Hemingway's Brain

by Andrew Farah

  The 200,000-word manuscript of Hemingway’s “African Journal” would have a complicated legal history and a legacy of controversy, but it was ultimately edited for Scribner’s by his son Patrick. The original assignment for Look magazine was an article concerning the 1953–54 safari—and the magazine expected only 10,000 words. Patrick would cut at least 50 percent of his father’s 200,000 words and described the result as fiction, although largely based on fact. It is unfair to judge another first draft or sketchbook as the finished work of a Nobel Prize winner. Hemingway was drinking heavily on the safari and reported difficulty remembering the trip once he was back in Cuba, no doubt the sequelae of his latest concussions and ongoing alcoholism and a profound harbinger. Patrick’s True at First Light was published in 1999, and yet another version would come to print in 2005 with the title Under Kilimanjaro; this version was absurdly billed as “truer to the author’s intent.” Neither can be. The artist always leaves more in the scrap heap than on the canvas for public viewing, and a writer’s sketchbook is just that.

  The highly acclaimed Old Man and the Sea would become required reading for thousands of schoolchildren and helped to confirm the Hemingway legacy after fifteen years of failure in the eyes of critics. His theme was common by now; in Santiago’s words, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” His struggle against the seen and unseen forces against him and his eventual loss were reminiscent of that inevitable fate that Harry Morgan had expressed in To Have and Have Not: that “a man alone ain’t got no bloody … chance.” Santiago’s eventual triumph, however compromised, has been compared to Hemingway’s mastery of his own craft, and thus, in this way, the novella is also a return to his writing basics. Much as the batter in a slump is told to focus on the fundamentals of stance, swing, and timing, Hemingway could also be viewed as returning to his fundamentals—the plainness of speech, a deceptively simple style, and naturalistic themes.

  Though initially serialized in Life in 1952, the work was complete by mid-February 1951, fully ten years before Hemingway’s death. It would be his last fully original novel in publication. It is so widely read and taught because it is so short and because its themes are easily elaborated. Rather than a metaphor for the mastery of the his art over a lifetime, perhaps it’s a statement of the effort it took to keep a grasp on his skills, as Santiago struggles to hold his prize—finding it has been devoured all the same. And as a final insult and a perfect symbol for how Hemingway felt his work had been misjudged, Santiago’s achievement is completely misunderstood (a waiter tries to explain to tourists that sharks have eaten the marlin, and they quickly conclude the skeleton is that of a shark).

  Hemingway had conceived the story twelve years earlier and wrote to his editor of the projected narrative: an old commercial fisherman struggles with a swordfish for four days and nights, only to lose it to sharks as he pulls it alongside his skiff.25 The literary critic Edmund Wilson believed Old Man and the Sea was “good enough little story” that only appeared to be a masterpiece because it followed the disaster of Across the River. Dos Passos agreed and noted that he was “fascinated by the ‘operation,’” by which he meant the timing and presentation of the work, not its substance. In fact, he “could hardly judge the story: it was like a magician’s stunt—when he makes the girl float through the hoop, you don’t notice whether she’s pretty.”26

  The first published version of A Moveable Feast was edited by Hemingway to some extent; he corrected his handwritten pages and, later, the typed pages. Some of the retyped manuscript had revisions in his hand, but there was never any version he considered a finished product. Mary was largely responsible for “finishing” this project, and in the process his chapters were rearranged. This compromised Hemingway’s main goal of the work. In his post–World War II years, he synthesized memory and writing in a consciously Proustian manner. The chapters built on each other thematically, and he understood their order to be critical to the progression and understanding of his books. Just as in 1950, when he feared that Hotchner’s editing of The Dangerous Summer had destroyed its “Proustian effect,”27 he expressed this exact concern regarding A Moveable Feast. Furthermore, when justifying the work as both fiction and memoir, he again recalled Proust: “All remembrance of things past is fiction.”28

  Because A Moveable Feast was his focus during the last three to four years of his life, at a time when his dementia was evident and progressing, even if never diagnosed, this text deserves special examination—not the widely known text, or the “Mary Hemingway version” but the manuscript at the Kennedy Library, that, fortunately, was made available, more or less in its raw form, by Ernest’s son Patrick and his grandson Sean in 2009. The discussion in chapter 10 is based on this original manuscript—the one Hemingway could never finish and could never title because of his dementia. At the time of his death, his paranoia was so prominent that he insisted the work never be published at all.

  Chapter 10

  A Moveable Feast

  Hemingway once remarked to Alfred Hotchner: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Later that night, Hotchner wrote the words down, and years later he “gave them” to Mary as she searched for a title for the Paris memoirs.1 As a young man in Paris, Hemingway was instructed in Roman Catholicism as preparation for his marriage to Pauline. The priest from her parish, Saint Sulpice, likely elaborated for Ernest that a moveable feast is a church feast day linked to the varying date of Easter.2 Ernest had used the phrase “moveable feast” in two letters from 1950, as well as in his “African Journal” and in Across the River.3 In a letter to Buck Lanham he told his friend, “Loneliness is a moveable feast” (September 27, 1950). And Colonel Cantwell informs a room-service waiter that “Happiness, as you know, is a moveable feast.” (The waiter is equipped with “Campari bitters and a bottle of Gordon Gin.”)

