Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  Applying this general background to Ernest's specific behavior, Dr. Renown said that the previous October in Madrid, Ernest's anxieties over his excess baggage and keeping his name off the manifest and taking a slow, old airplane to avoid detection, were all obsessions. But his later anxieties that his phone was bugged and that the Feds wanted to arrest him for impairing the morals of a minor and for not paying nonexistent taxes, were delusions. His obsessions could be dispelled by insistent logic, as witness our eventual hard-won triumph over the excess luggage anxiety. But these obsessions had hardened into delusions and no amount of persuasive logic or evidence could now have any effect on Ernest. The obsession had surrounded itself with an impregnable shell, and the fact that that delusion-shell was impenetrable necessitated the use of electrical treatment.

  As for the electrical treatments themselves, Dr. Renown said that ECT (Electro Convulsive Treatment) was a concept that was now obsolete. He explained that in modern treatment the patient receives an injection that puts him to sleep, thereby eliminating the convulsion that was characteristic of the early use of shock. That once terrifying experience is now no more than an awareness of the injection, then oblivion until the patient wakens a few hours later, when he may or may not have a headache. A patient usually shows some response to three or four treatments, then the series of ten to twelve is completed in order to "fix" the improvement, although it may be necessary to extend the number to as many as twenty. If improvement is sustained a week or two after the completion of the series, the prognosis is good. If there is indication of relapse, a treatment a week may be given for several weeks, often with very good results.

  I asked Dr. Renown whether the electrical impulses were directed to a particular part of the brain. He said there are fifty organic and fifty psychodynamic theories to explain how electrical treatments are effectual, which is, of course, a comment on our ignorance. We use many treatments in medicine, he said, that we are unable to explain: digitalis in heart failure; insulin in diabetes. We know only that they work. The electrical treatments are applied by placing the electrodes on each temple and the entire brain is affected. No one knows where memory is stored but it probably is closely related to molecular chemistry of the cells.

  I asked him about Ernest's complaints that the shock doctors were ruining his memory. He said that the two most prominent side effects of electrical treatments, loss of memory and confusion, both disappear in a short time. It is true, he said, that details of illness and hospitalization may never be recovered to memory—this could be a function of the treatment or of the illness, but he felt that such details were not important anyway. But he was very definite that all facts and experiences that predate the illness become as available as ever, once the treatments have ended.

  Dr. Renown speculated that Ernest's fears of impoverishment and of being in jeopardy physically and legally were probably related to his feelings of impoverishment as a writer, with attendant jeopardy of his identity and stature. His psychopatho-logical symptoms, Dr. Renown thought, were a defense against recognizing this. They were so dominant that he was not accessible to psychotherapy until they could be neutralized by the electrical treatments.

  During the month of May, Ernest received a number of electrical treatments. When they were completed toward the end of the month, Mary was permitted to visit him for three days. She reported that Ernest was even more infuriated with these treatments than the previous ones, registering even bitterer complaints about how his memory was wrecked and how he was ruined as a writer and putting the blame for all this on the Mayo doctors, who had finally acceded to his demands that they stop giving him the ECT's. At the heart of this conflict between Ernest and his doctors was the fact that he would not admit that he had a condition that needed such drastic treatment. Apparently the doctors had not yet been able to make him face up to the magnitude of his problem.

  He did not talk to Mary any more about killing himself and, in fact, firmly stated that he was all over thinking about suicide, but the delusions remained the same. By now they had broadened to include hostility against Vernon Lord and against Mary herself. The first night she was there he accused her of having dragged him to Mayo's to get hold of his money. But the following day he was loving and appreciative toward her. His moods oscillated wildly. He had developed a new delusion which had turned him against Ketchum: he could not possibly go back there because they were lying in wait to nab him and throw him into jail for not paying state taxes, and he accused Mary of secretly working with them and maneuvering him into going back there so they could nail him.

  "How can we persuade him to have the treatment that he feels isn't necessary?" Mary asked. "How can we make him see the extent of his problem, to admit that he even has one, so the Mayo doctors can work on it? They don't seem to be able to make him realize why shock is necessary. Maybe we could. And seeing him there, all cooped up, never allowed out without an escort, was terrible. Poor darling. Isn't there some place where he could be outdoors? You know how Papa loves the out of doors. He talked about going abroad, even wiring friends in Spain and France, so maybe he'd go to a clinic in Switzerland or somewhere like that. It's so confusing seeing him there needing help, the help all around him, but not getting through to him. There must be a way."

  Ernest's mind seemed to have constructed an intolerable prison from which there was no escape; projecting from the reality that he could never return to his house in Havana, delusion had built three other walls: he could not stay in Rochester for they were ruining his memory; he could not go to his apartment in New York for they would nab him for having impaired the morals of a minor who lived in that city; he could not go to Ketchum for they would get him for state taxes.

