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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