Hemingway's Brain

by Andrew Farah

  He and Mary left in mid-March and first rode across country with Hotchner at the wheel. Ernest even drove between New Orleans and Key West. Next they flew to Cuba, where the victorious Castro was planning an American tour for April. Ernest even lunched with Tennessee Williams at the Floridita in the older section of Havana. Williams came late, confessing later that he feared Ernest “usually kicks people like me in the crotch.”14 Yet Hemingway was more than civil, and both enjoyed the time together and the conversation. In Spain they were the guests of Bill Davis, a wealthy expatriate whom Hemingway had known for twentyfive years. His estate, La Consula, would be their home base. Ernest and Mary were given adjoining rooms on the second floor, and Ernest’s balcony overlooked the gardens and the courtyard. The estate had a sixtyfoot swimming pool. Ernest’s room was equipped with a writing table and his preferred stand-up-style desk. “Anyone who couldn’t write here couldn’t write nowhere,” he said.15

  Hemingway planned to follow the bullfights of Antonio Ordóñez and his rival, Luis Miguel Dominguín. The two were actually brothers-in-law. It was during this trip that he met Valerie Danby-Smith and dragged her into his entourage, carousing into the night. His language was unusually obscene, and his anger outbursts and cruelty toward Mary would also peak. Perhaps his worst display was at his sixtieth birthday party, which Mary had arranged on the Davis estate, an extravagant affair with an orchestra, flamenco dancers, fireworks, and even a shooting gallery. He ridiculed Mary and blamed her for spending too much money on the party (though he knew she had paid for most of it with her article for Sports Illustrated) and even erupted at his old World War II pal Lanham.

  The bullfighters were both gored, first Dominguín, then Antonio, and both were hospitalized. After visiting Antonio, Ernest and Valerie set out from San Sebastian for Madrid, with Davis at the wheel. They crashed when the right front tire blew out, demolishing the front of the Lancia. Though no one was hurt, Hemingway was badly shaken. By the next day, he decided that he had had enough. The country life was again calling.16

  During the voyage back he received a note from a thirty-seven-yearold writer who was working on a biography of Scott Fitzgerald. He hoped to interview Hemingway or at least chat with him about his old friend. Like Fitzgerald, Andrew Turnbull had also attended Princeton, and he first saw his subject when he was only eleven. His biography would begin, “One evening in the spring of 1932 I was walking with a friend down the lane of my family’s country place outside Baltimore. As we approached La Paix, the old house on our property that had just been rented again, we noticed a man sitting motionless on the high front steps. Alone and pensive … the stranger was the new tenant my parents had been talking about; he was Scott Fitzgerald.” The famous tenant obviously liked the young boy and even took him to Princeton football games and encouraged him in his sports and writing. It’s not surprising that the boy became Fitzgerald’s second biographer, but he received no help from Hemingway. He ignored Turnbull’s request for most of the trip, as he was nursing a cold (and a slight fever) in his cabin, but he finally consented to a meeting on their last day at sea.

  Turnbull had one kind recollection of Hemingway, that “a great dignity flowed from his tall lurching frame and his sad mask of a face,” and his other remarks were also telling. Hemingway’s official biographer, Carlos Baker, summarized the meeting as follows: “Turnbull shared the view of another passenger that there was something ‘staged and put on’ about Hemingway.… Like many others he was struck by the ‘meagerness’ of the bare forearms, the ‘delicacy’ of the features ‘above the froth of beard,’ and the whites of his eyes, which were veined with red. His conversational manner was shy and wistful, he was not very helpful about Fitzgerald, and his eyes flicked over Turnbull with ‘a kind of grazing diffidence.’”17 During the trip he had even informed Turnbull by a note that he was “trying to write a little about him [Fitzgerald] when I knew him.” Hemingway’s worn-out briefcase contained the manuscript that would be edited to A Moveable Feast, which at this point contained at least three sketches on Fitzgerald. None were flattering. Still, this was the treasure Turnbull was seeking. Hemingway was always secretive about his writing, and now he was paranoid—there was never a chance he would have shared.

