Hemingway's Brain

by Andrew Farah

  Scott Fitzgerald wrote Hemingway in November 1940, “It’s a fine novel [For Whom the Bell Tolls], better than anybody else writing could do.… I’m going to read the whole thing again.… I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this.” He even mentions Martha Gellhorn in an overly generous manner: “I hear you are marrying one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen.”5 And he signs it “With old affection.” Scott was living in Hollywood with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham at the time. Six weeks after he wrote to Ernest, Scott collapsed in their apartment and died from his third heart attack.

  The way Hemingway processed various tragedies was documented in his letters. And he once claimed his analyst was his “portable Corona No. 3.”6 Yet when those in his past or present circles suffered from the insidious tragedy of mental illness, his response ranged from silence to derision. Not only did Hemingway meet Fitzgerald, Shipman, Crosby, and Dos Passos during the Paris years; he also met James Joyce, who died of peritonitis in 1941 in a Zurich hospital. In 1953 Hemingway described Joyce as “the best companion and finest friend I ever had.”7 Once he read Ulysses, he voiced the opinion that Joyce was the “greatest writer in the world.”8

  During their last night in Paris, Ernest and his new wife, Pauline, dined with Joyce and his wife, Nora, a meeting famous not only for the unique meal (they dined on venison and pheasant Hemingway had shot just the day before in the Sologne) but for the conversation.

  A melancholic Joyce asked Hemingway his opinion of his work: were his books too “suburban? … that’s what got him down sometimes.” Before Ernest could answer, Nora chimed in: “Ah Jim could do with a spot of that lion hunting.” Joyce replied, “The thing we must face is I couldn’t see the lion.”9 These words have keep Lost Generation scholars busy for decades—with regard not to the superficial understanding of Joyce’s everfailing eyesight but to his metaphorical blindness in comparison to Hemingway, who wrote as he lived and lived what he wrote about. But Joyce’s primary distraction that night was not his “suburban” books (an unusual self-indictment for a modernist) but rather his daughter, Lucia.

  At the time of the dinner party, Lucia Joyce, a schizophrenic, had been unstable for months. She was at times mute and catatonic and at other times violent. Twice she set fires, once in her Geneva hospital room (because her “father’s complexion is very red and so is fire”) and once while staying at an aunt’s home (this time simply because she “wanted to smell burning turf”). She moved in and out of various sanatoriums or stayed with nurses or sometimes with extended family. She even was examined by Carl Jung, who was her twentieth psychiatrist. But in the days before antipsychotic medication, even his analysis was of limited benefit. Joyce, like many parents in his situation, was often in denial. He spoke of Lucia in public as if she were fully sane, and, further, he convinced himself that she was clairvoyant, citing evidence that her psychotic utterances were predictions of future events rather than disorganized ramblings.10 Joyce suffered depression, insomnia, and even auditory hallucinations under the strain of his daughter’s instability. If Hemingway was aware of Lucia’s struggles, he never commented on them, but he could see the toll they were taking on his finest friend.

  Sherwood Anderson, the accomplished writer who recommended Hemingway move to Paris to begin his literary career, turned to writing full time after a psychotic break. Despite being a successful businessman and seemingly in complete control of his manufacturing company, he arrived at his office one day, mumbled something to his secretary about his feet being wet and “getting wetter,” and walked out. He was found amnestic and confused four days later in a drug store and was checked into a hospital.11 Roughly a decade later, he had three novels and two collections of short stories in print and was about to meet the unpublished Hemingway, who dreaming of similar success.

  The influence of Anderson on Hemingway’s fiction and on his very path in life is well known. Hemingway had read Winesburg, Ohio in the summer of 1920, before they ever met. That meeting took place in Chicago when Ernest was basically freeloading at the expense (and at the mansion) of their mutual wealthy friend, Y. K. Smith in 1921. Anderson encouraged him to live and write not in Italy but in Paris and provided him with letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Lewis Galantière, and Ezra Pound. It is also well known that Hemingway parodied Anderson’s style in his novel Torrents of Spring, a work written primarily to extricate himself from his contract with Anderson’s publishers, Boni and Liveright.

