Hemingway's Brain

by Andrew Farah

  The fiction he completed and struggled to complete over his last decade can now be examined in the context of his changing mental state. But, as seems always the case with Hemingway, he leaves us with a paradox: the writing’s technical decline and other signs of dementia, such as disinhibition, are present in the face of preserved or even enhanced capacity for abstraction. This capacity is one of the few mental activities to actually improve as a person ages, even when judgment and insight become impaired. This can be particularly challenging clinically, as demented people may demonstrate horrendous judgment in their activities, finances, and relationships, yet articulate elaborate justifications for those actions, leaving those who are concerned for them quite puzzled. Much of Hemingway’s behavior left friends in such a state, yet all the while, when busy at his profession, he was still leaving buried treasure for endless Ph.D. dissertations. The later works, particularly the posthumous ones, deserve three complimentary examinations: technical, interpersonal, and symbolic.

  Because Hemingway had earned literary success, both critical and popular, at such a young age, it is understandable that many assume he was a prodigy. But true to his blue-collar image, he was always a working man. It is often the case that it’s much harder for the prodigy in adulthood. He faces the realization that his work is no longer special just because of his age, and he is competing against artists who have formally studied their discipline and whose product evolved through the failures of thousands of crossed-out words and hundreds of painted-over canvases. It would have been better if Hemingway had had to earn his success the traditional way and if he had received more than his share of rejection letters early on. But his timing in Paris was so fortunate as to qualify as divine intervention. He was able to learn his craft while surrounded by some of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century. He was accepted into their circle before he had ever published, and though many in the group may have believed him to be gifted, he was still spending his afternoons in cafés, drinking rum St. James, and trying to get it right.

  Hemingway declined college and sought on-the-job training. World War I was more educational than he would appreciate at the time, as was his early newspaper work. Once he arrived in Paris, Ezra Pound directed his reading list and editorialized on past and present greats, Sylvia Beach provided the books, and newspaper editors helped create his unique style. Pete Wellington was Hemingway’s boss at the Kansas City Star. In a 1940 interview, Hemingway remarked that he could “never say properly how grateful I am to have worked under him.” Wellington urged him (in his typical harsh manner) to avoid clichés and slang, to write in short sentences, and to strive always for a plainness of expression.7 And Hemingway borrowed thematically from the great minds around him: Frederic Henry is the embodiment of T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Man,” and recent criticism argues that Hemingway shared essentially the same philosophical and spiritual themes as Joyce. It was the perfect formula for America’s own modernist, forever in the rough.

  Still, the trajectory was not always upwards. His masterpieces were usually followed by critical disasters—In Our Time by Torrents of Spring; A Farewell to Arms by To Have and Have Not, and Green Hills of Africa before the success of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The work that seems to divide the critics down the middle with regard to literary merit is his 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees. It would be one of the last complete works while the dementing process was still prodromal, or in a preliminary phase.

  The title Across the River and into the Trees was derived from the last words of Stonewall Jackson, who was wounded in the right hand and left arm in a flurry of friendly fire just after nightfall at Chancellorsville. His left arm was amputated, but he also developed pneumonia. A few moments before his death, in a delirious states, he called out orders, paused, and then, smiling, said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Hemingway’s intent was for us to see Cantwell, as some scholars have, as an avatar of Jackson8 rather than himself.

  The book was generally panned by critics after its release, and only recently has it found some favor among them. Aside from the Adriana-Renata story (like Ernest, the Colonel would address Renata as “Daughter” throughout the short text), the less sexy question is how competent and original was it? In his notes from the Paris years, Ernest instructed himself on “Imitating everybody, living and dead, relying on the fact that if you imitate someone obscure enough it will be considered original. Education consists in finding sources obscure enough to imitate so that they will be perfectly safe.”9 The obvious comparison is to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and though Hemingway did not own a translation of this 1912 work until after 1956, he surely saw it translated for the March 1924 edition of The Dial during his Paris years. In fact, it becomes obvious he had read it when one researches his use of phrase “grace under pressure.”

