Hemingway's Brain

by Andrew Farah

  Hemingway described the second thing that “armored” him to his wife in a beautifully romantic passage: “When we lived in Austria in the winter we would cut each other’s hair and let it grow to the same length. One was dark and the other was dark red gold and in the dark in the night one would wake the other swinging the heavy dark or the heavy silken red gold across the others lips in the cold dark in the warmth of the bed. You could see your breath if there was moonlight.” Ernest called Hadley the “heroine” of the book, who would understand “when you wrote fiction with her in it.”43 In his “African Journal,” written in the 1950s, Hadley was “The wife I loved first and best.”44

  Finally, the mythical trunk served as a way of saving face for Hemingway, who had said that “It is only when you can no longer believe in your own exploits that you write your memoirs.”45 He had written himself into a corner, and the trunk(s) allowed for a glorious public escape.

  He had also written himself into another bind: as his dementia exaggerated his spirit of aggression, his paranoia made him obsess about the consequences. He was sure that libel suits would follow Feast’s publication. And so he relied on his old insurance policy of insisting that his work be considered a “fictional” account. His original manuscripts include seven pages in which he worked on a possible preface, with the line “This book is fiction.” written nine times, and there are at least three other phrasings to that effect. But this book used real names and described real places he had been. It was long anticipated and hyped, and his readers wanted biography.

  Hemingway would have been very displeased with Mary’s preface, which stated, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.” He wrote to Scribner’s to withdraw it in April 1961, between his Mayo admissions, but Mary never posted the letter.

  Chapter 11

  Alone

  Hemingway’s funeral took place on July 5, 1961. He was buried just twelve miles from where Ezra Pound was born. It was an unusually hot morning; in fact, one of the altar boys fainted at the start of the service and had to be revived. At the conclusion, Mary was seen “almost running” out of the cemetery. “That son of a bitch! I’m just so damned mad that I had to get away!” she told Tillie Arnold, who caught up with her just before the cemetery gates.1 Mary was angry with the priest for ignoring her wishes, but the sentiments she expressed obviously applied to the deceased as well. She had nursed him through it all the best that she could, dutifully accepting the abuse from his traumatic brain injuries, his alcoholism, and his narcissism. She had reassured him when he was paranoid, though it was futile, and once his dementia progressed no one could rescue him. She had averted disaster before, but this time there was no stopping him.

  Perhaps she had already heard the grumblings that it was all her fault, leaving the keys he needed to access his guns in plain view, not seeking more competent treatment, not informing his children of how sick he really was. Now, the priest became the target of her years of pent-up anger. He had either flatly refused to honor her wishes or, more likely, just misunderstood them. Mary had asked that he read from First Ecclesiastes:

  What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

  One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.

  The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

  The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

  All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

  All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

  The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

  Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us.

  Even now it seems the Bible was written solely as a tribute to Hemingway.

  The priest had read only the first line from the Catholic Douay Bible, a quite different version, and Mary was also distressed at the extensive “Hail Marys,” which she had expressly limited to eight. “The son of a bitch went on and on with the Hail Marys,”2 she complained.

  Perhaps she was more overwhelmed than she would admit: there was the estate, the Cuba home with its artwork and valuable manuscripts and papers, the arrival of family, and of course the publicity. She had done her best to control it during the moments that followed his death.

  According to Alfred Hotchner’s memoir, once Mary woke to the sound of the blast and discovered Ernest had suicided, she immediately contacted their friend Leonard Lyons, the well-known columnist. Lyons elaborated later: “The first thing she did was go to the phone and put in a call to my New York Apartment. She was told I was in Los Angeles, whereupon she put in a follow-up call to my Beverly Hills hotel and woke me up. ‘Lennie,’ she said very calmly, ‘I’m calling you because Papa has killed himself.’ After I recovered from the shock of her announcement, I asked her how it had happened. ‘With a shotgun. Now, what I’d like you to do is this—arrange for a press conference at your hotel—make sure all the wire services are there—and tell them I have informed you that while Ernest was cleaning his shotgun this morning, in preparation for going on a shoot, it accidentally discharged and shot him in the head. Got that?’ Only after she arranged all this with me did she phone Ernest’s doctor and tell him what had happened.”3

  Such coolheaded instructions in the face of horror imply planning in advance. Of course, it was no secret her husband was suicidal. And she shouldn’t be blamed for imagining her possible reaction and plans many days or months before the potential tragedy. Her desire to control the media is certainly understandable as well. Though the press was not as irresponsible and reckless as the current mainstream media, among her contemporaries in the press there have always been sensationalists who cared little for the humans they trampled to get headlines. However collected she was at the scene of the tragedy, she still found it necessary to spend the night in the hospital to recover from the shock, and, even if she was not particularly distraught that morning, no doubt it was best for her to spend the night elsewhere. Mary also had to pull herself together in order to make funeral arrangements and prepare for the numerous expected guests. And Ernest had certainly left a mess. Fortunately, George Brown (the New York boxing coach whose gymnasium Hemingway frequented) had driven him from Mayo and was staying in the guest house. He and a local man, Don Anderson, cleaned the foyer so well that Hemingway’s sister Sunny remarked that there was no sign of the tragedy that had occurred, not even a stain (and Lloyd Arnold burned the recovered remains).4

