon on June 16. Let us turn off the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, into the Montparnasse cemetery. There we will find one of Joyce’s most faithful followers, and one who drew his own artistic lessons from the fluidity of Joyce’s prose. His plays turned modernist speech into modernist silence. In the 1930s, Samuel Beckett was Joyce’s most willing and talented pupil. He wrote one of the first critical reflections on Finnegans Wake, and it appeared in a volume published by Shakespeare and Company, “Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.” Though he shared Joyce’s artistic integrity and Wilde’s knack for turning Irish stage comedy to fresh purposes, Beckett stuck out like a sore thumb among the Irish Parisians. He lacked the personal charms of Joyce and Wilde, and he was immune to the aesthetic temptations of Roman Catholicism—even a decadent, blasphemous, worldly Catholicism of the imagination, like Wilde’s or Joyce’s.

As we venture inside the cemetery walls, pausing to take a map from the porter, we find ourselves in a museum of modernist Paris: the ornate stained-glass temple that houses the famed tragic actor Mounet-Sully; the elegant, intellectual, eminently respectable tomb shared by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beavoir; Baudelaire’s resting-place strewn with fresh roses and letters from admirers; Serge Gainsbourg’s monument covered in the pop ephemera of photographs, cigarette lighters and metro tickets. With all these shrines to personality, one wonders what Beckett’s place in eternity will look like— austere or absurd? Does it, like Wilde’s Art Deco tomb in nearby Père Lachaise, do him poetic justice? Will it be strewn with turnips or carrots, leashes, tattered bootlaces? Perhaps the vaudeville spirit of his best-known plays will be honored, and atop the bones of Samuel and Suzanne Beckett we’ll find the marble forms of two quizzical tramps in trash cans, a final visual one-liner.

Beckett’s grave can be picked out as soon as it comes into view, not by its wit, but by its plainness. Though he may have indulged his characters with humor, for himself there was only an iconoclastic anti-regard. His tomb is a slab without adornment, formed of the most generic grey granite, with just one word— “BECKETT”—carved in chilly capitals on the edge. It declares the Protestant sensibility that made Beckett a different kind of Irishman in Paris, the sort who certainly didn’t expect any pleasure and rebuffed the adulation that later came his way. This austerity was his moral force, the temperament that served him so heroically as a member of the French Resistance. His aversion to the myths, cults, and romances of the Celtic twilight, more uncompromising even than Joyce’s, his refusal not just of the Christian imagination, but of the imagination in general, is shocking in this romantic and consolatory graveyard.

Yeats’s headstone in Drumcliff may counsel a similar stoic restraint, but it gives lyrical expression to the sentiment in the poet’s verse:

Cast a cold Eye On Life, on Death, Horseman, pass by!”

Joyce’s grave in Zurich, surrounded by lush green grass, has all the living charm we could hope for. First, there is the capitulation to death—a regular plot in the ground for Joyce and his family—and then, at a slight remove, a statue of the artist seated, a book in hand and his cane at his side, contemplating matters from a distance, just as though on a walk through the park. But Beckett’s tomb has no adornment at all: no images, no epigraphs, no height, no texture, merely names and dates. No devotee has left behind a tribute on its forbidding surface. Beckett’s silence still echoes through Montparnasse. But on Bloomsday, just as we revel in Joyce, it is also good to pause and consider the influence he meted, and the service he was rendered, by this plainer servant of Irish letters.

Outside the only nightly young-adult shelter in the U-District, dozens of people wait — hoping to be taken off the waiting list and given shelter for the night. With the expansion of the shelter, they might not have to hope.

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Ben Wolzfelt, a guest at ROOTS, and Kristine Cunningham, ROOTS executive director, sit at the entrance to the young-adult shelter.

The young-adult shelter Rising Out of the Shadows (ROOTS), located under University Temple United Methodist Church on Northeast 43rd Street, was granted a $500,000 grant this month by the Raynier Institution & Foundation, which will allow the shelter to rebuild and expand its space to accommodate more guests each night.

Brad Trenary, board member of the Raynier Institution & Foundation, said ROOTS makes an important contribution to the Seattle community.