  But Hemingway was very meticulous and thoughtful about titles and never derived them from causal remarks. His preferred source for choosing one was the King James Bible. Mary would take many other liberties with his manuscript, but at least this one seemed to fit perfectly.

  Though Hemingway was working on other books as he wrote A Moveable Feast, both The Garden of Eden and The Dangerous Summer, he began A Moveable Feast, most likely by the spring of 1957. Yet he believed it incomplete and in fact unpublishable at the time of his death, four years later. He progressed with A Moveable Feast from July to December 1957, then worked on it alternately with the sexually charged Garden of Eden between January 1958 and March 1959, even carrying the manuscript to Spain and back. The Dangerous Summer, his bullfighting obsession, took all of his energies from May 1959 to October 1960, but he then devoted himself entirely to Feast from January 1961 until his suicide, in July.

  Of course, there is no evidence he worked on the manuscript while hospitalized, and between hospitalizations he mostly shuffled papers, ordered the chapters, and ruminated about his inability to write. He was convinced that his skills would never return. At some point, his dementia progressed, and his cognitive skills declined below the threshold necessary for literary work of his caliber, and after ECT his skills were irretrievable.

  Perhaps the manuscript we know as A Moveable Feast was thus “completed” just in time. Between his two hospitalizations (January to April 1961), he was laboring up to five hours a day on his Paris sketches but was incapable of real progress. “He was exhausted and found it almost impossible to write. In February he was unable to write a coherent sentence for a presentation volume for President Kennedy. He would often sit with his physician, George Saviers, tears coursing down his cheeks, complaining that he could no longer write.”4 The physiological stress of his ECT (not the mechanism of the ECT) had worsened his dementia—he could no longer access the creative genius that had served him for decades.

  And Hemingway’s handwritten and typed pages for Feast, under close examination, furth
er confirm that dementia was his primary diagnosis by 1957. Still, his abstraction and capacity for description shine through, making it one of his most compelling efforts. A Hemingway autobiography, however embellished, still held great historical significance, and at the very least he could still seduce his reader with Lost Generation gossip.

  When Hemingway completed a book, he felt physically and emotionally drained, and he acknowledged as he aged that writing was “more difficult all the time.”5 The only part that seemed to flow was the dialogue. He made very few revisions or corrections to the conversations; by contrast, his descriptive passages required extensive changes. His French was never completely fluent. During the 1920s, it was Hadley who spoke to most of the waiters and dealt with their landlords. Perhaps more telling than the technical decline evident in the numerous misspellings and misunderstandings of French words is his lack of insight, even apathy, regarding the numerous words that didn’t look quite right.

  The last sentence Hemingway ever wrote as a professional writer concerned Feast: “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”6 “Remise,” in the legal sense, means a formal release or the giving over of a claim. But Hemingway may have also been reminding us of a fencing term—a “remise” in this context is a thrust that hits the intended target after a first attempt has failed. He considered this book his final gift to Hadley and was attempting to do her justice the second time around. Sports metaphors were commonly used when he discussed his work. When Mary complained that the Paris sketches were hardly autobiographical, as she and many others had hoped, he explained that he was working by “remate,” a jai alai term for a double-wall rebound.7 And we do learn a great deal about the author through his dealings with others, although we already knew he could hold a grudge for a lifetime. The initial criticism of the work, that he had created a “feast of victims,” was more than justified.

  In Feast, Hemingway assumes the detached yet fully aware stance of one of his earliest protagonist, Jake Barnes. Like Jake, he is keenly observant and usually the only sober one in the gang. And throughout the text, Hemingway portrays himself as self-sacrificing and poor, skipping meals to provide for his family, a man with an eye for beautiful girls but still the loyal husband. He is a student of his craft, a humble writer who is striving to learn all he can from others. Hadley is portrayed as “blissfully in love with her husband, admiring the smallest of his decisions as if they were wonders of life.”8 Most of the others, particularly Scott Fitzgerald, are savaged.

  Hemingway’s judgment while writing A Moveable Feast had deteriorated, and he failed to understand that transparent and relentless selfglorification, particularly at the expense of others, could serve only to diminish his stature. Montale, the Italian poet and critic, believed that A Moveable Feast (as well as Across the River), demonstrated that Hemingway was at this point in his life “moving towards a costly decomposition altogether congenial to the childlike nature of a man who had not grown up, a man manqué.”9 Montale’s insight can be reframed in terms of the “decomposition” of skills as a result of ongoing dementia and of a “childlike nature” (in written word and personal behavior) resulting from emotional regression, commonly seen in this illness. Without appreciating his diagnosis, it is understandable that Hemingway would be perceived as an artist who is incomplete and underdeveloped—a man “manqué.”

