Hemingway's Brain

by Andrew Farah

  Hemingway was lifted onto a stretcher and taken by two bearers to the nearest dressing station, which was essentially a shed with no roof. He roused and for two hours felt an unbearable stinging in his leg. Near dawn, an ambulance took him to a makeshift triage shelter, a converted schoolhouse near Fornaci. There he received much-needed morphine and an antitetanus injection. He spoke to a fellow patient, whose wrist was now a bloody stump: “You’re too old, Dad, for this war,” he said to the fifty-four-year-old, who informed Ernest that he could “die as well as any man.”8 Ernest was so covered in blood that he was initially thought to have suffered a shot through the chest. The Florentine priest who made his way through the lines of wounded anointed him and administered last rites. Five days later, on a slow hospital train, he began his journey to Milan.

  X-rays in Milan revealed a machine slug behind his right kneecap (entering from the side and leaving the patella bone unharmed) and another in his right foot. Both slugs were removed by his surgeon, Captain Sammarelli. Some publications still report that the surgical repair left him with a right kneecap fashioned from aluminum, but this was a classic Hemingway tall tale.

  From the Italian government he received the Croce al Merito di Guerra (War Cross of Merit, given to all engaged in action) and the Medaglia d’Argento al Valore (Silver Medal of Military Valor), awarded for acts of exceptional bravery. But Hemingway’s version of events would be inconsistent in retellings and was exaggerated over time. And it is noteworthy that he initially reported that he learned what had happened to him only the next day from an Italian officer who later recommended him for the honorable citation. He later said that Fredric Henry’s wounds in Farewell to Arms were the most accurate description of his own, which explains why he claimed that two bullets had pierced his scrotum as well. It is very unlikely that he or anyone, no matter how robust, could carry a man even ten yards with machine-gun bullets in the knee and foot, and even more improbable is the report that two bullets might have traversed the scrotal sack of a running man without significant damage to the genitalia and thighs and leave him healthy enough to eventually have three children and numerous exploits. (He did not mention genital injuries in his letters from the hospital.) At least from the waist down, his injuries were exaggerated.

  What is more likely is that he may have indeed acted while under the effects of a concussion and was therefore rendered amnestic for the subsequent actions. Perhaps he made efforts to assist the third soldier, perhaps even carrying him some distance before being hit by machinegun fire, but the next day he reported no recall of these events. Later he claimed to have been informed that the soldier he “assisted” was already dead at the time he was attempting to carry him to safety. Even after stripping away the exaggerated heroics and undocumented and unlikely compounding injuries, Hemingway’s brain had suffered its first major concussion. And he would eventually describe his own version of an “out-of-body” experience: “There was one of those big noises you sometimes hear at the front. I died then. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew all around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead any more.”9

  The second major assault on Hemingway’s brain occurred during his Paris years, in March 1928, while he was living with his second wife, Pauline, in the rue Férou. After dinner and drinks with Ada and Archie MacLeish, they returned at about 11, and by 2 A.M. Ernest entered the bathroom. The skylight had already been cracked when Hemingway confused its cord with the toilet chain and mistakenly pulled it. As Hemingway fumbled with the cords, the entire skylight fell onto his head, gashing him two inches above the left eye. Pauline summoned MacLeish, who managed to get his dazed friend into a cab, which reached the American Hospital at Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, just before 3 A.M.10

  In contemporary photos, he wears the upside-down horseshoe scar as if every day were Ash Wednesday, his outward markings signifying internal change. Biographers and critics find a direct link between the injury and his second major novel. The blood coursing down his face, his giddy concussive ramblings during the ride about his own blood’s smell and taste, all precipitating a flashback to his ambulance ride in the Veneto ten years earlier—these were the accidental necessities. The writer was transformed, and a masterpiece of love and war flowed with an ease that amazed its creator. It was effortless, like a gambler’s lucky streak. A short story going nowhere and essentially discarded then grew within six months into the first draft of A Farewell to Arms. He would write to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, “My wife says that she will see that I’m bled just as often as I can’t write—judging by the way it’s been going this last week.”11 As one critic noted, “the blood had set him free,” yet there was a cost. In the moment of his second concussive injury, more damage took hold.

