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140
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2017
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Publié par
Date de parution
18 avril 2017
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781611177435
Langue
English
A forensic psychiatrist's corrective and innovative diagnosis of the conditions that led to Ernest Hemingway's suicide
Hemingway's Brain is an innovative biography and the first forensic psychiatric examination of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway. After committing seventeen years to researching Hemingway's life and medical history, Andrew Farah, a forensic psychiatrist, has concluded that the writer's diagnoses were incorrect. Contrary to the commonly accepted diagnoses of bipolar disorder and alcoholism, Farah provides a comprehensive explanation of the medical conditions that led to Hemingway's suicide.
Hemingway received state-of-the-art psychiatric treatment at one of the nation's finest medical institutes, but according to Farah it was for the wrong illness. Hemingway's death was not the result of medical mismanagement, but medical misunderstanding. Farah argues that despite popular mythology Hemingway was not manic-depressive and his alcohol abuse and characteristic narcissism were simply pieces of a much larger puzzle. Through a thorough examination of biographies, letters, memoirs of friends and family, and even Hemingway's FBI file, combined with recent insights on the effects of trauma on the brain, Farah pieces together this compelling, alternative narrative of Hemingway's illness, one that has been missing from the scholarship for too long.
Though Hemingway's life has been researched extensively and many biographies written, those authors relied on the original diagnoses and turned to psychoanalysis and conjecture regarding Hemingway's mental state. Through his research Farah has sought to understand why Hemingway's decline accelerated after two courses of electroconvulsive therapy and in this volume explains which current options might benefit a similar patient today. Hemingway's Brain provides a full and accurate accounting of this psychiatric diagnosis by exploring the genetic influences, traumatic brain injuries, and neurological and psychological forces that resulted in what many have described as his tortured final years. It aims to eliminate the confusion and define for all future scholarship the specifics of the mental illnesses that shaped legendary literary works and destroyed the life of a master.
Publié par
Date de parution
18 avril 2017
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781611177435
Langue
English
Hemingway’s Brain
Hemingway’s
Brain
Andrew Farah
THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
© 2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 26 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-742-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-743-5 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: Ernest Hemingway on the steps of his house, Cuba, 1954, by Tore Johnson/Magnum Photos.
For Priscilla Farah
It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard, Journals (1843)
This may be wrong and I would be glad to have anyone disprove the theory as what we want is knowledge, not the pride of proving something to be true.
Ernest Hemingway, “Out in the Stream: A Cuban Letter” (1934)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 .
Inheritance
2 .
Trauma Artist
3 .
Giant Killer
4 .
Dementia, Disinhibition, and Delusion
5 .
Free Fall
6 .
Stigma
7 .
Mayo
8 .
The Body Electric
9 .
Working Man
10 .
A Moveable Feast
11 .
Alone
12 .
Modern Times
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
following page 70
The newborn Ernest Miller Hemingway
Hemingway family photo from 1906
Hemingway, pictured in his Milan hospital bed
Wedding photo, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson
Artistic nude of Hadley
Pauline, Hemingway’s second wife
Hadley and Pauline, likely in Schruns
Hemingway, scarred from his skylight accident
Hemingway with an unknown woman, likely Debba
Ernest on safari in 1954, “going native”
Hemingway, Robert Capa, and their driver
Ernest photographed by Yousuf Karsh
The first of two African plane crashes
Hemingway recovering after his Africa plane crashes
Mary Hemingway and Castro during 1977
Gianfranco and Adriana Ivancich pictured in Cuba
Ernest and Adriana in a lighthearted moment
The Farm , by Joan Miró
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint passages from Rose Marie Burwell’s Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1996); to Simon and Schuster and Penguin Random House UK for permission to reprint passages from A Movable Feast (Scribner’s, 1964), Across the River and into the Trees (Scribner’s, 1950), The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Scribner’s, 1987), In Our Time (Scribner’s, 1930), Carlos Baker’s Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (Scribner’s 1981), and Carlos Baker’s Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (Scribner’s, 1969); to Dover Publications for permission to reprint from Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Dover, 1977); to W. W. Norton for permission to reprint from Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway Women (W. W. Norton, 1983); to the Hemingway Society for permission to use excerpts from an unpublished letter; to Roxann Livingston for permission to use a photograph by Earl Theisen; to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., for access to information regarding The Farm by Joan Miró that led me to the Artists Rights Society, which granted permission to use the art; and to the dedicated and kind staff of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum for access to letters, documents, and images in the Ernest Hemingway Collection.
