Hemingway's Brain

by Andrew Farah

  His remark to Marcelline at the funeral, essentially that suicides are not welcomed into heaven,11 reflected more than callousness. It grew primarily from the desire (unknown to Ernest consciously) to reject the new mantle of family patriarch. That would put him in the same struggle for power, the same losing battle with his mother, that had killed his father. Much easier to stay the rebellious son.

  Leicester, the young teen who no doubt was traumatized by his discovery of his father on the bed expiring and making “hoarse breathing noises” and who then had to relive the experience at the coroner’s interview, was instructed by his famous older brother: “At the funeral, I want no crying. You understand, kid?”12 Leicester would also one day suffer from diabetes. His illness also resulted in vascular complications of the legs and, later, in peripheral neuropathy, a form of chronic pain from nerve damage. When tissue death occurs, many diabetics require amputations. And when Leicester was faced with the probability of more extensive surgery than he had already required, he too shot himself, like his father with a handgun. He was sixty-seven when he took his life.

  To what extent a predisposition to suicide is inherited has been explored in many ways, from reviews of basic family history to the search for specific genetic markers. Suicides do run in families. A commonly reproduced Hemingway family photo from 1906 shows young Ernest wearing his page-boy haircut and looking to the left of the camera with a halfhearted attempt at a smile. Dr. Hemingway looks every bit the patriarch, with a stern demeanor but a gentle hold on his youngest, Madelaine (“Sunny”), balanced on his knee. The other two daughters, Ursula and Marcelline, are lovely, and Grace exudes maternal warmth. Yet the most remarkable aspect of this photo is that four of the six Hemingways pictured would eventually commit suicide. The exceptions were Hemingway’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, and Sunny, who died at the age of ninety. Marcelline’s death, in 1963, was initially reported to be from natural causes, yet Leicester is on record as suspecting suicide. Ursula’s overdose followed in 1966, after she was diagnosed with cancer.

  There is something powerful lurking in a genetic code that not only conveys illness but self-destructive behavior. To measure the very strength of such a genetic connection, monozygotic twins (individuals who share identical DNA, or “identical twins”) are often compared with dizygotic twins (who have the same genetic relationship as do nontwin siblings, thus “fraternal” twins). Monozygotic twins have a significantly higher concordance rate for completed (and even attempted) suicides than do sets of dizygotic twins. In fact, studies show that the chance that one monozygotic twin will make a serious suicide attempt is seventeen times greater if the co-twin made a serious attempt at any point in his or her life. What is also revealing is that adoption studies also confirm the genetic link. Adoption studies are particularly important because they can argue for genetic influence in the presence of different parenting and environments. The rate of suicide among biological siblings of adopted children who commit suicide is six times higher than the rate among controls (in this case, siblings of nonsuicidal adopted persons), even when the adopted siblings are raised separately.13 Environment certainly plays some role, but the risk conveyed by DNA is undeniable. It has been estimated that as much as 43 percent of suicidal behavior may be explained by genetics, while the remaining 57 percent may be due to illness or environmental factors.

  Yet what is most curious is that the genetic risk of a suicidal tendency can be transmitted completely independent of the genes for mental illness. The predetermined vulnerability for self-destruction is therefore sent along as its own potential time bomb, independent of the genetic risk for depression, bipolar illness, substance abuse, or any other psychiatric disorder. These findings challenge the notion that suicide is always the product of a specific illness, always the actions of a diseased brain, although this is commonly the case. Certainly schizophrenia is a risk factor for suicide (5 percent of schizophrenics die this way), as are bipolar illness (a 15 percent rate) and substance abuse (at least 50 percent of suicides are impaired at the time of their attempt). And anyone who commits suicide is by definition depressed. But the genetic variant that codes for self-destruction is separate from the genes linked to these illnesses.

