Carlos Baker Quote
Sunday morning dawned bright and cloudless. Ernest awoke early as always. He put on the red Emporor's robe and padded softly down the carpeted stairway. The early sunlight lay in pools on the living room floor. He had noticed that the guns were locked up in the basement. But the keys, as he well knew, were on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. He tiptoed down the basement stairs and unlocked the storage room. It smelled as dank as a grave. He chose a double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke. He had used it for years of pigeon shooting. He took some shells from one of the boxes in the storage room, closed and locked the door, and climbed the basement stairs. If he saw the bright day outside, it did not deter him. He crossed the living room to the front foyer, a shrinelike entryway five by seven feet, with oak-paneled walls and a floor of linoleum tile. He had held for years to the maxim: il faut (d'abord) durer. Now it had been succeeded by another: il faut (apres tout) mourir. The idea, if not the phrase, filled all his mind. He slipped in two shells, lowered the gun butt carefully to the floor, leaned forward, pressed the twin barrels against his forehead just above the eyebrows, and tripped both triggers.
Sunday morning dawned bright and cloudless. Ernest awoke early as always. He put on the red Emporor's robe and padded softly down the carpeted stairway. The early sunlight lay in pools on the living room floor. He had noticed that the guns were locked up in the basement. But the keys, as he well knew, were on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. He tiptoed down the basement stairs and unlocked the storage room. It smelled as dank as a grave. He chose a double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke. He had used it for years of pigeon shooting. He took some shells from one of the boxes in the storage room, closed and locked the door, and climbed the basement stairs. If he saw the bright day outside, it did not deter him. He crossed the living room to the front foyer, a shrinelike entryway five by seven feet, with oak-paneled walls and a floor of linoleum tile. He had held for years to the maxim: il faut (d'abord) durer. Now it had been succeeded by another: il faut (apres tout) mourir. The idea, if not the phrase, filled all his mind. He slipped in two shells, lowered the gun butt carefully to the floor, leaned forward, pressed the twin barrels against his forehead just above the eyebrows, and tripped both triggers.
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About Carlos Baker
In 1969, Baker published the well-regarded scholarly biography of Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, describing him as a "fierce individualist ... who believed that that government is best which governs least". In "Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn", Hemingway's third wife, Gellhorn criticizes Baker's assertions concerning her affair and marriage to Hemingway, and indicates that Baker was frequently wrong about those matters she experienced personally, and which Baker wrote about. Hemingway never met Baker according to Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, who also asserts in her 1976 book How It Was that Hemingway deliberately chose someone who never knew him. Mary does not offer a specific reason for this choice; Baker had published Hemingway: The Writer as Artist in 1952, which favorably treated Hemingway's work to that date.
Baker's other major works included biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Baker's minor work includes A Year and A Day, Poems by Carlos Baker. Baker taught biographer A. Scott Berg while Berg was an undergraduate at Princeton in the late 1960s. Berg recalled that Baker "changed my life", and convinced him to quit acting to concentrate on his thesis, a study of editor Maxwell Perkins. Berg eventually expanded his thesis into the National Book Award-winning biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), which he dedicated in part to Baker.
Baker was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1982. He died in 1987 at Princeton, New Jersey, aged 77.