  Many biographers assume that his parody of Anderson’s style was a typical Hemingway double-cross—a knife in the back of a friend. Yet Hemingway tried to hedge his gamble and kept Anderson informed of the strategy—it was simply too early in his career to burn this important bridge. And at the end of May 1926, the very month Torrents was released, he wrote to Anderson from Madrid: “It goes sort of like this: 1. Because you are my friend I would not want to hurt you. 2. Because you are my friend has nothing to do with writing. 3. Because you are my friend I hurt you more. 4. Outside of personal feelings nothing that’s any good can be hurt by satire.”12 After this series of contradictory and convoluted excuses he observed, “Anyway I think you’ll think the book is funny—and that’s what it is intended to be—”

  Much to Hemingway’s relief, they dined together in Paris eight months later, and “He was not at all sore about Torrents and we had a fine time.”13 For three decades Hemingway never disparaged Anderson and never called attention to his history of psychosis. His silence on the matter was Hemingway’s version of gratitude. But by 1953, he broke his silence, writing that “Sherwood Anderson was a slob. Un-truthful (not just inventing untruthful; all fiction is a form of lying) but untruthful in the way you never could be about a picture. Also he was wet and sort of mushy.” Still, these harsh judgments are essentially about the man’s work, not the man, but (as with his self-contradictory statement from 1926 when he seemed to be describing how he was not hurting Anderson while he was busy hurting him) he further added, “He had very beautiful bastard Italian eyes.” In this instance, in much the way he would later disparage Scott Fitzgerald, he feminized Anderson (and still managed to sneak in the word “bastard”). “From the first time I met him I thought he was a sort of retarded character.” And a few days later, Anderson was still on his mind as he wrote, “Sherwood was like a jolly but tortured bowl of puss turning into a woman in front of your eyes.”14

  It was 1956, and Hemingway was well into his decline. Though he could not articulate it, he was in the early stages of dementia. His fears were obvious, and at this moment he was about to begin work on his Paris sketches, which turned his mind to the mentor who had sent him to that city. Hemingway’s denial was so entrenched that he avoided terms such as “crazy” or “psychotic”; rather, he conflated Anderson with one of his (Anderson’s) characters, a grotesque.

  The only variety of mental illness for which Hemingway seemed to have any compassion, and even reverence, was shell shock. Upon returning home after the war, he was able to convince a Boyne City doctor in 1919 that he was “badly shell-shocked.” Ernest did report some difficulty sleeping, but if he claimed to be experiencing nightmares and anxieties, he was really just claiming stories heard during his Milan hospital days as his own.15 Lying is too harsh a judgment; he was simply practicing his lifelong vocation of fictionalizing his life. His attitude was expressed well in a passage from “The Education of Mr. Bumby,” in A Moveable Feast: “‘It would be no disgrace if he had been demolished mentally by the war,’ I said. ‘Many of our good friends were. Later some recovered to do fine things. Our friend André Masson the painter.’”16

  After the war, Masson would share a Paris studio with Miró, and the three forest landscapes Hemingway acquired from him now hang at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. No doubt Hemingway felt some kinship with Masson, who also served in World War I and who managed to survive a bullet that pierced his chest—and in the delirious state of shock that
quickly followed he saw the sky as “a ‘torso’ of light,” the world around infused with “wonder.” Masson didn’t fall but stood dazed and feeling no pain, thinking, “I fear nothing any more.” He was dragged to the safety of a hollowed-out bomb crater by another soldier. He huddled next to a dead German, whom he called “Ramses II,” as he had been there so long that he appeared mummified. When nightfall came and he was finally taken to a hospital, he was still too psychotic to allow treatment. “Then began the long succession of hospitals, fits of rage, revolts, refusal to accept treatment, and finally the psychiatric hospital where he was confined,” according to his biographer. As with Hemingway, critics would cite Masson’s war trauma as central to his art: “The war scarred him deeply.… The art of Masson was to be a meditation on this disorder.”17