  Decades before this research, Hemingway, at some level, well understood this (either from intuition, wisdom guided by experience, or both). In 1936 he wrote to the mother of his second wife, Pauline, that the Pfeiffer bloodline was necessary for his children “to try to breed some if the suicide streak” out of them.14 And some of the more insightful individuals he encountered detected this very streak in him, even in his younger days. The French writer (and Ernest’s boxing partner in Paris) Jean Prévost described what he sensed as Hemingway’s “obscure need for his own destruction.” In his preface to the French translation of The Sun Also Rises, Prévost accurately predicted that “nothing would be able to strike down [Hemingway] but himself.”15 And the features editor at the Toronto Star, who met Hemingway during his stint there as a very young reporter, noted that “a more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked this earth.”16

  Though Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and his father, Anson, certainly warrant special genetic examination in connection with Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, so does Ernest’s maternal grandfather. Like Anson Tyler Hemingway, Ernest Hall served in the Yankee army. Hall was described as a tall, dark-haired gentleman with grey eyes, who crossed the Atlantic at age fifteen with his parents. After leaving their home in Sheffield, England, they eventually settled on the fertile land of Iowa. At the age of twenty-one Ernest Hall left the family cattle farm to join the First Iowa Volunteer Calvary. He suffered a wound at the time of the battle at Warrensburg, Missouri, in 1862, and would carry the Confederate miniball in his left thigh for the rest of his life.

  Hall never spoke of the war, and the circumstances of his wounding are vague and curious. According to his Civil War records, held at the National Archives, he was wounded during his term of service, “but not in the regular discharge of duty; though from an enemy in arms against the authority of the U.S.”17,18 The entry raises more questions than it answers, and perhaps this is why he never spoke of his war service.

  His home was directly across the street from that of Anson and Adelaide Hemingway, so when his daughter, Grace Hall, married his neighbors’ son, Clarence Hemingway, the young couple moved in with him. Ernest Hall had been a widower for a year, and he likely welcomed the attractive newlyweds’ company. But Hall would eventually suffer from kidney disease, which would lead to his death when he was sixty-five. In a letter to Mary in 1945, Ernest wrote of his maternal grandfather’s slow, painful demise. Hall had been diagnosed with Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the kidneys, sometimes associated with kidney stones and all the more excruciating:

  My father married the daughter [of the Halls, who lives across the street] and as long as my English grandfather was alive it was all right because he exercised all discipline and controlled the daughter and her terrible selfishness and conceit. But I can remember when he died very clearly and how the pain of what he died of was unbearable and he wished to shoot himself and my father removed the cartridges from his pistol (which he had under his pillow) and he was allowed to shoot himself with an empty gun. I was a very little boy (six) but it still seemed to me the cruelest thing I could imagine, much worse than what God who they were always spooking us with, would do. My father was very proud of it. I could never forgive him for that nor for any of his other cruellnesses [sic] nor weaknesses.19

  No six-year-old would fully comprehend or favor a grandfather’s suicide. Nor would any six-year-old be intellectually equipped or likely to measure the foiling of a suicide against God’s judgment. The tale is unverified in any other source and is clearly Ernest’s inventive recollection, based on some fragment of memory or half-truth he recalled from childhood. Yet in 1945 Hemingway’s theme was clear: if a suffering man wants to end his life, the well-meaning sh
ould simply get out of his way. And as Hemingway scholar Rose Marie Burwell concluded: “if he believed what he had written in this letter—as he frequently came to do with other tales he had told, then by the time he took his own life, he also believed that he was the third generation of suicidally intent men, and that they had come from both sides of his family.”20

  Beyond confirming the genetics of this scenario, this letter opens the door as well to the less objective and more elusive influence of “learned” or “modeled” behavior. Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in 1921. Her father had been deceased for eighteen years at that point, and, like Hemingway’s father, he had committed suicide by putting a revolver to his head. Hadley was just twelve at the time (in 1903), and her future husband was only four. James Richardson’s case was quite similar to Clarence Hemingway’s, in that he was also tormented by financial worries, but, unlike him, he often drank to excess. Like those of his future son-in-law (whom he would never meet), his moods were visibly affected by alcohol, whose destructive influence was obvious even to his young daughter. The pistol shot was not instantly fatal, and the young Hadley watched her father die over the subsequent four hours.

