July 21, 1899 Oak Park, Illinois
Author: Christine Whitehead
More on Hemingway’s Brain and link to Findings of NFL Research on Concussion: Different take on it all
This is a long article but the points are interesting. Some of the formatting and photos of brain functioning could not be captured so my apologies.
As those of you who follow this blog know, Hemingway was outrageously accident prone–from a young age even before you could blame it on drinking: sky lights falling on him; car accidents when he was not driving; 2 plane crashes when he was a passenger. No question, with what we know now, these episodes could well have affected his ultimate health and functioning. Please read what you have time for. This was published in the Washington Post, writer Avi Selk.
Best wishes, Christine
Ernest Hemingway meets the press at his Cuban home on Oct. 28, 1954, after the announcement that the American author was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. (AP file)
In one of Ernest Hemingway’s first published stories, a man goes into the woods and meets a disfigured prizefighter — insightful, though prone to fits of paranoia and violence.
“You’re all right,” says the visitor after they’ve chatted a while.
“No, I’m not. I’m crazy,” the fighter says. “Listen, you ever been crazy?”
“No. How does it get you?”
“I don’t know. When you got it you don’t know about it.”
Nearly a century after “The Battler” was written, psychiatrist Andrew Farah contends, we would recognize that the prizefighter suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE — the same concussion-induced brain disease now infamous in sports, particularly professional football.
And the prizefighter’s renowned author had CTE, too, Farah argues in his new book, “Hemingway’s Brain.”
The psychiatrist from High Point University in North Carolina writes of nine serious blows to Hemingway’s head — from explosions to a plane crash — that were a prelude to his decline into abusive rages, “paranoia with specific and elaborate delusions” and the final violence of his suicide in 1961.
Hemingway’s bizarre behavior in his latter years (he rehearsed his death by gunshot in front of dinner guests, for example) has been blamed on iron deficiency, bipolar disorder, attention-seeking and any number of other problems.
After researching the writer’s letters, books and hospital visits, Farah is convinced that Hemingway had dementia — made worse by alcoholism and other maladies, but dominated by CTE, the improper treatment of which likely hastened his death.
[In stunning admission, NFL official affirms link between football and CTE]
“He truly is a textbook case,” Farah told The Washington Post. “His biography makes perfect sense to me in the context of multiple brain injuries.”
Farah is not the only person to make the link. A shorter discussion of head trauma in Paul Hendrickson’s biography, “Hemingway’s Boat,” convinced a reviewer that the famous writer “was probably suffering from organic brain damage.”
But Farah’s book goes deeper, mixing biography, literature and medical analysis in what he writes is “a forensic psychiatric examination of his very brain cells — the stressors, traumas, chemical insults, and biological changes — that killed a world-famous literary genius.”
Farah dates Hemingway’s first known concussion to World War I, several years before he wrote his short story, “The Battler.”
A bomb exploded about three feet from his teenage frame.
Another likely concussion came in 1928, when Hemingway yanked what he thought was a toilet chain and brought a skylight crashing down on him — causing what Farah describes as “giddy concussive ramblings … about his own blood’s smell and taste.”
Then came a car accident in London — then more injuries as a reporter during World War II, when a German antitank gun blew Hemingway into a ditch.
The psychiatrist describes his reported symptoms: double vision, memory trouble, slowed thought. And headaches that “used to come in flashes like battery fire,” Hemingway wrote in a letter.
“There was a main permanent one all the time. I nicknamed it the MLR 2(main line of resistance) and just accepted that I had it.”
[The quiet tragedy of Ernest Hemingway]
These were “classic and typical” symptoms of head trauma, Farah writes.
And not the last Hemingway would suffer.
After the war: another car accident. Then a fall on his boat “Pilar,” two years before he published “The Old Man and the Sea,” which a book reviewer called Hemingway’s “last generally admired book.”
Farah did not include in his list of concussions Hemingway’s flirtations with boxing, or accounts of head injuries he could not verify or which he suspected were the author’s tall tales.