  Patrick Hemingway didn’t find his father’s suicide “as straightforward as it was supposed to be.” He added, “I have no trouble with my grandfather’s suicide, but my dad had been under what I would call prison restraint and I don’t see how a person kept in a room with bars on the windows, never alone, could want to live.… Then they let him come home, but leave his arms and ammunition where he can get them when the only reason for keeping him behind bars was to keep him from killing himself. I believe it was criminal not to have taken the easy things away from him.… I don’t believe the virtuous widow theory.… Neither I, nor any of my brothers were even consulted. But that’s not all. There was a deliberate attempt to cut us out of our relationship with him. For example, he and I corresponded twice or three times a month after 1952. But all my letters have disappeared. Not one is in the Kennedy Library. That amazes me, especially when there are lots of letters from trivial people. The thing that is missing in accounts of their marriage is the brutality of their relationship. You asked me why I didn’t see my dad? It wasn’t pleasant to be around them. They just went after each other tooth and nail. I think he wante
d to get rid of her.”5

  Patrick observed what many others had and what Mary had written to Charles Scribner about years earlier, in 1950: “he has destroyed what I used to think was an inexhaustible supply of devotion to him. He has been truculent, brutal, abusive and extremely childish. It has been more than a year since he actually hit me.” She also observed, accurately, that “it looks like the disintegration of a personality to me.” She elaborated in another section that “last spring in New York, after thorough examinations, I discovered definitively that my one remaining reproductive tube is congested and I can’t have a baby. When I married Ernest I had no faint idea that this was or would be true.… He taunts me with this. And it may be one of the basic reasons for his behavior.”6

  It’s no surprise, then, that while all of Hemingway’s guns were locked in the storage room of his basement, he could see the keys sitting on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. Mary later justified this by writing that “no one had a right to deny a man access to his possessions.” Perhaps knowing the statement is indefensible and frankly absurd when discussing a suicidal individual, she added, “I also assumed that Ernest would not remember the storeroom.”7 This, if true, was a very costly gamble. If Mary had gone to a psychoanalyst and puzzled why, why she had been so thoughtless as to leave the keys in plain sight, he would have stroked his beard and asked her to reflect on Papa’s suffering and on her suffering and then remained silent. One of the cardinal rules of psychotherapy is that it doesn’t always follow that just because the analyst has an insight, the patient is ready to hear it.

  The theory that Mary had facilitated her husband’s death was echoed by their mutual friend William Walton in his 1993 interview with the Hemingway scholar Rose Marie Burwell. Walton was close to the Hemingways and the Kennedys and served as chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts through both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. According to Burwell, “When I said to Bill Walton in August 1993, ‘Unconsciously, Mary wanted him to do it,’ Walton replied ‘Now that you have said it, I will say what I have never said before, but have known since Mary called me a few hours after Ernest’s death: yes, she did.’” Burwell further observed that “For Mary Hemingway, as for the heroine of a Victorian novel, death had done the work of the divorce court; and I have no doubt that—exhausted and without help from Hemingway’s family—she saw, but could not bear to admit, that his suicide was the only release for either of them. In the fall of 1959, Hemingway described Mary’s determination to separate part of her life from his as a tactic aimed at driving him to suicide.”8

  A Catholic burial was symbolic in the sense that it would prove his death was not a suicide. Mary had told the New York Times that she felt certain this, “in some incredible way, was an accident.” Part denial, part protection of her husband’s reputation, this statement corroborates Lennie Lyon’s account. But the official ruling on his death settled the issue as far as the priest was concerned—“the church accepted the ruling of the authorities that Hemingway had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the head.”9 Furthermore, he had been excommunicated after his divorce from Pauline. Suicide and excommunication were both reasons for refusing him a High Mass, so a graveside service was the best compromise Mary could reach.

  The Hemingway estate was valued at $1.4 million prior to any taxes, and there was of course the literary estate, including unpublished and incomplete manuscripts. His will, written in September 1955, stated that “I have intentionally omitted to provide for my children now living or for any that may be born after this will has been executed, as I repose complete confidence in my beloved wife Mary to provide for them according to written instructions I have given her.”10 But it appears that there were no such instructions left; if there were, they were no more generous than this one sentence. Of course Ernest knew that there was no particular closeness between Mary and any of his sons. His condition in 1955, at the time he wrote the will, was far from healthy. By early 1954 he had suffered the litany of injuries from the plane crashes and the concussions, and a list of his diagnoses from 1955 included nephritis (a kidney inflammation, probably from infection), as well as hepatitis (liver inflammation), and he was even bedridden for more than a month due to liver disease. He was well aware of his mortality, but he was also declining mentally.