  Hemingway’s sister, Ursula, born three years after Ernest, was also creative, but she preferred the visual arts. She resided in Hawaii during her adult life. Her suicide was by overdose in 1966 (women usually choose this method, while men are more likely to end their lives by more violent methods such as shooting or hanging). Yet, the female suicide in the family that received much more publicity was that of Hemingway’s granddaughter Margaux.

  Hemingway’s eldest son, Jack (often referred to by his other nickname, “Bumby”), had three daughters, Joan (born 1950), Margaux (1954), and Mariel (1961). Joan has struggled with substance abuse in the past and has also been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder (she now resides in Idaho). Mariel was cast in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, as his seventeen-year-old girlfriend (the Allen character was forty-two). Her work is regarded critically as the brightest spot in this sea of pseudo-intellectual neurotic angst.

  Jack’s middle child, Margaux, was nearly six feet tall and able to pull off girl-next-door beauty with equal proportions of tomboy and glamour. She was the first fashion model given a million-dollar contract (by Fabergé). Her first movie, Lipstick, also starred her sister Mariel and was a disturbing and graphic story of rape, injustice in the courts, and, finally, revenge, or “true justice.” But this critically acclaimed film was the high-water mark of her career. Her subsequent career setbacks were no doubt related to her struggles with depression, alcoholism, an eating disorder, and epilepsy. Though she was thought to be making a comeback, even appearing on the cover of Playboy in 1990, she overdosed on phenobarbital (from a prescription that was not in her name) in 1996.21

  Genetics are not the full answer but a piece of the puzzle. Though they constitute just one risk factor, adoption studies tell us that selfdestruction is more than just learned or modeled behavior in a family but is in part caused by a specific set of genes that have been passed along. There are millions who have inherited such genes and never harmed themselves in any way, but, for a few, their genetics lay the groundwork, and additional risk factors may accumulate and finally overwhelm them.

  Much psychological hay has been made of the photo of Ernest Hemingway as an infant, in a pink dress and a flowered hat, and his mother’s penchant for dressing Ernest and his sister Marcelline alike. But he was only nine months old at the time, and in most other photos of Ernest in girlish outfits he is clearly under three years of age. Furthermore, Grace’s “twinning” of Ernest and Marcelline went both ways, and by the time Ernest was five, the girlish clothing was in his past, but Marcelline’s hair was cut to match Ernest’s. Nor did the twinning end in childhood, but Marcelline was the one who suffered—she was even held back a year in school (kindergarten) and sat out another (eighth grade) just so that she and Ernest could be in the same high school class. Grace also insisted that the Ernest take Marcelline to many high school dances as his official date. Male-female twinning and girls with boy’s haircuts not only would show up in early stories (“Last Good Country”) but would reappear in 1950. David and Catherine were Hemingway’s fictional couple in The Garden of Eden. Catherine, one of the most psychiatrically disturbed of his characters, would become masculine by cropping her hair and tanning herself. The full exploration of these gender exchanges fascinates modern scholars, as they argue for a critical reexamination of Hemingway as far more experimental than his image and more popular works suggest.

  Even in his last years, while working on A Moveable Feast, Hemingway would write some of his most sexually charged and yet quite tender passages. He and his first wife, Hadley, would cut their hair to be the same length and wake each other in the cold nights—each lover taking a turn dangling and swinging his or her hair in the other’s face. And he was also working on the sexually charged manuscript The Garden of Eden during these last years.