But by the time Hemingway survived two consecutive plane crashes on a 1954 safari trip — escaping the second wreck by “batter[ing] open the jammed door with his head,” Farah writes — his remarkable brain was beyond repair.
“The injuries from earlier blows resolved, but, with additional assaults, his brain developed CTE,” Farah writes.
Often — though not always — caused by concussions, chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a degenerative brain disease that can manifest as memory loss, anger, dementia and suicidal behavior — usually decades after the head blow, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
This video from the CDC illustrates and explains the science behind a concussion and the importance of recovery time for the human brain. (CDC via YouTube)
Unknown in Hemingway’s day, it has been found in the brains of at least 17 dead athletes, and researchers will look for it in the brain of Aaron Hernandez, a former NFL star who killed himself in prison last week while serving a murder sentence.
Less bizarre but perhaps more devastating to the author: his deteriorating ability to arrange words.
“The genius who had written masterpieces such as ‘A Farewell to Arms’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ was now paralyzed, fully in the grip of a severe mental illness” as he struggled to assemble simple sentences for his memoirs in 1961, Farah writes.
“Only an autopsy can put the 100 percent stamp of approval” on a diagnosis, Farah acknowledged to The Post. But he didn’t back down from his conclusions in the book. “The symptoms are just so obvious,” he said.
CTE accounted for about three-quarters of Hemingway’s dementia, Farah said. “The concussions, alcohol, hypertension, and pre-diabetes all contributed to the changes in Hemingway’s brain,” he writes in his book.
And a long history of suicide in Hemingway’s family couldn’t have helped the author cope with his condition, Farah said.
But he is sure that by the end of his life, Hemingway had concussion-driven dementia, not psychotic depression as his doctors believed — to tragic consequences, he writes.
Hemingway’s doctors tried to change him with electroshock therapy. It was considered an effective treatment for depression in the last year of his life, 1961, and still is.
But depression was not Hemingway’s main problem, Farah argues. The traumas and resulting CTE had physically changed his brain — demented and weakened it.
After a round of shock treatments in early 1961, Farah writes, Hemingway “grew more and more abusive to” his wife, “berating her because of his paranoia.”
She and some friends had to physically restrain Hemingway from shooting himself that April.
He went back to the hospital for more shock treatments.
A few days after being discharged a second time, on July 2, 1961, Hemingway woke before sunrise. He fetched his shotgun from the basement, this time with no one to stop him.
“All his vulnerabilities coalesced in one final instant,” as Farah puts it.
Had he lived in the 21st century, Farah writes, Hemingway would have had an MRI scan, which might have revealed his much-abused brain was shrinking.
He would have been sent to a therapist, and told to stop drinking, to focus on his health, and “remind himself he is safe.”
He likely would have been prescribed antidepressants and vitamin B pills, and kept clear of stresses such as electric current.
Modern medicine could have saved Hemingway’s life, Farah said.
Even if not: “We would have at least understood him.”
“Hemingway’s Brain” by Andrew Farah was published in April 2017 by the University of South Carolina Press.
Hemingway’s 100 year anniversary (from High School graduation)
On Saturday, June 24th, the Hemingway Foundation in Oak Park, Illinois, hosted a party to celebrate Hemingway’s graduation from high school in 1917 – 100 years ago – from Oak Park and River Forest High School. The Foundation provided some jazz, some spoken word performances, a silent auction, and cocktails. It has long been debated what Hemingway’s favorite drink was. Contenders are a daquiri, a mojito, a bloody mary, and the ever-popular martini. Solid authority supports a dry, very cold martini as his favorite.
The Foundation also introduced their second annual publication of a collection of short stories called Hemingway Shorts, by rising writers. The Hemingway Foundation chairman, John Barry, presented several lesser known facts about Hemingway. If you read this blog regularly these will not be lesser known to you but bear with them.
- Hemingway suffered several concussions. There was the shell explosion in World War I, the skylight handle in Paris he mistakenly pulled which brought the window down to crash over his head leaving him with a lifelong scar that is very visible in his photos (no, he wasn’t drunk at the time!), and two plane crashes, the second of which caused the press to believe he was dead.