  Because Hemingway was already a famous author for The Sun Also Rises, wire services reported the episode, detailing the nine stitches, and the news reached his friend Ezra Pound. Pound fired off an amusing note from Rapallo, asking, “Haow the hellsufferin tomcats did you git drunk enough to fall upwards thru the blithering skylight!!!!!!!!”12

  One notable accident that did not involve significant head trauma occurred in 1930, while Hemingway and a fellow writer, John Dos Passos, were still close. They were driving to Billings, Montana, after a ten-day hunting trip, when the headlights of an oncoming car temporary blinded Ernest, and he drove right into a ditch. Though Dos Passos and Floyd Allington, a ranch hand who had accompanied them riding in the rumble seat, were unhurt Hemingway broke his right arm so severally that he required three surgeries and several weeks to recover. Temporary nerve damage left him wondering if he would ever write or shoot again, and he grew frustrated and irritable as the pain was only partly relieved for brief periods.

  Though he recovered remarkably well from the Montana incident, he would not escape the decade without another and even more bizarre injury. This one occurred during a fishing trip aboard his boat, the Pilar, once again with Dos Passos along with the other fishermen and crew. Hemingway was hoping to land a few large marlin and tuna. While en route to Bimini, he managed to hook a shark instead. He was ready to finish the creature off with his .22 Colt Woodsman, but while his friend Albert Pinder was gaffing the shark, it squirmed and twisted, snapping the gaff and causing Ernest’s pistol to discharge. “I’ll be a sorry son of a bitch, I’m shot” he said. The soft-nosed lead bullet split into pieces as it hit a brass railing; a fragment ricocheted into his left calf, and another entered behind his left kneecap (since a machine-gun bullet had lodged behind his right knee in Italy, he must have surmised by then that his patella bones were magnetized). Some smaller fragments managed to lodge elsewhere in his leg. Back in Key West, his doctor removed what he could but felt it wise to leave the largest fragment, which was lodged three to four inches deep in his calf muscle.13

  During World War II, Hemingway suffered additional concussive injuries, the first of which occurred in much less noble fashion than his wounding on the Italian front. He was in London during 1944 and was invited to a party at the penthouse flat of Robert Capa in Belgrave Square on May 25. Capa would become famous for his photos made during the Spanish Civil War, where he first became close to Hemingway. Soon, he would photograph D-Day. But for now it was a time to party with his friends. Just after 2:40 A.M. Hemingway took the front seat in the car of a new acquaintance, Dr. Gorer, and they headed to the Dorchester Hotel. Gorer, at the wheel, was described as “no drunker than Hemingway” at the time (he had been drinking since 10 P.M.). The doctor’s wife, a German refugee, took the back seat. London was blacked out during the Blitz, so none of them saw the steel water tank they plowed into. They had driven less than half a mile.14 Hemingway’s brain was again concussed when his head struck the windshield, and he also suffered a severe gash.

  Capa was summoned to the hospital at 7:00 A.M. to find “215 pounds of Papa” on an operating table. “His skull was split wide open
and his beard was full of blood.” He thanked Capa for the splendid party and asked him to look in on Dr. Gorer and to notify Hemingway’s three sons back in the States that no matter what they read in the papers, their father was safe and not badly hurt. After the hospital staff overheard Capa addressing Ernest as “Papa,” he was known to them thereafter as “Mr. Capa Hemingway.”15

  Ernest requiring fifty-seven stitches across his scalp, and it took two and a half hours to close the wound. He was hospitalized until June 6, and not surprisingly, he ignored his doctor’s orders. He held court, entertained visitors, and was found drinking whiskey and champagne specifically against medical advice. He was reliving his Milan Hospital days once more. It was amid this chaos that his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, decided she had taken enough of his volatility, his drunken rages, and his abuse and decided it was over. Irritability and angry outbursts are common after concussions, and alcohol indulgence is the best way to exacerbate this problem. Tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, also commonly follows a concussion, and this condition would stay with him for years (helped only slightly in the future by his antinausea medication).