  Hemingway docked in New York and lodged in a fourth-floor apartment on the Upper East Side, at 1 East 62nd, with a view of Central Park. He isolated himself, expressing the fear that he was “being tailed.” Next he was off to Cuba for the famous flag-kissing episode, then a drive to Idaho with Antonio and Carmen Ordóñez, showing off America along the way. Antonio was especially impressed with Las Vegas. Ernest had hoped to take the bullfighter hunting, but his sister needed him in Mexico. The frantic message relayed some unspecified domestic crisis (as it turned out, Antonio’s sister was separating from her husband), and the couple quickly departed, leaving their Jamaican cook behind. Soon after, Mary fractured her left elbow in a fall while duck hunting with Ernest and Dr. Saviers, and the break was so severe that it required an extensive two-hour operation. On the way to the hospital, the pain was excruciating, and Mary began to groan. Ernest callously said, “You could keep that quiet.… Soldiers don’t do that.”18 And once Ernest was her caretaker, he never let Mary forget it. He grumbled about the errands and assistance he was forced to provide and all the while plotted yet another trip to Spain.

  Prior to leaving for Europe, he stayed in New York in late July 1960. He was again literally penned up in the East 62nd Street apartment, fearing that “They’re tailing me out here already.… Somebody waiting out there.”19 He set up a flimsy card table in a corner of the main room and used it as his office, and he rarely left. He received Charles Scribner there but did venture out to lunch with Lenny Lyons and Hotchner. And he did manage a visit to an eye doctor, but he was essentially a prisoner of his delusions. He also began obsessing about Valerie’s immigration status and repeatedly called the Office of Immigration in Key West, assuring them she was only a “visitor” in the country. When Hotchner discussed the offer of $100,000 from Twentieth Century Fox to adapt the Nick Adams stories, Ernest insisted he should hold out for $900,000.20 His once impressive business savvy had deteriorated and was now driven by grandiose delusions, not paranoid ones.

  Once again, the same writing assignment, the bullfighting installments for Life, was his justification for a trip he shouldn’t have planned and never should have taken. Still, he kept insisting that the matador, Ordóñez, simply “needed him there.” For this trip he flew to Lisbon and then on to Madrid, and just the time change was extremely disruptive—Ernest found himself overly fatigued and struggling. The body requires time to recalibrate to a new time zone; the general rule is one day per hour. Even if Hemingway was fully adjusted to East Coast time when he left, he would need five days to adjust to the Spanish time zone. His circadian rhythm, his body’s early-morning cortisol pulse, and his level of alertness and energy all needed time to adjust. Dementia made the shifts delayed, partial, and disjointed—it was a significant psychological and biological shock to his damaged brain. He was struggling even before the plane landed.

  While in Europe, he was extremely depressed, as his friends noted; his memory was shot, he was consumed with guilty ruminations, and he complained of cramps and nightmares. He wrote to Mary that he wished she were there to protect him from insanity. He further wrote: “I don’t know how I can stick this summer out … am so damned lonesome … only thing I’m afraid of, no, not only thing, is complete physical and nervous crack-up from deadly overwork.” She must have surmised that the other “things” he feared were driven by his delusions. He concluded, “I wish you were here to look after me and help me out and keep [me] from cracking up.”21 He agonized over the installments of the bullfighting articles for Life, which were expanded and published posthumously in book form as The Dangerous Summer, and genuinely felt he had made a “mess of it.” When he saw the September 5, 1960, issue of Life, with his forced but pleasant grin, he described it as “the ho
rrible face on the cover” that “made him sick.”22

  His paranoia surfaced again with a vengeance. He was inquisitive and suspicious of everyone and everything. Even bullfighting was corrupt and “unimportant.” His installments were criticized for seeming to favor Antonio in the ring, and for the first time he seemed very affected by a negative reaction to his work. The bad karma spread, Antonio suffered a concussion in the ring, and Carmen suffered a miscarriage. As for his longtime friend and host, Bill Davis, he was repeatedly trying to murder Hemingway, or so the delusion went. A car wreck in 1959 proved as much; Bill was at the wheel again for this trip, with Ernest in the passenger’s seat, wide-eyed and hypervigilant, aware of the “death by motor vehicle accident” plots. Valerie was sent to help as best she could, but Ernest insisted, “Did you notice how Davis is driving? He’s trying to kill me.”23 And the ever trustworthy Hotchner soon made the journey, but even his calm presence failed to reassure Ernest. In public, he could not control his irritability; he railed at waiters at his favorite restaurant, the Callejón, and stormed out before the luncheon with friends was over.

