Stephen McGinty: For all his flaws, Hemingway is worthy of praise half a century on

FIFTY years ago last night, on 1 July, 1961, Ernest Hemingway went out to dinner at a local restaurant in Ketchum, Idaho, only to be disturbed by the sight of two men in suits, sitting quietly at a table.

After inquiring of the waitress as to who they were, he was told: salesmen. "They're FBI," he muttered. In recent months the world's most famous author had been hospitalised with depression and become increasingly paranoid, convinced J Edgar Hoover's G-men were out to get him.

A few hours later, as dawn crept across the The Big Wood River, he climbed out of bed, walked downstairs, collected the keys from the kitchen windowsill and unlocked the storage room in the basement. He then selected a double-barrelled shotgun, with which he liked to shoot pigeons, went back up to the foyer at the front of the house, put both barrels against his forehead and then pressed the trigger with his thumb.

As he had written in the short story, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, "a sudden white hot blinding flash exploded inside his head and that was all he ever felt".

The reason why Ernest Hemingway killed himself was answered quite compellingly by Christopher D Martin, the inspector and staff psychiatrist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.

After studying all the available biographical material, he wrote a long article in 1996 for the American Psychiatry magazine entitled: "Ernest Hemingway: A Psychological Autopsy of a Suicide." His conclusions were that the author suffered from "bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury and probably borderline and narcissistic personality disorder".

In the previous decade he had repeatedly sustained severe head injuries, one by head-butting his way out of a small plane that had caught fire on an African runway. Suicide ran like a dark river through his family having carried off his father decades before.

Recent years have not been kind to Ernest Hemingway. The machismo of much of his work has fallen out of favour and, for some, there are strong arguments for why Hemingway should be a closed book.

In our age of environmentalism, it's hard to think what young readers make of his desire to hunt and kill as much big game as his fleet of Land Rovers could carry. An enthusiastic chronicler of the barbarous ballet of bullfighting, most notably in Death in the Afternoon, he would be appalled that even Spain has turned against its once sacred bloodsport.Yet, as he explained to Ava Gardner: "I spent a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won't kill myself."

Then there was his portrayal of women. I recently read Across the River and Into the Trees, in which a battle-scarred American officer, dying of a heart condition, falls in love with a young Italian countess in Venice. Calling his young lover "daughter" as Hemingway often did, rendered it an almost repellently creepy read, with dialogue you could certainly type, but not speak - at least not with a straight face. Hemingway was a brave, at times foolhardy, man who frequently over-egged his achievements and so left what he had done open to the debate that he didn't.

He believed that life should be lived on the edge, that the author should be on tip-toe at the rim of the abyss so as to send back the most accurate dispatches of what awaits us all. Yet there was an elemental quality to Hemingway that remains timeless. The importance of simple, declarative sentences to create the tip of a gleaming iceberg, one with so much weight tucked out of sight and below the waterline. He could capture the weather, the landscape and the people and creatures that populate it, like a documentary film-maker, but with the added bonus of providing previously unseen footage of their souls.

I believe fiction lost something precious when he pressed the trigger that warm Sunday in July, half a century ago. You need only pick up The Old Man of the Sea and read the story of Santiago's futile three-day fight to save his giant marlin, the first fish he had caught in 84 days, from the surrounding sharks to see an individual's struggle rendered universal. Hemingway said that there was no message: "The sea is the sea, the old man is the old man, the boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse."

But this slim volume, originally designed as the epilogue of a much larger book, Islands in the Stream, published postumously, epitomised the author's belief in the human spirit. As he said: "Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated." It is also a note on the necessity of community and partnership, for despite how selfishly Hemingway acted, he knew that no man is an island and that a man alone "ain't got no bloody ***ing chance".

On this, the 50th anniversary of his death, it seems appropriate to ask the question: where is the Hemingway of today? There will be those who argue that one was enough, that we have no need of swaggering macho bully-boys, who challenge their bravery by rushing to the sound of gunfire.

Sure, we have a new generation of war correspondents, but show me the author brave enough to go under fire and return from combat with 2011's For Whom The Bell Tolls.I find it incredible that in the decade since the events of 2001, and all the violent turmoil in which America and Britain have been active participants in Iraq and Afghanistan, that not a single major novelist has attempted to witness first hand what has gone on and transmuted all that fired lead into literary fictional gold.

Perhaps today's authors prefer the buttoned down Brooks Brothers shirts to the epaulettes of the safari suit or the khaki coloured flag jacket, the quiet tip-tapping on the laptop in Starbucks to the foxhole. Fair enough, it is an entirely sensible decision, but it's one we should all remember when Hemingway's name is next tarnished. For it is a symbol of how far down the literary shelf he has slipped that this major anniversary has passed so quietly. I think he earned the right to be read, even if only for a few pages today.

Even Martha would agree. Many years ago, in the small apartment in London's Eaton Square, I interviewed Martha Gellhorn, one of the 20th-century's finest war correspondents and the author of a clutch of good novels, who had spent the past 50 years struggling to escape the shadow of the man to whom she was briefly married.

They had met during the Spanish Civil War, married in 1940, separated in 1945 and spent the intervening years in a marital conflict as explosive as that which they both covered. He once sent a telegram that read: "ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED?" At the time she was not best pleased to be questioned: "Do not mention that man's name." To one biographer she was more balanced: "He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote: he liberated our written language."