Hemingway's Brain

by Andrew Farah

  Hemingway was wise enough to shield his parents from his first publication, Three Stories & Ten Poems, as it contained the story “Up in Michigan.” Even the open-minded Gertrude Stein objected to it, calling it “inaccrochable,” like a painting one cannot hang in public view. And true to the genius of Hemingway’s sensitivity, the raw details of the central event of the story, the date-rape, seem less traumatic than the young lady’s psychological torment. Dr. Hemingway did order six copies of In Our Time from Paris but shipped every one of them back to Three Mountains Press once he and Grace read the sentence “A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.” Such “filth” was not allowed in his home, no matter who wrote it.24

  Exactly two years before Dr. Hemingway put the Smith & Wesson to his temple and just after the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, he wrote to Ernest: “You are now a famous writer and I shall trust your future books will have a different sort of subject matter.… You have such a wonderful ability and we want to be able to read and ask others to enjoy your works.”25 Grace had wept at the vulgarities in the earliest of his stories and did not hide her anger when writing to him about his novel: “Don’t you know any words other than ‘damn’ and ‘bitch.’ It is a doubtful honor to have produced one of the filthiest books of the year.” Her final words fully negated his great accomplishment: “I love you dear, and still believe you will do something worthwhile to live after you.”26

  Hemingway was not only an adult; he was busy transforming twentieth-century literature and culture. Yet, to his parents, he was still the foul-mouthed teen, an embarrassment, and they prayed nightly that he would one day straighten himself out. (Grace reported she was too embarrassed to attend a public discussion on his “filthy” book.) It is significant that only after his father’s death would Ernest Hemingway become “Papa,” a nickname given to him by his second wife, Pauline, in 1929 that set up a paternal dynamic with whomever addressed him. The name fit, and it stuck for a lifetime. When Ernest inherited the patriarchy, he secured the persona of a “Papa”: the sons were always in their youth. Thus, Father was not paranoid or suicidal, not harshly judging your great novels; he was forever the Papa who took you hunting and fishing at the lake and taught you to cook over the campfire.

  As for his mother’s possible genetic influence on him, Ernest claimed the only thing he inherited from Grace was poor eyesight. While suffering from a bout of scarlet fever at the age of seven, she apparently went blind, and the condition did not resolve for several months. The young Grace’s blindness remains somewhat of a mystery, as acute scarlet fever is not associated with visual problems. Yet, scarlet fever can result in rheumatic fever, which it commonly did in the days before antibiotics. This autoimmune disease can indeed be associated with transient blindness, through a possible blood clot in a retinal vessel. But this is a very rare occurrence, and it is even more unlikely to involve both eyes. It is more likely that she suffered from another form of transient blindness in childhood and that its inception at the same time she had scarlet fever was merely coincidental. Though her blindness is generally accepted to have been a somatization disorder (that is, the result of psychological issues, not physical ones), whatever the etiology, once she recovered her sight she was forever light-sensitive. And this sensitivity crushed her performance dreams, as the bright stage lighting ended her opera career after just one performance. Grace studied voice in New York from 1895 to 1896 and was even offered a contract by the Metropolitan Opera. She made her debut at Madison Square Garden, but the eye pain associated with this one role sent her home to Illinois and her future husband.

  Music always played a major role in the house (Ernest would play cello in his early teens for his school orchestra, no doubt at Grace’s urging). And Grace had numerous students in and out of her home’s music room. With a fee of $8 per hour, she was soon earning $1,000 a month. By contrast, Dr. Hemingway felt his patients would pay what they could when they could. Though on the surface this was noble in spirit, it was in reality a lofty defense against confrontation. And Grace felt her husband, Ed, was too frequently taken advantage of. Ed brooded about the earnings disparity, feeling emasculated and often arguing with Grace about money. After many such disputes, according to memoirs, she would retreat to her darkened bedroom and complain of a migraine. One of Hemingway’s early stories, “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” presents a near-perfect reflection of their home life: the doctor struggles to keep his volcanic anger under wraps while his wife is “lying [in bed] with the blinds drawn” and quoting Proverbs to him (“Remember, that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city”).