  The phrase was forever linked to Ernest when he was quoted in Dorothy Parker’s profile, “The Artist’s Reward,” in the November 30, 1929, edition of The New Yorker (“Exactly what do you mean by ‘guts’?” Hemingway replied: “I mean, grace under pressure.”).10 And his April 24, 1926, letter to Scott Fitzgerald references a conversation Ernest had had with Gerald Murphy about bullfighting: “Was not referring to guts but to something else. Grace under pressure.”11 But this unique Hemingwayesque phrase was coined by Mann for his classic and appeared not only in the Dial in 1924 but in the English-language version Death in Venice and Other Stories, of 1925. Perhaps there is no better example of Hemingway following his own advice, imitating everybody. But still, a more likely inspiration was closer to home by the early 1950s.

  His third wife, Martha Gellhorn, an accomplished war correspondent, wrote the novel The Wine of Astonishment (later republished as Point of No Return). This work is strikingly similar in structure and plot to Across the River, which at the time of publication was Hemingway’s first book after ten years. He was very aware of Martha’s 1948 novel at the time he finally broke his writing hiatus. What he was told specifically by Charles Scribner in 1947 was that Martha “had written a novel about the war, and both Max [Perkins] and Wallace Meyer thought that the first two thirds of it were extremely good. It told of an American colonel who toured around the warfront with his chauffer and had love affairs, drinking bouts and the usual sort of thing, all of which they said was very effectively done and very masculine.”12(The final third, which neither editor cared for, described the horrors of the death camps.)

  Hemingway kept up through Scribner not only with Martha’s literary career after they divorced but also with her personal affairs—at times obsessively. He asked about her in one letter that also informed Scribner that his new housemaid was named Martha. Ernest said it was pleasure to give her orders. And so, with his third wife on his mind, Ernest began work on his World War II novel in 1948, inspired by the Venice trip that began in December of that year, when he first met Adriana.

  Like Gellhorn’s Colonel Smithers, Cantwell relies on interior monologue to fill the narrative and reflect on the war. No previous criticism of Across the River has addressed its originality, just its quality, with critics wondering if it would have been worthy of publication without Hemingway’s name on it and observing that a work that consists largely of reflection and inner dialogue, which is by definition stream of consciousness, could just as easily be the result of a rambling pen. Even Adriana, the muse herself, was not impressed with the book, particularly the character she had inspired, telling Ernest, “The girl is boring. How could your colonel love a girl who is so boring? A girl like that does not exist, if she is lovely and from a good family and goes to Mass every morning. Such a girl would not drink all day like a sponge and be in bed at the hotel.”13

  Hemingway’s defense of Across the River was “they can say anything about nothing happening in Across the River, but all that happens is the defense of the lower Piave, the breakthrough in Normandy, the taking of Paris and the destruction of the 22nd Inf. Reg. in Hürtgen forest plu
s a man who loves a girl and dies.”14 At least that was his intent, however less successfully he achieved it than The Wine of Astonishment. With events such as the Normandy breakthrough, perhaps a character’s recollection and a narrator’s description would both be inadequate. And once again, there is no hiding the autobiographical aspects of Hemingway’s short novel—Cantwell is separated from his ambitious wife, a former war correspondent. At the time, Martha was also publishing with Scribner’s, and she threatened to leave the firm if Ernest did not delete the defamatory passages that so obviously referenced her in his novel.15

  More recent criticism of Across the River makes the Stonewall Jackson connection more obvious, describing a man whose health is actively failing and who is trying very self-consciously through his inner dialogue to gain control or at least to understand his life as it slips away, even in his last moments. In the autobiographical sense, Hemingway had once again seen himself in the crystal ball.