2. While he was born in Oak Park, he counted downtown Chicago and Upper Michigan as home. He honeymooned with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in Upper Michigan on Lake Walloon, and after the war moved to Chicago for several months.
3. He burnt the candle at both ends. Hemingway stayed up late but got up early. His usual habit when he was writing well was to get up early and work until the early afternoon. He’d then take a swim, go out on the Pilar, his boat, and relax with friends. While working on a book he was very disciplined.
- He wrote/typed standing up. Due to the leg injury from shrapnel in World War I, he was more comfortable standing than sitting when working. After the plane crashes, it was even more common for him to write while standing.
- He knew a fair amount about loss and starting over. When Hemingway was married to Hadley and they were living in Paris, he was reporting for the Toronto Star. He had been assigned to cover the Conference of Lausanne being held in Switzerland. While there, he thought he could do some work as well as share some of his work with other journalists who might be interested. He sent a telegram to Hadley asking that she bring some of his work. She put all of his manuscripts in a suitcase along with the carbon copies. Once on the train, she stepped off to buy a bottle of water and when she returned the suitcase had been stolen. It was more than a year and a half’s work and all that was left were two short stories that were in the back of a drawer at home. Scholars have debated whether it actually served Hemingway well to have to begin again and helped him perfect the lean style for which he is known or if it’s a huge loss to the history of his evolving style. If anyone finds them…He did forgive Hadley, but it remained a sore spot for a long time.
So happy 100th anniversary of high school graduation of Ernest Hemingway.
Fantastic Video Documentary of Hemingway’s Key West Home and Cats
Play and enjoy courtesy of Quincy Perkins, of Key West, Florida! Lovely look at part of the home, the cats and a bit of the cats’ history, and Quincy’s own dark humor and take on it all as a kid growing up with its aura nearby. A glittering Gem. 5 minutes of fascination. Thank you, Quincy and his creative colleagues! Best, Christine
Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Politics that split them up.
My friend Trudy found this interesting Article about the writers of Paris in the ’20s. I edited it to shorten but I think you will enjoy it. Photos added by me.
Best, Christine
Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound’s friendship spanned continents—and ideologies.
Michael Hogue
Ernest Hemingway, fresh off his marriage to Hadley Richardson, his first wife, arrived in Paris in 1921. Paris was a playground for writers and artists, offering respite from the radical politics spreading across Europe. Sherwood Anderson supplied Hemingway with a letter of introduction to Ezra Pound. The two litterateurs met at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and struck up a friendship that would shape the world of letters.
They frolicked the streets of Paris as bohemians, joined by rambunctious and disillusioned painters, aesthetes, druggies, and drinkers. They smoked opium, inhabited salons, and delighted in casual soirées, fine champagnes, expensive caviars, and robust conversations about art, literature, and the avant-garde. Pound was, through 1923, exuberant, having fallen for Olga Rudge, his soon-to-be mistress, a young concert violinist with firm breasts, shapely curves, midnight hair, and long eyebrows and eyelashes. She exuded a kind of mystical sensuality unique among eccentric highbrow musicians; Pound found her irresistible.
Pound was known for his loyalty to friends. Although he had many companions besides Hemingway—among them William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, Pablo Picasso, Wyndham Lewis, T.E. Hulme, William Carlos Williams, Walter Morse Rummel, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau, and Malcolm Cowley—Hemingway arguably did more than the others to reciprocate Pound’s favors, at least during the Paris years when he promoted Pound as Pound promoted others.
Pound edited Hemingway’s work, stripping his prose of excessive adjectives. Hemingway remarked that Pound had taught him “to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations.”
Pound, however, grew disillusioned with Paris, where his friends were gravitating toward socialism and communism. Paris, he decided, was not good for his waning health. Hemingway himself had been in and out of Paris, settling for a short time in Toronto. In 1923, accompanied by their wives, Pound and Hemingway undertook a walking tour of Italy. The fond memories of this rejuvenating getaway inspired Pound to return to Italy with his wife Dorothy Shakespear in 1924. They relocated, in 1925, to a picturesque hotel in Rapallo, a beautiful sea town in the province of Genoa.