  Grace’s conflicts with Ernest were typical of those between any adolescent boy and his mother, except that they never ended, no matter how successful Ernest became or how much he aged. An incident at Windemere Cottage would inspire Grace to write to her then twenty-one-yearold son that while a mother’s love is like a bank account, rich with love and patience, Ernest was very much overdrawn: “For three years, since you decided, at the age of eighteen years, that you did not need any further advice or guidance from your parents, I have tried to keep silence and let you work out your own salvation; by that I mean, your own philosophy of life—your code of ethics in dealing with men, women, and children. Now, at the age of twenty-one, and being, according to some of your best friends and well-wishers, so sadly in need of good guidance, I shall brave your anger and speak this once more to you.”

  Grace continues for six paragraphs, elaborating on the theme of a mother’s love as a bank account, “seemingly inexhaustible.” But the child draws heavily on the account, particularly in adolescence. By the time the child reaches early adulthood, the bank is in need of some “good sized” deposits in the way of gratitude and appreciation. “Unless you, my son, Ernest, come to yourself, cease your lazy loafing, and pleasure seeking—borrowing with no thought of returning—stop trying to graft a living off anybody and everybody—spending all your earnings lavishly and wastefully on luxuries for yourself—stop trading on your handsome face, to fool little gullible girls, and neglecting your duties to God and your Savior Jesus Christ—unless, in other words, you come into your manhood—there is nothing before you but bankruptcy: You have over drawn.”27

  The incident that was apparently the last straw was a midnight rendezvous and picnic with the neighbor kids. Of the party of eight that set out by canoe and rowboat to the sandbar across the lake, three were Hemingways—Ursula and Sunny had actually planned the secret outing. But Ernest and his friend Ted Brumback, being the oldest, took the heat. Of course, the incident seems fairly typical for teens and young adults on vacation, and harmless enough. And the worst of the speculation in any biography has involved some possible “kissing the girls beyond the edge of the firelight.”28 Even Grace had to acknowledge that nothing “wicked” transpired.29 She focused rather on the deceit involved. And it was clearly the latest of many offenses to Grace. She was so pleased with her letter that she drafted another copy for her husband and a third to keep herself. Her theme of unrepentance was by then quite familiar to Ernest. He played the role of prodigal son who never returned for a lifetime. He and his mother fit like two angry puzzle pieces.

  Hemingway never spoke kindly of Grace throughout his entire adult life. His friend Buck Lanham wrote that he always referred to her as “that bitch”: “He must have told me a thousand times how much he hated her and in how many ways.”30 He always blamed her for his father’s death, and when she died, in 1951, he did not attend the funeral. Two years earlier he had written to Charles Scribner:

  My mother is very old, her memory is more than spotty and she is addicted to fantastic statements. Lately, because she is so old, I have played the role of a devoted son in case it pleased her. But I hate her guts and she hates mine. She forced my father to suicide and, one time, later, when I ordered her to sell worthless properties that were ea
ting her up with taxes, she wrote, “Never threaten me with what to do. Your father tried that once when we were first married and he lived to regret it.” I answered, “My dear mother I am a very different man from my father and I never threaten anyone. I only make promises. If I say that if you do not do certain sound things I will no longer contribute to your support it means factually and exactly that.” We never had any trouble after that. Except that I will not see her and she knows that she can never come here.31

  The jabs went both ways, but Grace would score extra points for subtlety. Even during the last year of her life, before a dementing illness took over, she gave a newspaper interview in which she said: “Some critics and professors consider Ernest’s books among the finest of our times, but I think the essays he wrote as a schoolboy were better.”32