  The Garden of Eden was begun a bit earlier, in 1946, but it split away from his Islands in the Stream text as a separate work around the spring of 1948.16 Hemingway continued to work on the Garden manuscript intermittently for rest of his life. Some themes were genuine departures, while others were well known—the young protagonist writer, David, struggling to write a book on African hunting, is familiar enough, but his bisexual wife, Catherine, and the love triangle with another woman, Marita, were quite experimental for the time. The sexually charged text may indicate some lack of inhibition, but it is difficult to draw any conclusions about Hemingway’s skills as a writer from the published text, as he never felt it ready for publication. Still, it would become the second posthumously released novel, in 1986.

  The original manuscript at the Hemingway Archives is 200,000 words, arranged as forty-eight chapters, yet it would be edited down to 70,000 words in thirty chapters by Scribner’s. Much like in his rambling Islands in the Stream and in The Dangerous Summer he could never stop expanding; the repetitiveness and unwieldy expansion of Garden indicate progressive memory impairment. His signature economy of style was gone, as he was unable to fully remember what he had written before and therefore what to cut out. As his last decade progressed, he forged ahead on these last works, repeating himself. Only when his cognitive skills declined to another threshold, making the act of writing much harder, did the old style return by default in Moveable Feast.

  What was deleted by the editors of Garden included a second love triangle, involving a painter, his wife, and her male lover, as well as a chapter labeled “provisional ending.” The work has been compared to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, as well as to Fitzgerald’s personal life—in both circumstances, the writer is forced to choose between pursuing his career and caring for his mentally ill wife. Critics have noted how unstable Hemingway’s Catherine is and have assigned various psychiatric labels; the character best fits the definition of a borderline personality, someone with intense inappropriate anger, fear of rejection and abandonment, intense and unstable relationships, self-destructive behaviors, and gender identity issues. Like Catherine, a borderline may even experience psychotic symptoms at times. It is important to note that when critics compare this character to Pauline, Hemingway’s second wife, it is only in terms of her sequence in the writer’s love life and of her general look and haircut; there is no evidence that Hemingway was assigning such severe psychopathology to Pauline or that Pauline would be diagnosed as such.

  Still, each character in Garden can be identified as an echo of someone in Hemingway’s past or current circle—Mary, of course, being “Marita” (little Mary). And critics have suggested that Pauline’s sister was perhaps in part an inspiration for Catherine, as Virginia (Jinny) Pfeiffer was close to Hemingway prior to Pauline’s death. Again, there is no evidence of such psychopathology in Jinny, but Hemingway admired her and claimed she had “as much talent or more for writing than I have.” Her sexuality intrigued Ernest as well. Patrick Hemingway was quoted as saying that “Aunt Jinny was lesbian and she was quite keen on getting my mother to be homosexual as well.… There was always this undercurrent with Jinny.”17 But it was most certainly Ernest’s intimacy with Mary and Pauline at the time that inspired the most risqué parts of his Garden. And he was reliving his 1926 personal Garden of Eden as well.

  Hadley told her first biographer that during their Paris days Pauline liked to crawl into bed with Ernest and her at Schruns and also when the three of them vacationed together at Juan-les-Pins.18 After Ernest had left for New York to secure a contract with Scribner’s and Pauline was back in Paris, she wrote to Hadley, “Oh, my soul, I wish I woz in Schruns. I miss you two men. How I miss you two men!” The interpretation is obvious enough, but Pauline could also be reminding her rival for Ernest that she was the smaller, younger, prettier, and more feminine of the pair.

  Schruns is a small town in western Austria where Ernest and Hadley had taken skiing vacations, and Juan-les-Pins is a town on the French Riviera where Scott and Zelda had rented the Villa Paquita. To allow Hadley and Ernest to stay on at Paquita from June 1920 until they returned to the United States, the Fitzgeralds moved to another cottage, the Villa St. Louis. Scott brought along a manuscript of The Sun Also Rises to review. Thus, these weeks, during which Ernest, Hadley, and Pauline enjoyed one another’s company in the same bed, occurred after Ernest and Pauline were already intimate. One researcher noted that Ernest and Hadley were both large individuals, and beds at the time were generally twin size unless custom made.