  In a deleted fragment of writing Hemingway expressed his full sympathy for any soldier so affected: “In those days it was no disgrace to be crazy, but, on the other hand, you got no credit for it. We, who had been at the war, admired the war crazies since we knew they had been made so by something that was unbearable. It was unbearable to them because they were made of a finer or more fragile metal or because they were simple and understood too clearly” (emphasis added).18

  This passage, in context, contrasts Fitzgerald’s ignoble mental anguish with that of the warrior, even if a simpleminded one. Thus, Hemingway was no stranger to mental illness. It is likely that as a child he heard his father speak of patients who suffered from psychiatric conditions, and he may have even encountered them during his father’s workday. General practitioners see numerous psychiatric comorbidities, as they are ubiquitous in their patient populations (and were especially prevalent at a time when there were so very few effective treatments). His father’s specialty of obstetrics no doubt involved cases of postpartum depression (which affects around 20 percent of women after delivery) and possibly postpartum psychosis (which affects one in one thousand). But, of all of his friends and acquaintances who quietly (or publicly) struggled with psychiatric issues or who seemed bent on outdoing one another with dramatic endings, there were four specific individuals whose lives and difficulties helped solidify the adult Hemingway’s denial of his own illness.

  It was September 1931, while sailing to the States on the Ile de France, that Ernest and Pauline met Jane and Grant Mason. Pauline was into her seventh month of pregnancy with their second child, Gregory. Grant Mason was a Yale graduate who ran Pan American Airways in the Caribbean and who held a substantial interest in Cuban Airlines as well. His wife, Jane, was just twenty-two, with a model’s beauty; she was described as having “a perfect oval face … strawberry-blond hair parted in the middle and drawn back … large blue eyes.”19 She was also an avid sportswoman. She loved fishing for marlin off Cuba and hunting big game in Africa, dabbled in art and sculpture, and could hold her liquor—even keeping pace with Hemingway, according to mutual friends. To sum up Jane and Ernest, each was the moth, each was the flame.

  As if Jane’s being young, vivacious, beautiful, and fond of the same sporting life as her husband wasn’t enough for the tired and pregnant Pauline to be concerned about, the Masons also lived in Cuba. They resided just thirty minutes west of Havana, on an elegant estate in the Jaimanitas suburb, and employed nine servants (including a Chinese cook, an Italian butler, a Cuban chauffer, and a German gardener). Their “pets” included not only dogs, parrots, flamingos, and peacocks but also a fox, a honey bear, and a monkey. Grant traveled frequently as his job demanded and, being generally unassertive, didn’t try to rein in his wife in any way. During the 1930s, Pauline was often with her sons at the Key West home, where the peacocks that strutted around the yard were a gift from Jane. Ernest, according to one of his sons, “used to cuckold Mother unmercifully in Havana with an American lady friend.”20 They first made love one spring evening in 1933. Ernest and Jane were both staying at the Ambos Mundos hotel, and Hemingway had just started knocking out a piece for Esquire about marlin fishing when he heard a gentle taping on his window. He was staying on the top floor. Jane had walked the fifty-foot-high ledge (that stuck out two and a half feet) to climb through his window and wasted no time sprawling on his bed, claiming she was “just in the neighborhood.”21

  Pauline tried to compete, even dying her hair blond like Jane’s and writing to Ernest that she was “having large nose, imperfect lips, protruding ears and warts and moles all taken off before coming to Cuba. Thought I’d better, Mrs. Mason and those Cuban women are so lovely.”22 Pauline was easily the most attractive of Hemingway’s four wives, but, as with most affairs, it’s about not wanting what you already have (and the corollary). Despite Pauline’s awareness, the rendezvous continued.

