Hemingway’s Brain. Andrew Farah. University of South Carolina Press. 2017. 194 pages.
Maybe you’ve read biographies of Hemingway before or watched documentaries. His daredevil life, following bullfighting and big game hunting, his alcoholism, his fighting in multiple wars, his mother’s obsession with dressing him as a girl and claiming he and his 18-month-older sister were twins.
Maybe you’ve seen his quirky and wonderful house in Key West. Or Cuba. Or Idaho. In Key West, besides the cats, there is a fountain in the yard made from a urinal at his favorite bar.
Maybe you’ve read his work — the best of his generation, “the lost generation,” they say, a generation that included Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cummings, MacLeish, Orwell. The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, Death in the Afternoon, A Moveable Feast…
Maybe you just knew in the back of your mind somewhere that he killed himself back in 1961. and maybe you knew that 4 of his five siblings did also, and his father, and a granddaughter. And maybe you heard he had bipolar disorder, was institutionalized more than once, and underwent ECT — electroconvulsive therapy.
Even given all that, you will find much that you didn’t know in this biography by Andrew Farah.
A PBS documentary claimed “July 1961 brought a sudden end to Ernest Hemingway’s storied life.”
Turns out, there was nothing sudden about it.
Farah is not primarily a writer; he is a psychiatrist, a director of psychiatry in the University of North Carolina Healthcare System. He is clearly a fan; his knowledge of Hemingway’s work and life are deep and engaging. But his perspective is different. He contends that Hemingway’s decline and suicide were not related to Bipolar Disorder, which Farah doesn’t believe Hemingway had, but were a result of depression as a symptom of dementia caused by multiple traumatic brain injuries exacerbated by alcoholism. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CTE, before that was a known thing. “These repeated concussive blows did cumulative damage, so that by the time he was fifty, his very brain cells were irreparably changed and their premature decline no programmed into his genetics.
Farah’s analysis is medical — symptoms, signs, genetics, causes and effects on the brain. It is also literary; he analyzes Hemingway’s writing style and content, describing how Hemingway’s stories emerged from his strained relationships and fueled by paranoia and hostility related to his damaged brain. Hemingway wrote what he knew, or what he believed, which often was presented as truth though it was truth filtered through the lenses of dementia. His barely concealed stories of Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, his wives and the other women in his life were sometimes hostility, sometimes homage, driven by his moods and memories, however inaccurate they might have been. Chapter 10, A Moveable Feast, which was his last work and completed after he died, is a particularly intriguing exploration of this aspect of his writing.
He also became incapable of writing, which further fed his depression. “His lifelong therapy (writing) became instead primary source of depression, because of the the loss of his capacities and the subsequent fear that he could no longer make a living.”
And so, surprising to no one who knew him well, Hemingway completed suicide in July 1961.
So, read the other biographies, too, but “with this subtext,” writes Farah: “this is the life of a functional alcoholic, and the last ten years of this life involved a decline into dementia caused by multiple factors, insidious at first, and rapidly in the last two years.”
In truth, there were a couple of times when my eyes glazed over from the discussion of brain cells and mutations and whatnot, but those passages were brief, and even glazing over them took nothing from the story. Under 200 pages, this is an easy book to read. But perhaps not at bedtime. (I had dreams of brain trauma.)
The multiple brain injuries that were at the root of Hemingway’s dysfunction were the result of Hemingway’s daring hyperfunction — perhaps itself a life driven by haunting and a desire to escape. A circle feeding on itself. Hemingway as a writer was thus shaped by Hemingway as a man running from demons. It was a life of adventure — real life tall-tales, but perhaps his was a life that could have ended no other way. It certainly wasn’t a surprising or sudden conclusion.