  However Hemingway may have defined love as a young man, he believed himself to be in love with both Hadley and Pauline at the time and wrote to his father in 1926, that it was “pure hell to be in love with two women at once.” The wise doctor quickly dismissed his son’s dilemma as “nonsense.”19 As a much older man, he wrote clearly enough in A Moveable Feast that he loved both women at the time, and it is also clear from the text that, more than thirty years later, he still loved Hadley and could not forgive himself for the way he left her. To assuage this guilt, he portrayed himself as a distracted, hardworking, and innocent victim of the feminine forces swirling around him rather than as an active participant in the affair.

  And two decades on, while writing Garden, Ernest would again enjoy two familiar partners at once. In 1947 he wrote to his World War II friend, Buck Lanham, of his and Mary’s rejuvenated love life during the time Pauline was visiting in Cuba. She had arrived to help Patrick recover from what at first was postconcussive symptoms after a car wreck; as the week drew on, his headache worsened, and he developed a fever. It was probably unrelated to the accident, as he had developed some infectious process, but, with Mary dealing with family matters in Chicago, Pauline was a welcome sight at the Finca.20

  When Mary returned, she and Pauline got on well and became close. Ernest’s code words for his new love life in letters to Charles Scribner and Buck Lanham were “the happiness of the Garden that a man must lose.” He singled out Martha as the only one of his wives not to play along: “she could never depict happiness truly; the happiness of the Garden that you must lose.”21 He also urged Lanham to “KEEP ALL THIS UNDER YOUR HAT TOO.” Pauline wrote to Ernest and Mary in 1948 as “Dear Men,” her greeting from twenty-three years earlier. She began collaborating with Mary on the plans for his “white tower” at Finca in the summer of 1947, and they visited each other frequently in the few remaining years of Pauline’s life (Mary even traveled to California). And Ernest was furious when he learned that Pauline had met with Martha in Italy without his knowledge in 1949, and in his beloved Venice.22

  The alternative ending to Garden portrays a couple on a beach, and it’s David and Catherine, not David and Marita as expected. Catherine has been released from a Swiss asylum, and, true to her pathology of borderline personality, she asks David to agree to a suicide pact if she decompensates again. The text, as left by Hemingway, is repetitive and less coherent than any finished product he would have ever approved. Still, Garden was very risqué for the tim
e, and Hemingway was ever attentive to his hair fetish in the text. The boldness of the work is undeniable. Garden of Eden was begun nine years before the 1955 publication of Lolita. Hemingway later purchased the 1958 U.S. edition.

  The writer he created, David Bourne, is focused on recollecting his experiences hunting an elephant in East Africa with his father. To his credit, Hemingway always considered killing elephants taboo. He never hunted them, and on his last safari he was far more interested in watching elephants and other animals than in killing them. In his “African Journal,” he had elaborated: “In the night I thought about the elephant … and about the long time he had lived with so many people against him and seeking to kill him for his two wonderful teeth that were now only a great disadvantage to him and a deadly load for him to carry.” An analyst would substitute Ernest for the elephant and “persona” for the tusks.

  In the night, Hemingway continued to reflect on the old elephant: “I knew that old bulls were driven out of the herds long before they were impotent but I did not know why some were still loved after they had gone by themselves and why others were not.”23

  Islands in the Stream, True at First Light, and A Moveable Feast all suffered similar fates—so heavily edited as to compromise the author’s intent. Thus, in their commercial forms they are incapable of fully reflecting the state of their author’s skills. When Valerie Danby-Smith (later Valerie Hemingway) arrived in Cuba after Hemingway’s death to sort his papers, she discovered that the manuscripts “were not even close to meeting Hemingway’s exacting publishing standards.” And eventually “They were, to a certain extent, reconstructed by editors specifically chosen to shape the working drafts into coherent, saleable novels of reasonable length.” The pages were “rambling, sometimes incoherent.”24 What was published as Islands, even after editing, reads as a rambling sketchbook of ideas and autobiography in which, once again, simply changing the names serve as the author’s weak attempt at concealing identities.