“We are thrilled with what ROOTS does,” Trenary said. “We think ROOTS is one of the greatest gifts to homeless young adults in Seattle.”

About 600 homeless people ages 18 to 25 live in the Seattle area, ROOTS Executive Director Kristine Cunningham said, and this past year ROOTS turned away 2,103 visits due to lack of space.

“We’d be at least a step closer,” Cunningham said about the expansion. “It’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s a good drop in the bucket. It’s moving in the right direction.”

The expansion allows ROOTS to house 45 homeless young adults instead of the previous 27. Currently, if over 27 guests sign up for the shelter, a random selection determines who gets turned away for the night. The construction, which is scheduled to begin in August and last three months, will take place during the day and will not significantly affect ROOTS’ overnight shelter.

While the grant was not enough to buy a new building, Cunningham said the current location near the UW is ideal because most of ROOTS’ volunteers are UW students.

UW senior Amanda Mendoza, a volunteer at ROOTS, said the shelter has been turning down a lot more people over the summer. It’s the regulars, though, who benefit from the ROOTS community the most, she said.

“I’ve made a lot of connections with guests I see every week,” Mendoza said. “When they have something good [happen] in their lives, they can’t wait to share it with us. … We’d know what’s going on. We’d be a substitute for a family member who hasn’t been around.”

Ben Wolzfelt, age 25, is currently homeless and seeks shelter daily at ROOTS. He was placed on the waiting list one night and said the experience was scary because he didn’t know what he was going to do for that night if he didn’t get in.

“I think it’s a wonderful thing,” Wolzfelt said about the expansion. “Especially in this area, it will get a lot more people off the waiting list [and to] just do what they need to [do] to get back on their feet.”

Wolzfelt recently lost his job and said that, like many of the homeless young adults he sees at ROOTS, his situation is a temporary setback.

“You do hear a lot at night … about plans for the future,” Wolzfelt said of the conversations the guests engage in at the shelter. “They’re normally striving towards something.”

Cunningham said many of the homeless youth who seek shelter at ROOTS don’t mind the rules and order that come with the shelter and have ambitions about their futures.

“Just having a predictable place to be safe for one night helps them put the wind in their sails,” Cunningham said. “These are folks that just need a really solid foundation to jump off from.”

With the expansion, the hygiene center will also have four bathrooms instead of three, which Cunningham said is a critical aspect of what the homeless youth need in a shelter.

She added that, while the shelter will not change significantly in appearance, the remodeling will allow the shelter to function more efficiently because of the more open space and improved hygiene center.

“The walls don’t really change that much, but the improvements will be vast as far as how the shelter feels and how it operates,” Cunningham said.

The overnight guests receive accommodations such as toiletries, nursing facilities, underwear and laundry services.

“We are kind of taking it on faith [that we can] grow our income to accommodate the extra people,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham calls ROOTS a community crucial for those who are homeless and don’t have the support they need — a community those who are turned away miss out on.

“They don’t have that circle of support,” Cunningham said. “We’re that circle for these guys. We’re it. That’s a part of how poverty and oppression work. Until the community claims them, that cycle perpetuates.”

The following is an essay by Adam McKeown, author of Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders.

Immigration law is the last and most unrepentant bastion of discrimination in the modern world. Among the causes for discrimination are birthplace, wealth, education, occupation, family ties, political sentiments, and health. Most attempts to reform immigration law, whether motivated by a concern for human rights or to better control borders, only strengthen and refine the discrimination already in place. Not only is this discrimination tolerated, it is even encouraged as a public good. Reformers claim that proper management of these kinds of discrimination will benefit the receiving communities as well as the migrants themselves. How has this come about?

It was not always like this. In the mid-nineteenth century, liberal thinkers believed that free mobility was one of the rights of man and a necessary condition of economic and social progress. By the 1860s these liberal ideals prevailed and were widely put into practice. Most of the countries and cities around the Atlantic Ocean repealed their migration controls as the outmoded legacy of a despotic past. States such as Russia, China, and Japan that continued to restrict movement were considered uncivilized, outside of international norms. International migration took place without papers, restrictions, or any obstacle other than ticket prices and rudimentary health inspections.