Young Ezra
The move to Italy also effectively terminated Pound’s glory years in Paris, about which Hemingway wrote affectionately:
More than anything else, Italian politics—and the rise of fascism—damaged Hemingway’s regard for Pound, who became a zealous supporter of Mussolini and a reckless trafficker in conspiracy theories.
Hemingway offered Pound some money, sensing that money was needed, but Pound declined it. 
The falling out was no secret, and other writers took sides. William Carlos Williams wrote to Pound in 1938, saying, “It is you, not Hemingway, in this case who is playing directly into the hands of the International Bankers.”
Archibald MacLeish helped to orchestrate Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s, (A mental asylum Pound had been committed to. See below as to how he got there.) drafting a letter to the government on Pound’s behalf that included Hemingway’s signature, along with those of Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. A year later Hemingway provided a statement of support for Pound to be used in a court hearing regarding the dismissal of an indictment against Pound.
Hemingway awoke on the morning of July 2, 1961, put a 12-gauge, double-barreled shotgun to his head, and, alone in the foyer of his home, blew his brains out. He was 61. Pound’s friends and family didn’t tell him about Hemingway’s death, but a careless nurse did, and Pound reacted hysterically. The older of the two, Pound, at 72, was free from St. Elizabeth’s, where he’d spent 12 solemn years. He had returned to his beloved Italy to finish out his long and full life. In the autumn of 1972, he died peacefully in his sleep in Venice, the day after his birthday, which he’d spent in the company of friends.
Allen Mendenhall is an associate dean at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law and executive director of the Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty.
ME here: I may have over-edited re: how Ezra ended up in a psych facility. Ezra Pound was closely aligned with the Fascists in Italy. He was later imprisoned in Pisa by the liberating American forces in 1945 on charges of treason. In Pisa, he purportedly was placed in a small 6 x 6 cell and had a mental breakdown. He was ultimately sent to St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington D.C. for 12 years. Friends including Hemingway sent money and petitions for his release which finally happened. While most acknowledged that he was a bit “crazy,” most felt he was far from any sort of danger to anyone including to his country. Once released he returned to Italy and died in Venice eleven years after Hemingway’s death. Christine
The Styles of the Novelists
I just read an article by Kevin Knudson, which appeared on April 30 in Forbes Magazine. It was a book review of Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve, by Ben Blatt. Noting that famous novelists write in their own particular style: Hemingway and the short sentences, Henry James and the longer ones, Virginia Woolf in the free-flowing stream of consciousness, Mr. Blatt, who’s a scientist, wanted to determine if you could figure out who the author was just by examining the pattern of his or her words.
The first chapter tackles the rule that all of us writers learned early, i.e. to use adverbs sparingly. Blatt took it to the scientific level. He took a corpus of novels written by a broad spectrum of famous writers and counts the “LY” adverbs. Here’s what you’ve got:
Author Books looked at Adverbs per 10,000 words
Hemingway 10 80
Mark Twain 13 81
Amy Tan 6 83
Steinbeck 19 93
Vonnegut 14 101
Updike 26 102
Rushdie 9 101
King 51 105
Dickens 20 108
Virginia Woolf 9 116
Blatt goes on to determine if each author is uniformly efficient or does it vary from book to book. Bringing it home to this blog, the question is: Hemingway the most efficient or just the most efficient on average. It turns out that William Faulkner wrote three books with a lower adverb rate (As I Lay Dying, The Sound And The Fury, The Unvanquished), than Hemingway’s lowest count, To Have and Have Not.
Blatt also looks at the number of exclamation points per 100,000 words. Elmore Leonard once said, “You are allowed no more than 2 or 3 per 100,000 words.” He actually used 49 per 100,000, but that still made him “one of the stingiest.” Tom Wolfe used 929 per 100,000. But the “winner” is James Joyce’s 1105 per 100,000. Most clichés? James Patterson the highest; Jane Austin the lowest. In addition, Blatt looks at what words an author uses more often than the average. He set out the following requirements to judge this issue:
- The word must be used in at least half of the author’s books.