  The language in the will is certainly deliberate and had to be hurtful: “I have intentionally omitted to provide for my children.” It is very curious that he includes the possibility that he may “have children born after this will has been executed.” Was this delusional grandiosity or a last statement of sexual prowess—a part of the legend he wanted to maintain until death? It was, after all, that same year that he confided to Hotchner that “September I will have an African son. Before I left I gave a herd of goats to my bride’s family. Most over-goated family in Africa. Feels good to have African son. Never regretted anything I ever did.”11 Perhaps he and Debba had consummated their relationship, or perhaps he wanted to lend more credibility to his boasting. (If Debba was in fact pregnant, which is unlikely, she had no way of knowing the child’s sex in advance, never mind the fact she had no means of communicating with Hemingway.) A legal challenge might have revealed doubts about his capacities at the time the will was written, but such challenges are lengthy, expensive, stressful, and often very difficult to prove conclusively.

  Mary wrote (in a 1976 letter) that the famous Joan Miró painting The Farm seemed to her “the most important of the various pictures and other things that Ernest left me in his will.”12 Excluding the literary estate, she was indeed right; however, its ownership at the time of his death was controversial. His son, Jack, felt he or at least his mother, Hadley, was entitled to keep the painting; Ernest had purchased it as a present for Hadley’s thirty-fourth birthday. Hemingway, who said in the last year of his life that he always wrote better after viewing paintings, had his sights on this particular painting before Mirós looked like Mirós and certainly before they were collectible. Hemingway clearly recognized its significance and appreciated its folksy and harsh angular composition. It’s a large painting (roughly four by five feet), painted in a transitional style for the artist—part surrealism and part cubism, on the way to his bold signature abstraction—and the work held great sentimental value as well.

  Hadley and Ernest had attended the first Miró solo show at Galerie Pierre, in June 1925. While Hadley had her exhibition program autographed by the artist Max Ernst and by the writers André Bréton and Louis Aragon.13 Ernest spotted the canvas he would describe as capturing the very essence of Spain: “It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there.… No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.”14 And typical of his usual spot-on assessments of any form of art: “No one could look at it and not know it had been painted by a great painter.”

  It was, however, already listed in the show’s catalogue as belonging to Evan Shipman, a poet and friend of Hemingway’s who wrote for American Horse Breeder magazine. Shipman had introduced the gallery’s dealer to Miró, and in repayment the dealer had offered him any painting in the show, with the full price going directly to the artist, without a commission. Shipman chose The Farm, made a down payment, and, according to Hemingway’s version of events nine years later, came to see him that very day.

  Shipman noticed how disappointed Ernest was and understood immediately that he had hoped to own the painting as well. Shipman’s biographer reports they flipped a coin, and Hemingway lost, but Shipman yielded to his friend’s desire anyway.15 Over the years and through subsequent retellings, the story evolved into the more romantic version that Hemingway elaborated in his letter nine years on. The day Shipman came to Ernest’s apartment, he said, “Hem, you should have The Farm. I do not love anything as much as you care for that picture and you should have it.’ … so we rolled dice [to decide] and I won and made the first payment.”16 In another version, Hemingway lost the roll of
the dice just as he had lost the coin toss, but Shipman wanted the approval of the dashing young colleague more than the Miró, and he insisted that “Hem” buy it anyway. The roll-of-the-dice versions have become classic Lost Generation legend and too rich to compromise with accuracy.

  Convincing his wife that it was a wise purchase was another issue—according to Hem, the cost was 5,000 francs, more than a month’s worth of living expenses for the young couple. So Hemingway made it clear that he was thinking of her all along, that it was her gift. The Farm would hang in their Paris apartment, and Miró himself would inspect the chosen site, approving of its placement above the bed. The costly present was Hadley’s by her November 9, 1925, birthday, but she would also get divorce papers on December 8, 1926. She demanded that the painting follow a truckload of furniture (and the Richardson family silver) to her new apartment after Ernest left her for Pauline. She specifically named it as her property at that time, and Hemingway complied. In another account, it wasn’t in a truck but in a wheelbarrow Hemingway rented and wheeled himself from one apartment to the other, from rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to rue de Fleurus.17 Though Hadley remained stoic, Ernest would burst into tears when unpacking many of the sentimental items, fully consecrating his labor as an act of contrition. Yet when he and Pauline left Paris in 1931, the painting was among the items they had shipped to Key West. Though still officially Hadley’s painting, Ernest had “borrowed” it.