  Hemingway was technically a member of the press, but he was considered too important to military authorities to risk his death on the Normandy beaches. Yet, after the initial assault waves, he did board a landing craft, one of the LCVPs (or “Higgins Boats”), and reached the bloody shallow waters of Omaha Beach with troops before being ferried back alone to the transport ship (ironically named the Dorothea L. Dix). The first six assault waves had already landed in the shooting gallery before Hemingway’s craft was allowed to depart, and he was forced to observe the rest of the invasion from the safety of the Dix. Just as well; he had only partly recovered from his May 25 injuries, and climbing the riggings into and out of the transport craft was a painful enough challenge (and risky, considering the disequilibrium that usually follows concussions).

  Despite his official role as correspondent, after D-Day through the liberation of Paris and into the Hürtgen Forest, he would take up arms—strictly against the regulations that governed members of the press. So, in addition to being a correspondent, he was the self-declared leader of his band of “irregular” soldiers and an intelligence man operating in the theatre as well. To what extent he behaved bravely or recklessly and to what extent he actually fought and killed Nazis or just blustered and bumbled himself and his entourage into risky situations and later embellished his exploits are topics that will always be debated. What is certain is that he suffered at least one, and possible two, major concussions while in the field of combat.

  Reuters reported that on August 3, 1944, six of “Hitler’s supermen” surrendered to Hemingway and his driver, Archie “Red” Pelkey, when Ernest tossed a grenade into their hideout in the basement of a French country house. Two days later, on August 5, 1944, Ernest and his friend Robert Capa were on their way to find Colonel Lanham’s command post in the area of St.-Pois. Hemingway had specifically gotten permission to retrieve Capa from Patton’s Fourth Armored Division just twelve miles away and anticipated spending the weekend with him in Lanham’s camp. He had even arranged for a captured convertible Mercedes (repainted olive green) to chauffer Capa in. But their next ride was less luxurious: Capa followed Hemingway’s motorbike into hostile territory, ostensibly to find Lanham’s headquarters, according to Hemingway’s official biographer. However, according to Capa’s account, “Papa said there was an interesting attack going on a few miles away and thought we ought to investigate. We put some whiskey, a few machine guns, and a bunch of hand grenades in the side car and set out in the general direction of the attack.”

  Capa warned against taking “lonely short cuts through no man’s land,” and made it clear he would follow Hemingway “only under protest,” but still, as so many others had done and would do, he followed. Hemingway took the sidecar, his driver, Pelkey, was in control of the bike, and a photographer specifically assigned to Ernest (long before Capa arrived) sat directly behind Pelkey. Capa followed with Lieutenant Stevenson, a PR man also assigned to Hemingway.

  Turning a corner, they unwittingly careened into the path of a German antitank gun. According to the news report, a shell soon exploded just three yards ahead of Hemingway (Capa’s estimate was ten yards), and the explosion threw Hemingway into a ditch. The other four huddled “well protected” on the other side of the curved road. Capa is said to have continued snapping photos until a second antitank shell whizzed by too close for comfort. Tracer bullets coming for the light German tank kept kicking up the dirt just in front of Hemingway’s helmet, which he gripped tightly, staying as low as he could. His headache was already throbbing, the London concussion rekindled. In Hemingway’s account six years later, in a letter to Charles Scribner, he recalled: “A tank shell lifted me up and dropped me on head.”16 He also noted that his head slammed into a boulder in the ditch as well; thus, he likely suffered two successive concussions—one blast and a second on impact. Capa, Stevenson, the official photographer, and Pelky all hunkered down behind the road’s bend opposite Hemingway as the Nazis obliterated the cycle and sidecar with machine-gun fire. Through the rest of the afternoon they could hear the German patrol talking between rounds. After two long hours, the tank drew back and drove off. At dusk, they were able to crawl back around the bend and head to the American lines.