- It must be used at a rate of at least once per 100,000 words.
- It must be obscure in the sense that it is not commonly used.
- It is not a proper noun.
Based on those criteria, Ray Bradbury’s favorite words are: icebox, dammit, exhaled. Nabokov’s favorite word was, in fact, mauve.
So, some scientists have really buckled down and used their training to illuminate, and to have a bit of fun! Interesting data that’s not quite trivia.
Love,
Christine
How to Tell if You are in a Hemingway Novel
This is part of a series that Mallory Ortberg has done (how to tell if you are in a Bronte novel, etc.) I read it in THE TOAST. I found it hilarious. If you don’t, you probably don’t read enough Hemingway. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Best, Christine
1. Everyone you know respects you. This disgusts you.
2. The door is white and the day is hot. This pleases you.
3. A Jewish man believes you are his friend. This disgusts you.
4. You are a man. A man! A man is a man like a tree is a tree.
5. A Greek man is shouting incomprehensibly at you. This is why you are drunk.
6. You have lost something in a war. This is why you are drunk.
7. A woman is looking at you. She is wearing her hat in a manner you find unbearably independent and mannish. You despise her.
8. You are standing on top of a mountain. The mountain admires you for climbing it. You do not care what the mountain thinks of you, and you light a cigar. The cigar admires you for smoking it. You sneer casually at the sun. Somewhere there is a white door.
9. You are shooting a large animal but thinking about a woman. You cannot shoot her. This infuriates you.
10. You met a homosexual once in Paris. It took you two years snowshoeing across the backcountry in Michigan to recover.
11. You have said goodbye to a young girl with a white face on a black train. You are ready to die.
12. Waiter bring me another rum
13. You hate every single one of your friends. You have no friends. You are alone at sea. How you hate the sea, but how you respect the fish inside of it. How you hate the kelp. How indifferent you are to the coral.
14. Your stomach hurts; that is how you know you are alive.
15. You are standing in a river and something is coming to kill you. You will welcome it with open arms and a booming laugh when it comes.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald: more thoughts
An interesting article on Hem and Fitz
By ANDRIA DIAMOND April 22, 2017
If you’ve ever seen the movie Midnight in Paris then you are familiar with the rose colored glasses romanticists often wear when thinking of the past. In the film, writer Gill Pender (played by Owen Wilson), somehow manages to travel back in time to 1920s Paris and meet many of the greatest minds in literature, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this particular movie, the two historical writers seem to be cordial, Fitzgerald is handsome and sociable while Hemingway is philosophical and intense. Though Midnight in Paris is immensely enjoyable, it may not be wholly accurate in it’s portrayal of the relationship between these two phenomenal writers. History would suggest that their relationship was much more complex.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald first met in May of 1925, two men with extraordinary talent who were both battling their respective demons. Though they originally were good friends, their interactions later turned less amicable. Hemingway, though impressed with Fitzgerald’s writing, never seemed to respect the writer himself. He was wary of Fitzgerald’s need for validation, his tumultuous relationship with Zelda, and his self-destructive drinking habits. In a letter to Arthur Mizener (Fitzgerald’s biographer) dated April 5, 1950, Hemingway wrote:
“I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful; Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead. I think Scott in his strange mixed-up Irish catholic monogamy wrote for Zelda and when he lost all hope in her and she destroyed his confidence in himself he was through.”
Although Hemingway’s feelings toward Fitzgerald are clear, the facts with which he fuels them are decidedly less so.