  Whether he lodged at the Davises’ estate, La Consula, or in a hotel room, he stayed in bed for days, and his delusions, when he expressed them, had become essentially random. He feared he would not be allowed to board the plane with all of his luggage, and he was so convinced of this that Hotchner had to get a signed statement from the airline to reassure him (he and Mary tended to travel with extensive baggage, of course, at a time when no limits were imposed by airlines). His friends wanted to send him home, the sooner the better. But Hemingway delayed his return for four days, unable to even get out of the bed—he was paralyzed by fear and exhaustion. To the relief of all, he finally agreed to a midnight flight home.

  The word most often used to describe Hemingway in the weeks that followed was “fragile.” The vigorous man was gone, and a pale, thinlimbed, tentative shadow of his past self was what friends and visitors were so shaken by. He must have felt some relief being home at last, but soon the delusions, particularly of FBI surveillance, would bore in again on his depressed and compromised brain. He refused to talk to Hotchner inside, as all the rooms were surely bugged, so he insisted they speak only outdoors, away from the FBI’s listening devices. The delusions were multiplying—he expressed to his confidant Hotch that undeclared gambling winnings were causing him trouble with the IRS, that hunting on private land would bring the sheriff any minute, that the government was aware of Valerie’s immigration status—and then there was a persistent fear of arrest for “taking indecent liberties with a minor,” a sad and tender hangover from the Adriana days.

  When he grazed a car in a parking lot, he was sure he’d be arrested at any moment, despite the owners reassuring him the damage was minor and telling him not to worry. He told Mary he couldn’t afford the hillside home they desired, with its spectacular mountain views, owned by Dan Topping, because he had no way to pay the taxes. She reached one of the bankers on the phone to reassure her husband that he did indeed have a substantial balance, but he refused to believe it. The vice president at Morgan Guaranty in New York “was confusing us.… He’s covering up something,” he told Mary.24 When she asked what he could possibly be hiding, like a true paranoiac he replied, “I don’t know. But I know.”

  A letter he had posted to his bank must have been taken as a prank: he explained that he did not have much opportunity to visit the bank as much as he should, though he had held an account with Morgan Guaranty for around thirty years. He also noted that all future calls would be identified with his serial number, 0–363, because it was easy to remember and was “not the correct one which a con man might have. A con character would say 364. So we will make it 363.… This is getting too much like OSS so if anybody wishes to know whether it is actually Hemingstein speaking I will answer that I am a friend of David Bruce.” He signs it “Ernest Hemingway 0–363.” The postscript reads: “This letter, of course, opens it wide for any con man to destroy us so please commit it to memory and destroy it. EH.”25

  What is remarkable is that this letter is dated March 11, 1955, more than five years before Mary found it necessary to call Morgan to reassure Ernest. Clearly his illness was an ongoing process, not an acute event. By 1960 he even believed his mail was being read by postal authorities. Even his favorite project, and perhaps the only work that qualified as an obsession, The Dangerous Summer, was a source of anxiety, as he feared it would only bring libel suits. The photographs used for the second installments were somehow unfair to the matadors, and they exposed Hemingway as a “double-crosser” and a fool.

  There was no doubt he needed treatment, but where he should get it and how to get him there secretly were the questions. The fact he would receive psychiatric care not only was to be kept from the public but would have to be withheld from the patient himself. When Dr. Saviers discussed the possibility of Hemingway checking himself into the Menninger Clinic, he refused: “They’ll say I’m losing my marbles.”26

  International Trips during the Last Decade of Hemingway’s Life

  November 19, 1949: New York to Le Havre / Ile de France

  March 22, 1950: Le Havre to New York / Ile de France

  June 24, 1953: New York to Le Havre / Flandre

  August 6, 1953: Marseilles to Mombasa / Dunnottar Castle

  March 1954: Mombasa to Venice / Africa

  Late May or early June 1954: Genoa to Havana / Francesco Morosini

  April 1956: Havana to Peru / air

  May 1956: Peru to Havana / air

  August 1956: New York to Le Havre / Ile de France

  January 1957: Le Havre to New York and Mantazas, Cuba / Ile de France

  Late April or early May 1959: New York to Algeciras / Constitution

  Late October 1959: Le Havre to New York / Liberté

  August 1960: New York to Madrid / air

  October 1960: Madrid to New York / air

  (Adapted from Meyers, Hemingway, 578)