  Once out of harm’s way, Hemingway and Capa were soon in a screaming match. Ernest accused Capa of retreating to the ditch across the road, well out of the German line of fire. In Capa’s words, Hemingway “was furious. Not so much at the Germans as at me, and accused me of standing by during his crisis so that I might take the first picture of the famous writer’s dead body.”17

  Hemingway had survived another brush with death, but this time, the postconcussive symptoms were quite significant: he reported double vision and memory trouble, while his friends noticed that his speech and thought processes were slower than normal and his verbal skills were noticeably lacking. His headaches “used to come in flashes like battery fire. But there was a main permanent one all the time. I nicknamed it the MLR 2 (main line of resistance) and just accepted that I had it.”18 Hemingway’s symptoms are classic and typical for head injury and postconcussive patients. They report a baseline headache that never goes away and one that is superimposed when stress, insomnia, fatigue, or more trauma occurs.

  Hemingway’s postconcussive symptoms would soon be exacerbated by his D-Day experience, twelve days later. Coming in on the seventh wave, he had to climb nets to get in and out of the LCVPs, in “a more than moderate sea.” He complained that “honest to God, nothing … hurt worse than going up and down those nets.” Again, this is very typical of a postconcussive headache, which is excruciating when the patient is jostled, particularly by rough seas, and Hemingway already had disequilibrium and intermittent nausea. In addition, he felt continually lightheaded, his ears were ringing, and he was impotent from August to November. He was writing to Mary, his future wife, with all the details, reassuring her, but more likely himself, that his “abilities,” sexual and otherwise, would soon return.

  During the summer of 1950, Ernest added two more notches to his belt with two more concussions. On June 20 he ordered his chauffeur, Juan, into the back seat. Why he insisted on driving Mary to the airport, from which she would fly to Chicago and finalize her divorce from her second husband, is not known. But the road he took was spotted with clay that had leaked from construction trucks. Once mixed with rain, the clay made the road slippery and treacherous. The car skidded, and Hemingway warned Mary, “This is bad, Pickle. We have to go off.” They slammed into an embankment. Ernest cracked four ribs and bloodied his forehead on the rearview mirror. Mary went through the windshield and required plastic surgery, performed fortunately by a very skilled surgeon.19

  The next major blow came on July 1, 1950, aboard his fishing boat. Hemingway was climbing the flying bridge when the Pilar turned and was rocked by a wave that hit it broadside. His hea
vy fall from the bridge resulted in a gash so deep as to expose (but not fracture) his skull. He had struck one of the large clamps that held the gaffs, and the wound required three stitches. Two surgeons reassured him that only the “thickness of his skull had saved his life.”20 He would famously joke that being labeled thick-headed was a form of literary criticism, but more lasting than the flesh wounds was the recurrence of headaches and intermittent irritability that followed, signs of the extent of the repeated brain injury and more harbingers of future trouble.

  The greatest damage occurred in 1954 when he and his last wife, Mary, chartered a plane while on safari, hoping to view the spectacular East African landscape. With Kilimanjaro in sight, the hydraulics of the plane failed, and the passengers were indeed lucky to make it back to Nairobi safely.21 Mary and Ernest climbed into a Cessna 180 for the next flight, which was scheduled to take them west over the southern end of Lake Victoria and then north over Lakes Edward and Albert to the dramatic Murchison Falls of Uganda. They circled the falls three times so that Mary could photograph them. On the third pass, to avoid a collision with a flock of large ibis flying above the Nile, the pilot dove and struck instead an abandoned telegraph wire, badly damaging the plane’s propeller and tail assembly. The plane reeled uncontrollably for a brief period, but the skilled pilot, Roy Marsh, was able to keep his composure, calmly announcing, “Sorry, we’re coming down now. Get ready. Get ready.”22 He crashlanded along the shore. Mary was thought to be in shock for a time, and her pulse was 155 beats per minute.23 Her anxiety subsided, but she had also suffered two broken ribs. Ernest had sprained his shoulder.