The Last Words Hemingway Ever Wrote

Hemingway typing on an Underwood Noiseless portable in Idaho on October 7, 1939.

He never liked the photo. "I don't work like this," he said.

Fritz Savier's grave, circled, seen here behind Hemingway's.

It will be 60 years next Friday since Ernest Hemingway blew his brains out with a Boss shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Less than five years later, on March 11, 1967, Wood River High School freshman and champion schoolboy skier Frederic Gordon “Fritz” Saviers, the son of Hemingway’s doctor George Bate Saviers, died from a long-term congenital heart condition, aged just 15. Fritz, born the week before Christmas 1951, had been diagnosed with the incurable ailment at the Colorado General Hospital in his birthplace, Denver, on June 15, 1961, the day Hemingway wrote a charming letter to him. At the foot of Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, and facing it, is the last resting place of young Fritz. The two were close during Hemingway’s final months. The last words Hemingway ever wrote were in his letter to Fritz, sent from the Mayo Clinic Hospital on the Saint Mary’s Campus in Rochester, Minnesota, where Dr Saviers had flown Hemingway in a Piper for electroshock treatment in April 1961 [Hemingway was checked in under the name George Saviers]. Dr Saviers let Hemingway know that his son Fritz was in the Denver hospital with his heart problem. Hemingway’s letter read:

“Dear Fritz

I was terribly sorry to hear this morning in a note from your father that you were laid up in Denver for a few days more and speed off this note to tell you how much I hope you’ll be feeling better.

It has been very hot and muggy here in Rochester but the last two days it has turned cool and lovely, with the nights wonderful for sleeping. The country is beautiful around here and I’ve had a chance to see some wonderful country along the Mississippi where they used to drive the logs in the old lumbering days and the trails where the pioneers came north and saw some good bass jump in the river. I never knew anything about the upper Mississippi before and it is really a very beautiful country and there are plenty of pheasants and ducks in the fall. But not as many as in Idaho and I hope we’ll both be back there shortly and can joke about our hospital experiences together.

Best always to you, old timer

from your good friend who misses you very much

Mister) Papa

Best to all the family. Am feeling fine and very cheerful about things in general and hope to see you all soon.

Papa”

LIFE magazine published the letter in its August 25, 1961, edition, saying, “To the tragedy of Ernest Hemingway’s death there is now added a tender, peculiarly fitting postscript – a letter to a little boy forced to put aside for good the rugged outdoors world they both so loved. The letter’s words were the last that Hemingway ever wrote. The boy is Fritz Saviers, 9, of Ketchum, Idaho, whose father was Hemingway’s doctor and his hunting and fishing friend. Fritz delighted in going on their trips, and Hemingway was charmed by the boy’s Hemingwayesque pleasure in what his athletic young body could do. ‘There’s a boy,’ the author would say. Around Ketchum where the children called Hemingway ‘Mr Papa’, Fritz was allowed plain ‘Papa’.

“Then, together, the man who was a living legend and his small friend turned a sad corner. Hemingway, himself in the Mayo Clinic for hypertension, learned that Fritz was hospitalised with heart disease. Ernest Hemingway immediately wrote the note at right, characteristically spare yet full of the physical zest that is his trademark, full of the things dear to this 9-year-old. And as usual with Hemingway, it was what he did not say that carried the measure of his sadness. Two weeks later, back in Ketchum, when Fritz had to return to the hospital for diagnostic tests, he came to say goodbye to ‘Papa’. As always the two had a solemn conversation – the Yankee’s pennant chances, a 14-inch trout Fritz had caught. As they parted, Hemingway put his arm around the little boy, and said, ‘Be a good scout.’

“The next day Fritz was told that his famous friend was dead. As in The Old Man and the Sea, when the young boy sees the defeat of the heroic old fisherman he loves, Fritz wept. But as his eyes filled with tears, he fled the room, unwilling that anyone see his sobbing.”

Fritz Saviers with a .22 rifle which had belonged to Hemingway and was given to Fritz by Hemingway’s widow Mary.

From the Valley Morning Star, March 3, 1958.

Only three weeks before his own death, Fritz Saviers won the Expert B boys division of the Intermountain junior slalom championships at the Thayne Canyon outside Park City, Utah. Fritz’s father George died, aged 78, on June 23, 1994. He was the son of a pioneer Twin Falls newspaperman, George Delno Saviers, and the husband of a champion skier, Patricia Gordon Pierce, the daughter of a superior court judge who he married in 1947. They were divorced in 1968. George Saviers had travelled to Spain to be with Hemingway for the author’s 60th birthday on July 21, 1959, during the “Dangerous Summer”. Antonio Ordóñez dedicated his second bull to Saviers at a corrida in Valencia on July 25. Saviers acted as one of Hemingway’s pallbearers.

Hemingway with George Saviers in Spain in July 1959.

Fritz's mother and sister.