  Chapter 6

  Stigma

  The stigma attached to mental illness was powerful during most of the twentieth century. Hemingway was born at the end of the Victorian era, when a common pastime was a walk through an insane asylum to gawk at the random antics of warehoused psychotics, for whom effective treatment was decades out of reach. In the 1800s, London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital, known as Bedlam, would open its doors for Sunday strolls, charging one penny per entry; so popular was the viewing that the usual take was £400 per year. Hemingway showed a sensitivity toward psychiatric difficulties (not only in his writing but also in his life) only if that illness was the result of combat service. The stigma attached to other forms of psychiatric illness resonated in his letters and fiction. As the shellshocked Nick Adams put it in 1932, “It’s a hell of a nuisance once they’ve had you certified as nutty.… No one ever has any confidence in you again.”1

  Hemingway had written elegantly of battle fatigue, or shell shock, the precursors to posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And, in every decade of his writing life, he displayed in his works flawless insights regarding women with borderline personality disorder (Brett Ashley, Margot Macomber, and, in his forties and fifties, while creating Catherine Bourne of The Garden of Eden). Still, one’s own “nuttiness” was another matter altogether. In his defense, until about 1925, once a patient was admitted to a psychiatric facility, there was only a 25 percent chance that the person would ever be released. Many Americans of Hemingway’s generation knew of townspeople who had suffered psychotic symptoms and been sent to asylums, never to be seen again.

  By his sixtieth year, two of his sons had received electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, Patrick in 1947 and Gregory in 1957. And many of his friends had suffered tragic deaths—Capa had stepped on a landmine in Indochina in 1954 and died in a field hospital, still clutching his camera. A girlfriend from his Michigan youth, Katy Smith, who married John Dos Passos, was described by Hemingway just after her death in a letter as “an old
girl of mine, had known her since she was 8, and Dos drove her into a parked truck and killed her last Sat.… Looks as though our Heavenly Father was perhaps dealing off the bottom of the deck.”2 Katy was almost completely decapitated in the horrific wreck, and Dos lost an eye. And a pal from Paris, Evan Shipman, died of pancreatic cancer in 1957; the unique smell of cancer was noted in Hemingway’s memoirs during Shipman’s last visit with him in Cuba.

  One of the more dramatic deaths was that of Harry Crosby, whom Hemingway had met during his Paris years and who had accompanied him to Spain in 1927. Crosby had also driven an ambulance in World War I and survived Verdun and battles near Orme, after which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. After the war, he plunged headfirst into a lifestyle of extreme hedonism, one that has probably never been rivaled since. He abused cocaine and hashish and became addicted to opium, and his near continual sexual exploits sadly sometimes involved underage individuals. Crosby was the heir to a fortune made in Boston banking, and he spent it lavishly. He edited and published some of the Left Bank writers in the 1920s, including Hemingway (his Black Sun Press published an edition of Torrents of Spring in 1932), but the two were never particularly close. Still, Hemingway referenced his bizarre end in a letter to Fitzgerald in 1929: “Did you know Harry Crosby who shot himself yest? He told me about this girl before he went to N.Y. Mac Leishes introduced her to him. He was a hell of a good boy and I feel awfully bad today about him.”3

  The “girl” was his mistress, Josephine Bigelow, whom he shot (or who shot herself) as they lay in bed, fully dressed, in a borrowed apartment at New York’s Hotel des Artistes. Two hours later, Harry put a bullet through his right temple. He was found with the pistol still in his hand and a picture of a thireen-year-old North African girl, a victim of his past exploits, in his wallet. Crosby had made a suicide pact with his wife, Polly, and strangely equated true love with such an arrangement; the day before his death, his final journal entry was “One is not in love unless one desires to die with one’s beloved.”4