  About the same time that Ernest was permitted to see Mary, he was allowed, by prearranged appointment, a few monitored telephone talks with me. He must have known they were monitored, for there were very few references that involved his delusions and even those were oblique.

  What he was mostly concerned about in those talks was a sudden and new compulsion to have a motion picture made of Across the River and into the Trees. For ten years he had turned down all picture offers for the book, the most persistent of which came from Jerry Wald, and on one occasion he had returned a fifty-thousand-dollar option check from Columbia Pictures. It's true that he had agreed to let Cooper do it, but that was a gesture of accommodation rather than desire. Now, however, it was a vital matter. He wanted to know who I thought could play the role of fifty-year-old Colonel Cantwell. He asked about an actor, whose name he couldn't recall, who lived in Switzerland and who had been proposed by Jerry Wald for the part. I identified the actor. He said that was exactly who should not play the colonel. He then tried to think of two other actors who he thought could play the part but could not recall their names either, and he raged out at what they had done to his memory.

  In these phone talks Ernest was very businesslike and uncharacteristically crisp. I had the distinct impression he had in front of him a list of items to be discussed and he seemed to hurry from one to the next without paying too much attention to my responses, as if the list were an end in itself. Also, the natural slow rhythm of his speech had changed and his voice was a tape being run through the machine too fast.

  As for Across the River, I simply put him off by saying I would look into it, but I didn't.

  In the beginning of June, on my way back from Hollywood, I rented a car in Minneapolis and drove the ninety miles to Rochester through lovely spring countryside. The town seemed a little less forbidding decorated with green leaf. The nature of Ernest's hospitalization had been well publicized. Time magazine had wormed its way into the hospital's confidential records and had smeared its pages with the contents of the file on Ernest, including the number of shock treatments he had received. Where the facts were missing, Time filled the gaps with conjecture.

  When I approached Ernest's room, he was standing at an elevated hospital table with a newspaper spread befor
e him; I stood at the open door, not able, for the moment, to enter; whereas on my previous visit he had appeared attenuated, now the man he once was had disappeared and the man before me was only a marker to show where he had been.

  He was very happy and, in a peculiar and incomprehensible way, proud that I had come. He called in nurses and other floor personnel, and introduced them to me, each introduction followed by an effusive endorsement of my past, present and future. When the doctors came they readily gave their consent to Ernest's request to go for a drive.

  In the car I started to tell Ernest about Honor, who had obtained her first job, but he cut me off quickly. To my dismay it was as before: the car bugged, his room bugged, all the same persecutions. He directed me onto a small road that carried us through a wooded section and then climbed steadily up to the summit of a blunt hill. We parked the car and walked a short distance through woods along a trail that emerged upon a clearing. The view was a three-quarters sweep of all the surroundings; the sky was cloudless and busy with birds cavorting in the green-scented air.

  Ernest noticed none of it; he immediately took me through a catalogue of his miseries: first, poverty complaints; then accusations against his banker, his lawyer, his doctor, all the fiduciary people in his life; after that, his worries over not having the proper clothes; and then the taxes. There was a great deal of repetition.

  My first inclination was to let him talk himself out, hoping that perhaps that would help release the pressures within him, but as I watched him pace about, his eyes on the ground, his face contorted by the miseries he was recounting, there rose in me a kind of anger, and finally not able to hold back, I stepped into his path, causing him to look up, and said: "Papa, it's spring!"

  He looked at me blankly, his eyes fuliginous behind his old glasses.

  "We missed Auteuil again." Reality. Make him come into my world. Restate the reality. "We missed Auteuil again, Papa."

  The eyes stirred. He moved his hands into his pockets. "And we will miss it and miss it and miss it," he said.

  "Why?" My words pounced on his. I didn't want to lose the wedge. "Why not next fall? What's wrong with a good fall meet? Who says Bataclan can't run in autumn leaves?" Mention the good associations.

  "There won't be another spring, Hotch."

  "Of course there will. I can guarantee it. . ."

  "Or another fall." His whole body had relaxed. He went over and sat on a busted fragment of stone wall. I stood before him with one foot up on an overturned rock. I felt I should get to it quickly now, and I did, but I said it very gently: "Papa, why do you want to kill yourself?"

  He hesitated only a moment; then he spoke in his old, deliberate way. "What do you think happens to a man going on sixty-two when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?"

  "But how can you say that? You have written a beautiful book about Paris, as beautiful as anyone can hope to write. How can you overlook that?"

  "The best of that I wrote before. And now I can't finish it."

  "But perhaps it is finished and it is just reluctance . . ."

  "Hotch, if I can't exist on my own terms, then existence is impossible. Do you understand? That is how I've lived, and that is how I must live—or not live."

  "But why can't you just put writing aside for now? You have always spent a long time between books. Ten years between To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls and then ten years more until Across the River. Take some time off. Don't force yourself. Why should you? You never have."

  "I can't."