  As for his memory, Hemingway believed that it vanished progressively with each of his ECT sessions. His last written words justify his suicide: he is “out of business,” his memory “does not exist.” And he makes one last argument for Hadley’s forgiveness—it wasn’t his fault, his heart was “tampered with.”

  Despite the limitations caused by Hemingway’s illness, Paris does come alive in the book. He captured its essence beautifully, and the descriptions of the specific paths he took, though fraught with spelling and geographic inaccuracies, are still lovely. Long-term memories, like one’s ability for abstract thinking, are usually sustained until the later stages of illness, while short-term memory and processing decline first in dementia. The editing and basic wordsmith skills were just what he lacked, and they were provided by Mary and Harry Brague, his last editor at Scribner’s. It was Mary who primarily revised the manuscript for more than two years prior to its publication: Ernest suicided on July 2, 1961, and Mary did not submit her final version of A Moveable Feast to Scribner’s until July 27, 1963.

  The work alternates wonderful imagery with striking vehemence. Consider how he handles Fitzgerald: “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think. He was flying again and I was lucky to meet him just after a good time in his writing if not a good one in his life.” Curiously, the Mary Hemingway edition is less forgiving. She deletes the hopeful words “He was flying again” and adds that “[he] could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.”10 Undercutting Scott would be unnecessary, as Ernest, in turn, was much harsher.

  Scott is described as an obnoxious drunk, a whining hypochondriac, a bully to his inferiors, and the most annoying and miserable companion imaginable. It seems Hemingway’s duty to rescue Scott from his drunken bumbling, such as when Scott relentlessly harasses fellow train travelers. And, of course, there are the infamous passages about Fitzgerald’s “measurements” not being manly enough and about his inability to satisfy Zelda.

  When Hemingway introduces Scott in the text, he leaves little doubt that his goal is to feminize him: “Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair … and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth.”11 The internal rhyming of “very fair wavy hair” and “very fair hair” all hint at “fairy,” and an “unmarked nose” would indicate, to Hemingway, a wimpy life—one without boxing.

  Next he sets out to further humiliate and emasculate Fitzgerald. In the chapter “A Matter of Measurements,” Scott confesses to Ernest that, according to Zelda, he is inadequately equipped to satisfy women. A trip to the men’s room for an inspection, followed by Hemingway’s judgment that Scott’s equipment is “perfectly fine” and there is no cause for alarm, is no reassurance to Scott. They then trek to the Louvre to evaluate the statues, Scott clearly possessing every inch of marble he had examined himself. Hemingway also uses the sketch to attack Zelda for trying to ruin Scott’s productivity. She is jealous of his talent, so she is simply trying to destroy it and put him out of business, he suggests.

  Although Hemingway had related the same story of Scott’s agonizing over his limited phallus in a letter almost a decade earlier and was generally true in Feast to that earlier account, other facts in the text about Fitzgerald don’t hold up to historical scrutiny. The detail that Scott had never made love to a woman before Zelda is contradicted by his own account of seeing a prostitute while in college and by that of the actress Rosalinde Fuller, whose unpublished autobiography elaborated on her intimacy with Scott prior to his marriage to Zelda. Furthermore, the account of Ernest’s initial meeting with Fitzgerald as Scott drank with a fellow Princeton man, the baseball star Duncan Chaplin, is also inventive, as Chaplin was not in Paris during 1925.12

  Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins in June 1925 that “Scott Fitzgerald is living here now and we see quite a lot of him. We had a great trip together driving his car up from Lyon through the Cote D’Or. I’ve read his Great Gatsby and think it is an absolutely first rate book.”13 When it comes to recalling the travel f
or Feast, Ernest first sets the scene with his high hopes: “I would have the company of an older and successful writer.” But the trip is nothing short of a disaster; Scott is an inept, whining hypochondriac who basically requires babysitting.

  The car they retrieve, a Renault, has no roof—it has been cut away. Zelda, we’re told, “hated car tops.” Even on a guys-only road trip, it seems Zelda’s psychosis is inescapable. The pair are soaked in the rain during their drive home. Ernest then continues to feminize Scott in the text, loosely connecting him with a young girl losing her virginity. “I am not sure Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before and it was exciting to him … as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit.”14 Yet Scott’s comments in 1925 are in line with Hemingway’s letter about their “great trip” together: “Hemingway and I … had a slick drive through Burgundy. He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.”15

  With dementia comes regression, and at Hemingway’s worst, much as in his “African Journal,” he regressed to adolescent sexuality (his concern with measurements). And as he struggled with his manuscript, privately noting that his cognitive skills and memory were faltering, he also regressed to projection: “You could not be angry with Scott any more than you could be angry with someone who was crazy.”16