  Ernest’s upbringing did plant various seeds, but not the one commonly assumed: the quaint Victorian holdover of dressing infants in a unisex fashion could never be the full explanation, as many have wished it to be, for macho overcompensation. It is rare for a child to store any memories before the age of three. Yet his machismo must have been shaken somewhat when Hemingway walked in on one of his sons in 1943 while he was trying on his mother’s nylons. His boy was twelve years old at the time, and, like virtually all cross-dressers, he engaged in the practice from a very young age. He would later report “the look of horror” on his father’s face at the discovery. And Ernest Hemingway’s comment, several days later, about their coming from a “strange tribe” would eventually become the title of yet another Hemingway memoir, in 2007.

  Gregory Hancock Hemingway was born in 1931, the younger of two sons Hemingway had with his second wife, Pauline. Gregory would train to become a physician, like his grandfather, but would live the most tortured and possibly the most tragic life, from a psychiatric standpoint, of any member of the clan. He struggled with bipolar illness, addictions, and gender identity issues. During a visit to Cuba, he stole some of his stepmother Mary’s clothing and blamed the maid when the theft was discovered. After the incident, he described his cross-dressing in a letter to his father: “The clothes business is something that I have never been able to control, understand basically very little, and I am terribly ashamed of.” Eventually he had a sex-change operation and presented himself as “Gloria” or “Vanessa” at various times thereafter, even altering his voice to a less-than-convincing female tone. But, as with his father, alcoholism would eventually take hold, and his medical license was not renewed in 1988 as a result. Because of the severity of his bipolar illness, he received even more rounds of electroconvulsive therapy than his father, and over a much longer span of time.

  While in Miami, expansive and disinhibited from the manic phase of his illness, as well as possible intoxication, he caused a disturbance on a bus, which prompted the driver to pull over and call the police. He assaulted one of the officers and was subsequently arrested and booked but, once released, failed to show for his hearing. A second arrest in Miami followed in early September 2001. With Gregory noncompliant with his lithium and again well into a manic phase, his wife feared the typical out-of-control spending—and he soon discovered his accounts were frozen and his credit cards were useless. He was reduced to begging in front of a liquor store until by chance he was noticed by a friend. With this help, he was no longer destitute and was clothed and fed but still unstable mentally.

  Toward the end of the month, “Vanessa” attended a party at the home of friends, wearing a long black evening dress and a blond wig. She danced and drank until four A.M. and then began walking, at some point stripping to just underwear and eventually sleeping on a park bench. Six hours later she was walking again, down the median of a highway, now without panties. The officer who arrested her was more than civil and described herself as a “big fan
of Ernest Hemingway.” They chatted cordially on the way to jail. On the back of the arrest affidavit, Gregory wrote “to the loveliest police officer i have ever met—greg hemingway.”

  His wife at the time hoped that the jail authorities would recognize the need for psychiatric treatment, and no bail was posted. It was obvious that Gregory needed psychiatric care, but the jail was unaware of his need for cardiac medications, and his heart went into fibrillation while he was in custody. He died on the concrete floor of the cell. Gregory’s son, John, noted in his memoir that it was “fifty years to the day” of his mother Pauline’s death. Perhaps alcohol withdrawal played a role in this sad end, triggering the arrhythmia; if so, like those of many alcoholics, his death may be considered a slow form of self-destruction.22

  Ernest and his son Gregory would exchange many unpleasant letters. Gregory’s illness and the resultant instability caused him to write numerous threats in letters that were laced with profanity and insults. Ernest certainly took offense and never backed down, but all the while he saw his son as quite ill and usually responded in a measured, matter-of-fact tone that satisfied his desire to stand firm without throwing gas on the fire. In 1957 he advised Gregory to have the electroconvulsive treatments that had greatly benefitted Gregory’s older brother Patrick: “Even though you feel better now, the doctors have convinced me that it would be wise to take the same treatments Patrick had, and which did him so much good, so that you would not have a recurrence of that suicidal feeling and get rid of your anxiety state. They say that treatment cannot possibly do your brain any harm.”23 (Hemingway would one day take the opposite stand regarding shock therapy.) And Hemingway would not live to see his son transform himself into a strange imitation of the daughter he always wanted, but the theme of the son who disappoints his parents was very familiar to Hemingway.