Hemingway's Brain

Hemingway’s Brain

Journal entry: Sunday, April 30, 2017

I should have anticipated it. That’s why I wasn’t taken by surprise when I read the piece by Joseph Brean on Hemingway’s brain in yesterday’s paper (National Post, April 29, 2017): “Head trauma linked to Hemingway’s suicide.” Medical science to the rescue…

Andrew Farah, chief of psychiatry at High Point Regional Health System at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, wrote Hemingway’s Brain in which he argues that the Nobel laureate’s famous shotgun suicide in Ketchum, Idaho was the result of “chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head,” stating his case on his study of Hemingways’ medical records, biographies on his life, and comparing Hemingway’s early writing with his later writing, especially A Movable Feast which was the last thing he was working on before committing suicide shortly after being released from the Mayo Clinic where he had received electroshock therapy for manic depression.

Psychiatrist Farah focussed on Hemingway’s nine major head traumas that he received throughout his life, the first one sustained in Italy during the First World War and the others in different accidents—car crash in London, skylight in Paris accidently falling on his head when he pulled the wrong chord, a fall on a fishing boat in the Gulf Coast, a plane crash in East Africa, and others which Farah argues were responsible for Hemingway’s brain disease medically defined as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

 “We all think of the Hemingway persona, but what the CTE did, later in life, was it simply solidified and locked in the very worst aspects of that persona. It made him irritable, volatile, difficult, and challenging,” Farah said in an interview. “People talk about how, psychologically, he was trapped by the persona like a spy out too long, believing his own cover, or acting that way because people expected it of him. I think he was biologically incapable of breaking free from the nastier aspects of that persona, simply because of the CTE,” Farah added, convinced in his belief of Hemingway’s psychological condition.

Farah argues that the electroconvulsive therapy that Hemingway received at the Mayo Clinic for his severe depression and paranoid behavior made Hemingway’s condition worse instead of better and believes that Hemingway was misdiagnosed and should not have been given electroshock treatment, and he may be right; but it seems to me (I haven’t read his book yet, but I’ve put it on my Amazon wish list) that he’s trying to fit Hemingway’s very complex psychological condition into his medical theory, and it smells bad to me.

Hemingway played with the idea of suicide all his life, often threatening to take his life to get his way with his four wives, and he played out this theme of suicide in one of his earliest and most canonical stories, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and according to his official biographer Carlos Baker while still working on his first novel The Sun Also Rises Hemingway wrote in one of his meditations on suicide: “When I feel low, I like to think about death and the various ways of dying. And I think about probably the best way, unless you could arrange to die some way while asleep, would be to go off a liner at night.” But his love of life always overrode his death wish and he survived until he could no longer live life on his own terms; so I have grave doubts about Farah’s theory of Hemingway’s famous suicide. 

But what intrigues me about Farah’s theory is that he believes the dark side of Hemingway’s personality was “solidified” and “locked in” by Hemingway’s deteriorating brain disease caused by traumatic head injuries. Why the dark and ugly side of Hemingway’s personality and not the good and compassionate side? Curious, what?

Were the novelists Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Dostoevsky (The Double), and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) wrong in their psychological take on the dual nature of the human personality? Why does medical science want to relegate the self of man to the brain and reduce man’s behavior to biology and the dustbin of medical waste when the body dies? Have we become this materialistic?

There’s so much more to Hemingway’s suicide than the good psychiatrist can see, and though there’s evidence to support the theory that traumatic brain injury can cause changes to one’s personality, it does not discount the ancient belief in the dual nature of human consciousness that poets have written about for centuries; and if I were to offer my opinion on Ernest "Papa" Hemingway's CTE, I’d be inclined to say that his behavior was more psychologically affected than neurologically induced. "That's the way we Hemingways are. We're nice guys one day and sons-of-bitches the next," said Hemingway's son Jack, who never suffered from CTE; but his model/actress daughter Margaux Hemingway committed suicide. It's probably in the genes, then; but that's another theory...

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