  While Jane was driving her Packard with two of Hemingway’s sons and her own adopted child as passengers near the airport in Havana, a bus ran them off the road, and they rolled down a forty-foot embankment. The car landed on its wheels, and no one was seriously hurt. But a few days later, Jane jumped from her second-story balcony. It seemed unrelated to the car incident; in fact, it seemed completely unprovoked. Grant believed it was more a manipulative act than a real suicide attempt; he referred to it as her “jumping out of our home in Jaimanitas at an altitude, all her friends agreed, which would be reasonably impressive as an effort at suicide but not high enough to cause death or serious injury.… As I remember it, she went off a second story balcony.… I do not think the accident was directly related to anything currently happening with Ernest or me or with anyone else but just one of her changeable fits of elation and depression. In case she tried another such stunt, I arranged for constant nurse attendance and then shipped her to New York on a Ward Line vessel with special bars on the portholes.”23 Hemingway couldn’t resist, privately joking to Dos Passos that Jane was the girl who “fell for him literally.”24 This was at least her third suicidal gesture.

  Jane suffered vertebral fractures, and after spending five months in hospital she wore a back brace for a year. Of course, these circumstances prohibited any relationship with Ernest, but, even when she had recovered, he had seen enough of her instability. Curiously, her psychiatrist, Lawrence Kubie, had been hired by the Saturday Review of Literature to write psychoanalytical reviews of some of Hemingway’s books (those written between 1924 and 1933). He naively wrote to Hemingway, in an oddly bombastic fashion, thinking the writer would somehow approve and aid in the effort.25 Even before the American Psychiatric Association published a Code of Ethics, it was obviously a violation of boundaries and trust to explore Jane’s intimacy with Ernest and to use the evidence to discuss Hemingway’s “sexual conflicts.” Fortunately, Kubie’s work remains less than a mere footnote, as the literary analysis he did produce is not only worthless but also embarrassing to the psychiatric profession.

  When Jane and Ernest parted ways for good, in April 1936, the end of the relationship was described as a “violent and bitter break.” Just four months earlier, in January, Ernest had complained of “facing impotence, inability to write, insomnia and was going to blow my lousy head off.”26 By the spring, he had recovered enough to participate in a fishing tournament (and Jane chartered a boat to compete with him). He was also, by then, well into “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Jane, of course, was the physical and psychological basis for Margot Macomber, who cheats on her husband, mocks him as a coward, and “accidentally” blows his head off. There are several theories as to why the affair ended; mainly it’s speculated that Pauline had had enough. But Ernest was a quick study, and by this time it was obvious that the risks outweighed the rewards.

  During the 1950s, as Hemingway’s illness progressed, he was often reminded of the psychiatric struggles of another friend as he was repeatedly lobbied to support Ezra Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C. Pound was confined for more than twelve years, and to this day his exact diagnosis remains elusive. What makes Pound’s case so difficult for physicians to categorize is that his full-blown psychosis was
seemingly the result of ever-evolving eccentricities, rather than a discrete, neatly categorized episode. Hemingway appreciated this aspect of his illness, elaborating on “our knowledge of how he went nuts, how gradually and steadily he became irresponsible and idiotic.” And both Hemingway and Joyce noticed the worsening of Pound’s erratic behavior as early as 1933. They concluded that their former mentor and the tireless champion of their work had lost his grip on reality.

  The three men had arranged a dinner together, and it was the last time Pound would see Joyce. According to Hemingway, “Joyce was convinced that he was crazy then and asked me to come around when Pound was present because he was afraid he might do something mad. He certainly made no sense then and talked as utter rot, nonsense and balls as he had made good sense in 1923.”27

  During the 1930s, Pound voiced his support for Mussolini and his brand of fascism. Hemingway wrote to his friend, trying his best to dissuade him from a political stance that could only end up as a public humiliation or worse. Though Hemingway’s letter was sincere, accurate, and thoughtful, Pound was too ill to accept the advice. He fired back, insisting Hemingway move his money to Italy and ridiculed him for “killin … pussy cats, however titanic, that ain’t got no guns to shoot back with, you god damn lionhunter.” He wanted Hemingway to save his ammo for usurious financiers, “the buggars back at the Bank of Paris.”28 There was no stopping Pound—he was manic and obsessed, and these conditions robbed him of the insight that he was ill. He began making shortwave radio broadcasts from Italy. His rants were characterized as anti-American and anti-Semitic. In practical terms, few if any people heard them, fewer understood them, and any rational listener would have concluded that the speaker was deranged.