But a commitment to free mobility was not the only possible result of the search for freedom and economic prosperity. These same ideals also inspired the rise of the first modern immigration laws in the late nineteenth century. These new laws focused on controlling entry, as opposed to the controls on exit and domestic mobility that had prevailed in the early nineteenth century. The interpretation of freedom behind these laws focused less on the idea of individuals as the bearers of certain rights and more on the idea of a free people with the power of self-government and self-determination. And the first principles of self-determination were the right to shape one’s political community and to guard against threats that might undermine liberty and security. The power to control membership was one of the basic expressions of these rights. This could be easily understood as the right to exclude people who could be a threat to the processes of self-rule and who could undermine the living standards and economic dignity desired by a free people. Some of the most vociferous proponents of these sentiments could be found on egalitarian Anglophone settler frontiers like California, British Columbia, and Australia. These feelings were frequently expressed as a passionate opposition to Chinese immigration. Much of this opposition relied on crude, racist stereotyping of Chinese as filthy, subservient, and, as the childlike subjects of a despotic emperor, inherently incapable of self-determination and participation in a democratic polity. At the same time, it was also grounded in an equally deep fear of unfettered capital as a threat to self-rule and the dignity of the common man. In this context, encouraging the free migration of certain peoples was viewed as a technique by wealthy capitalists to circumvent the interests of self-governing democracy by importing cheap, subservient workers who may well be chained by indenture contracts that provided wages and conditions well below local standards. A free self-determining people did not want a subgroup of what they believed to be degraded coolies in their midst any more than they wanted slavery and slave plantations.

By the 1880s, all these frontiers had enacted laws to exclude Asians. Enforcement was difficult in the early years because of both international criticism and imperfect mechanisms of control. Proponents justified these laws to domestic and international critics as a necessary expedient to protect local communities against an unprecedented danger to their livelihood. In the early years of enforcement, diplomats attempted to gain international cooperation through treaties and agreements. By the early twentieth century, however, negotiation was dropped in favor of insisting that the right to police national borders was more fundamental than the right of migration. Immigration law was to be domestic law and not subject to negotiation. The rights of free mobility were only guaranteed by the institutions of a free government, and those rights stopped at national borders. These nations continued to criticize exit restrictions and the restriction of domestic mobility, as opposed to human rights and progress. But they insisted on the power to restrict entry as indispensable to the constitution of a free government that could guarantee equality before law and free mobility within its borders.

By the 1920s, under diplomatic pressure and relentless advice from the United States and other immigrant nations, most nations around the world had accepted these principles and methods and enacted similar immigration laws. A pair of international conferences also developed standardized international passports. And many nations looked to the United States quota law of 1924 as the gold standard of scientific migration management. The adoption of modern immigration laws and border controls had come to be seen as a necessary aspect of sovereignty, the sign of a modern nation that could adhere to international norms and manage its own population for the public good.

Contemporary immigration laws around the world have largely repealed the explicitly racial discriminations that originally motivated immigration law. But the basic architecture and mechanisms of discrimination established in the service of racism are still firmly in place. One of the most important techniques developed through Chinese exclusion was an array of categories to define admissible immigrants and methods to those migrants. Most current immigration laws now center on the further elaboration and enforcement of categories or point systems that define immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, family reunification, business travelers, investors, students, guest workers (of multiple types), professionals, tourists, and any number of other statuses that determine admissibility and the kinds of rights that can be enjoyed after admission. These categories define the globalizing classes that are free to move around the world and the unfree classes who may not move except as “illegals,” or under surveillance as guest worker and other temporary visitors.

Migration control is often seen as the exception to recent trends of globalization and open borders. But it is actually a fundamental part of globalization. Historically, it has emerged hand-in-hand with the rise of human mobility. Through globally systematized passports and visa procedures, it has preserved and even facilitated the flow of humans who travel with money, knowledge, and information. At the same time, by restricting the mobility of others, it also helps maintain the global wage and skill differentials that make the movement of goods, money, and information so lucrative.