  When Dr. Hemingway’s suicide is discussed in the context of Ernest’s writing life, the deleted passages from Green Hills of Africa are the primary touchstone: “My father was a coward. He shot himself without necessity. At least I thought so. I had gone through it myself until I figured it in my head. I knew what it was to be a coward and what it was to cease being a coward. Now, truly, in actual danger I felt a clean feeling as in a shower.”33

  The cowardice has been commonly interpreted as the act of suicide; however, for Hemingway, the cowardice he described in his father was his inability to stand up to Grace, allowing her to “force” him into this premature death, as Ernest made clear in his 1949 letter (“She forced my father to suicide.… I am a very different man from my father.”). A suicide out of “necessity” would be that which Grandfather Hall plotted (even if it is apocryphal) when his kidneys were inflamed and his illness incurable, his situation akin to that of the fatally wounded man suffering on the battlefield. The henpecked did not qualify. His mother’s dominance of his father was unforgiveable, and Ernest’s defiance was a lifelong obsession—partly because it was a disruption in the assumed power structure. Hemingway never walked into a room where he was the weaker party, whether a defiant teen, or in a (fabricated) boxing match against a professional fighter, or even among falling shells in the Hürtgen Forest. He needed to command every situation, if not in rank, at least psychologically.

  When he prevented his sons from visiting their grandmother, he told them that it was because of Grace’s “androgyny.”34 Some biographers have concluded that Ernest projected homosexuality onto his mother, though historical investigations into this possibility are all dead ends (for Ernest and for Grace). But this was not the point he was making. Hemingway was a wordsmith, so his choice in this instance was very deliberate—he did not say his mother was homosexual, rather that she was androgynous—she was a mixture of male and female, as it would be acceptable for a male to be controlled only by another male, even if defined by halves.

  Ernest, however, would never be such a coward, certainly as long as Grace still lived. His father’s life, as summed up by Ernest’s stand-in, Nick Adams, was “both cruel and abused.” Burying the gun his father used to end his life was a critical ritual. In classic Hemingway metaphor, he was now cleansed and safe, no matter what danger he might face, at least for the time being.

  Chapter 2

  Trauma Artist

  Professors and critics still aptly described Hemingway as a “trauma artist,” one whose life and thus whose writing were repeatedly informed by trauma—the celebrated World War I injuries being most central to the art. Though he disagreed, the theory was never news to Hemingway. But, more important, it was the critic’s attempt to put him on the analyst’s couch that he found intolerable. In his defense, few people know the distraction of having any and every detail from their lives uncovered (even their wardrobe from infancy and childhood) and then having their past and current work production analyzed for subconscious motivations.

  Hemingway’s personal injuries were the central theme of the 1952 book, Ernest Hemingway, by Philip Young, a professor at New York University. Though Young’s volume is essentially a work of literary criticism, Hemingway still fought to suppress its progress and release for a time. The book examines his fiction in the context of “wound psychology,” and Hemingway wrote to Scribner’s insisting that the publisher refuse Young permission to quote from any of his writing. He elaborated to his editor: “Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung, and a sort of Columnist peephole and missing laundry list school.”1 Hemingway felt “academic detectives” were always trying to “hang something on him,” seeking Ph.D.s, and quipped that if he bothered to shoot Young, the man would “bleed footnotes.” Hemingway eventually relented, but when writing to Young he still sought reassurance that the book was “not a psychoanalytical study of a living writer.”

  No doubt, Hemingway’s male characters are defined, in varying degrees, by their traumas. Jake Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises, is rendered impotent by his World War I wounds, and this fact dominates his daily life, though he openly denies that it does. He has indeed considered his trauma from every angle: “Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.” This is an argument much more convincing when it applies to someone else’s wounds. Harry Morgan (To Have and Have Not) loses his right arm from a bootlegging gunfight and eventually dies from wounds he suffered while killing four bank robbers in a shootout on his boat, concluding Hemingway’s most violent book. The other fictional “Harry,” the writer in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” dies in the most inglorious fashion of all—from a mere scratch that becomes infected. At the other end of the spectrum is Francis Macomber’s horrific death, which is described as lyrically as getting one’s head blown off can possibly be.