  "But why is it different now? May I mention something? Back in 1938 you wrote a preface for your short stories. At the end of it you said you hoped you could live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. That was your ambition. All right—For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea, not to mention the unpublished ones. And there're more than twenty-five stories, plus the book of Paris sketches. You've fulfilled your covenant—the one you made with yourself—the only one that counts. So for God's sake why can't you rest on that?"

  "Because—look, it doesn't matter that I don't write for a day or a year or ten years as long as the knowledge that I can write is solid inside me. But a day without that knowledge, or not being sure of it, is eternity."

  "Then why not turn from writing altogether? Why not retire? God knows you have earned it."

  "And do what?"

  "Any of the things you love and enjoy. You once talked about getting a new boat big enough to take you around the world, fishing in good waters you've never tried. How about that? Or that plan about the game preserve in Kenya? You've talked about the tiger shoot in India—Bhaiya's invitation—there's that. And at one time we talked about your going in with Antonio on the bull ranch. There's so damn many things . . ."

  "Retire? How the hell can a writer retire? DiMaggio put his records in the book, and so did Ted Williams, and then on a particular good day, with good days getting rarer, they hung up their shoes. So did Marciano. That's the way a champ should go out. Like Antonio. A champion cannot retire like anyone else."

  "You've got some books on the shelf . . ."

  "Sure. I've got six books I declare to win with. I can stand on that. But unlike your baseball player and your prize fighter and your matador, how does a writer retire? No one accepts that his legs are shot or the whiplash gone from his reflexes. Everywhere he goes, he hears the same goddamn question— What are you working on?"

  "But who cares about the questions? You never cared about those phony tape measures. Why don't you let us help you? Mary will go anywhere you want, do anything you like. Don't shut her out. It hurts her so."

  "Mary is wonderful. Always and now. Wonderful. She's been so damn brave and good. She is all that is left to be glad for. I love her. I truly love her." A rise of tears made it impossible for me to talk any more. Ernest was not looking at me; he was watching a small bird foraging in the scrub. "You remember I told you once she did not know about other people's hurts. Well, I was wrong. She knows. She knows how I hurt and she suffers trying to help me—I wish to Christ I could spare her that. Listen, Hotch, whatever happens, whatever . . . she's good and strong, but remember sometimes the strongest of women need help."

  I couldn't manage any more. I walked a short distance away. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder. "Poor old Hotch," he said. "I'm so damn sorry. Here, I want you to have this." He had the horse chestnut from Paris in his hand.

  "But, Papa, that's your lucky piece."

  "I want you to have it."

  "Then I'll give you another."

  "Okay."

  I stooped down to pick up a bright pebble but Ernest stopped me. "Nothing from here," he said. "There's no such thing as a lucky piece from Rochester, Minnesota."

  I had a key ring that one of my daughters had given me, that had a carved wooden figure attached to it, so I removed the figure and gave him that.

  "If I could get out of here and get back to Ketchum . . . why don't you talk to them?"

  "I will, Papa, I will." I felt suddenly elated. "And you should work hard to think about the things you care about and like to do, and not about all those negative things. That's the best thing that can happen."

  "Sure. Sure it is. The best things in life and other ballroom bananas. But what the hell? What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven't any of them. Do you understand, goddamn it? None of them. And while I'm planning my good times and worldwide adventures, who will keep the Feds off my ass and how do the taxes get paid if I don't turn out the stuff that gets them paid? You've been pumping me and getting the gen, but you're like Vernon Lord and all the rest, turning state's evidence, selling out to them . . ."

  I lashed into him. "Papa! Papa, damn it! Stop it! Cut it out!" A heavy quiver shook him, that th
in old lovely man, and he held his hand against his eyes for a moment before he started to walk slowly back along the path to the car; we didn't say another word all the way back to the hospital.

  I stayed with him for a few hours in his room. He was pleasant but distant. We talked about books and sports; nothing personal. Late in the day I drove back to Minneapolis. I never saw him again.

  On the flight back to New York I thought about Mary's suggestion about a place that had access to the out of doors where Ernest could enjoy good air and scenery while receiving treatment. I knew now that he could be reached. On the hilltop he had been momentarily clear and lucid about his troubles. Sitting there in the plane, I could not help but try to reason out, from what he had said, what the forces had been that had crushed him. He was a man of prowess and he did not want to live without it: writing prowess, physical prowess, sexual prowess, drinking and eating prowess. Perhaps when these powers diminished, his mind became programed to set up distorted defenses for himself. But if he could only be made to adjust to a life where these prowesses were not so all-important . . .

  I found myself thinking about his dicho: man can be defeated but not destroyed. Maybe it could work that way, even though Ernest favored its contrary brother. Ernest Walsh's words came back to me: "It will take time to wear him out. And before that he will be dead."

  Mary was living in New York now, and we both consulted Dr. Renown about a new place that would be better suited to Ernest's needs. He suggested The Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut—small cottage residences, open grounds in a scenic setting, fine staff, long-term intensive care a specialty. Mary flew up to inspect it and consult with the director.