Hemingway_Vs_Fitzgerald.pngHemingway had a flair for the dramatics, and his accounts of people and experiences could rarely be relied upon as gospel truth. Hemingway denounces Fitzgerald in his posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast (1964), and also deals roughly with the likes of Gertrude Stein and Ford Maddox Ford. In fact, we’ve recently documented Hemingway’s distaste for Ford Maddox Ford. While history shows it is not uncommon for writers to take issue with other creative minds, Hemingway had a lengthy track record for doing just that. It is speculated by literary devotees and historians alike that Hemingway’s harsh opinion of others was an act of self-preservation, as he seemed to be a man with a big ego and an even bigger chip on his shoulder. He was sensitive to the slightest condescension (which Fitzgerald did not mind providing) and often reacted with a sharp tongue.
While I would love nothing more than to imagine Hemingway and Fitzgerald—these two great minds—strolling through the 1920s as comrades, success rarely comes without sacrifice. Hemingway’s stubbornness and brash masculinity were essential in his work, just as Fitzgerald’s social perspectives and charm were essential in his. The very personalities and behaviors that made for different men are the same that made for great writers, and the world is a better place for it.
Romance: Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich
Hemingway was a romantic. Sure, he was macho and tough and a man’s man in many ways, but he enjoyed women greatly and always had a close and loving relationship with Marlene Dietrich. One of Hemingway’s love letters to her is going up for auction. It is expected it will garner something in the vicinity of $30 – $40,000.
This particular letter is dated August 12, 1952 – a year after Dietrich had confessed to keeping the author’s photograph by her bedside. They met in 1934 and became quite infatuated with each other but never consummated the attraction because, as Hemingway put it, they were “victims of unsynchronized passion.” He noted that whenever one of them was out of a relationship the other one was in one and the timing never worked out.
Hemingway writes in the letter to Marlene “I always love you and admire you and I have all sorts of mixed up feelings about you.” Later in the letter he declares that while “you are beautiful…I am ugly…please know I love you always and I forget you sometimes as I forget my heart beats. But it beats always.”
Marlene and Hemingway corresponded over several decades. Marlene Dietrich’s daughter wrote a book noting that after Hemingway’s death, her mother wore widow’s weeds for quite a while and she always believed that had he been with her, instead of his then wife, Mary, he wouldn’t have killed himself.
So, if I had $30,000+ just sitting around, I might enter the fray and bid on this letter, but I fear I’m going to have to let it go to some other fervent Hemingway fan.
I’ve read many of Hemingway’s letters. They are fun and he is quite funny and clever in them. His humor rarely comes through in his novels.
I think the line that I’ve quoted above – I forget you sometimes as I forget my heart beats. But it beats always – is so him. It’s very simple and yet it speaks volumes.
Hemingway’s Brain
A new book is coming out by Andrew Farah, called Hemingway’s Brain. Dr.
Farah is Chief of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina Health Care System. Treading on new territory, Dr. Farah highlights these little-known facts.
1. The only variety of mental illness for which Hemingway seemed to
have compassion was shell-shock. Those of you who’ve read For Whom the Bell Tolls know that Robert Jordan – the main character – condemns his own father’s suicide, saying it’s the easy way out for cowards.
2. Hemingway’s depression was noted in his own letters as early as 1903
(he was 4 years old in 1903! so I would love to see the letter) and that he
required a “rest cure.” I’m thinking it’s a letter that Hemingway must have written later in life describing himself at 4? I’m not sure but I will read the book and find out.
3. The original manuscript of The Garden of Eden is 200,000 words and
it was edited down posthumously to 70,000 words by Scribner’s. Hemingway worked on The Garden of Eden for quite a number of years. He’d put it on the back burner and then bring it out. It dealt with what we call today a threesome – two women and a man – and sexual ambiguity and was well ahead of its time. A very interesting book.
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald once described Hemingway as having the quality
of a stick that has been hardened in a fire. I’m not quite sure what to
make of that. Did Fitzgerald mean that Hemingway was really tough or that he had been burned and became brittle as a result? Food for thought.
5. In 1936, Hemingway told Archibald MacLeish that he would never kill himself because of what the trauma might do to his sons. While we can all comment on that one and how he was not true to that narrative, I have to say that by the time he did kill himself, he was debilitated after electric
shock treatments and ongoing mental health/depressive issues.
So, we will all have to read the book to get more of the details.
Best,
Christine