  And, of course, Hemingway drew on his recall of his own World War I injuries to elaborate Frederic Henry’s traumas (A Farewell to Arms). Shortly after his arrival in Italy, he told his friend and fellow ambulance driver Ted Brumback that he was bored with the scenery: “I’m going to get out of this ambulance section and see if I can’t find out where the war is.”2 He didn’t have to look for long. And apart from the mortar blast, the one Hemingway survived on the front, all the traumas that followed for him were not the product of his being “accident prone,” as is commonly thought, but the natural outcome of an adventurer’s life, mixed with excessive drinking and a mindset of adolescent invincibility and recklessness.

  His injuries and head traumas were frequent, random, and damaging. And, despite his lifelong protests at any attempt to link his art to these experiences, Hemingway would never escape personal trauma—in fact, head (and thus brain) trauma was a recurring event in his life. These repeated concussive blows did cumulative damage, so that by the time he was fifty his very brain cells were irreparably changed and their premature decline now programmed into his genetics.

  Hemingway lettered in football at Oak Park High School, and, though six feet tall and 150 pounds, big for his time, he was slow and less coordinated than most of his teammates and played less than he and his father had hoped. He probably suffered no significant blows to the head, no more and no fewer than any other high school player of the day. Still, the equipment used in the early twentieth century was far from protective. And, though it is well known that he considered boxing a testament to his manliness at all points in his adolescence and adulthood, there is no evidence that he endured severe concussive injuries as a result. At sixteen he converted his mother’s music room into a ring (the balcony made it a perfect venue). It didn’t take long for Grace to ban the use of this arena for her teenager and his schoolmates, but they soon found that any backyard would suffice. He would brag later in life of learning to box before he was sixteen from a list of professional fighters in Chicago gyms, but there is no evidence that these sparring matches ever took place. The fabrication would gain some credibility from a detail he often cited, that his defective eyesight was the result of the dirty tactics used by his professional sparring partners (no doubt the professionals had to resort to cheating to beat the young up
start).3

  The first major head injury Hemingway suffered occurred during World War I. He left his post at the Kansas City Star in 1918 to join the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in Italy, arriving there by June 4. While serving near the front, he would go down in history as the first American wounded in Italy after less than a month of service. Yet, he was not the first American casualty, just the first American to survive his wounds on the Italian front.4 His own accounts of the injuries varied over time and were likely much less accurate than the initial report believed to have been written by his superior, Captain Jim Gamble: “Hemingway was wounded by the explosion of a shell which landed about three feet from him, killing a soldier that stood between him and the point of explosion, and wounding others.”5

  Hemingway was in the trenches of the front lines at the village of Fossalta di Piave, about forty miles north of Venice, delivering chocolates to troops on June 22 when the Austrian mortar hit. It was a large, fivegallon bomb, full of scrap metal and explosives that knocked him unconscious and throwing enough dirt to half-bury him as well. The “others” wounded by the blast included a nearby soldier, whose legs were blown off. This was the first of Hemingway’s nine major head traumas, but there were additional injuries as well. Despite the shrapnel and concussion, Hemingway regained consciousness and picked up another man who was badly wounded and carried him, by his own account, 150 yards toward a first-aid dugout. He was soon “picked up by Austrian searchlights and took several big machine gun slugs bullets”6 that he later wrote “felt like a sharp smack on my leg with an icy snow ball.”7 He never recalled the last hundred yards of his adrenaline-fueled run, during which he eventually fell, the wounded soldier tumbling with him, both unconscious. And accounts differ as to whether he actually carried the mortally wounded Italian infantryman. Such is the fog of war.