Introduction
On July 2, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway rose quietly so as not to disturb his wife. He put on his bathrobe and slippers, walked down to the basement of his Idaho home, and unlocked his gun case. He climbed the steps to his foyer, placed his favorite shotgun to the roof of his mouth, and blew the top of his head off.
Many of those who have never read a Hemingway novel or biography still know the details of this tragedy. His suicide may even be the most famous in American history, competing with those of Marilyn Monroe and Robin Williams for this tragic distinction. He shot himself only six days after his discharge from the Mayo Clinic, where he had been hospitalized twice. The primary goal of his treatment at Mayo for severe depression and psychosis was to prevent this exact scenario. Yet his death was the result not of medical mismanagement but of medical misunderstanding. Hemingway received state-of-the-art psychiatric treatment in 1960 and 1961, but for the wrong illness.
This book is the first comprehensive and accurate accounting of the psychiatric diagnoses that led to the demise of Ernest Miller Hemingway. Thus, Hemingway’s Brain 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. The method of the forensic psychiatrist is to carefully review all medical records, study any other relevant information available (usually in the form of depositions), and, if possible, interview the subject himself. Even though the subject is America’s quintessential writer, the medical chart is still closed and confidential. When his Mayo psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Rome, was approached at professional meetings by colleagues who asked, “Weren’t you Hemingway’s doctor?,” Dr. Rome was known to always lift an index finger to his lips, indicating that they were forever sealed. He was an ethical clinician who maintained patient confidentiality for the rest of his life
Fortunately for this study, there is no shortage of collateral information. We have numerous biographies, Hemingway’s extensive catalogue of personal letters, the memoirs of friends and family, and even an FBI file on our patient. With all of this data, it is possible to piece together a narrative of neurological and psychiatric illnesses that were progressing for years. This specific analysis has been missing from the scholarship for too long. Indeed, no scholarship can be complete without integrating these insights, as Hemingway’s illnesses informed his relationships, his day-today life, and the last two decades of his creative output. One theme that will become apparent as the reader progresses through Hemingway’s Brain is that marvelous literature was still possible despite Hemingway’s cognitive decline, his anxieties, and even his psychosis. His late-life struggle was made particularly difficult by his acute awareness of his declining mental capacities. His sensitivity and his ability to “notice everything,” which were key to his creative genius, were by then fueling his torment.
His neurological and psychiatric conditions began years before the sixty-one-year-old stood at his worktable shuffling papers, unable to write the one sentence asked of him for a volume of wellwishes to be presented to President Kennedy. He had been delighted to receive the telegram inviting him to the inauguration but declined for the very health reasons that left him frustrated and frozen as he stared at the blank pages. The illness began with specific, inherited genes from both sides of his family. It was developing as the young ambulance driver lay unconscious in the mud of the Italian front during World War I, and continued to germinate with the slow poison of thousands of cocktails. His pathology was the result of the coalescing of genetic codes with trauma, untreated hypertension, diabetes, and lifestyle choices. And when his psychiatric illness was fully manifest, it eluded the finest doctors of his day.
Modern scans and testing would leave no doubt regarding the specifics of his diagnosis, and there are numerous treatment options available now that were not even theoretical in 1960. Even if he had received the correct diagnosis, there were few therapies available—but still, there were a few.
Though many excellent biographies of Hemingway have been written and his life has been extensively researched, no biographer to date has been able to make an accurate diagnosis, nor could one be expected to, without training and experience in the practice in neurology and psychiatry. Not until Verna Kale's 2016 Hemingway biography, the first by a woman, did any author consider that concussive injuries might have been a factor in his demise. What scholars instead have turned to, by default and out of sheer fascination, is psychoanalysis. Thus, there is no shortage of conjecture along psychoanalytical lines regarding Hemingway’s mental state, with his fiction and many of his utterances, indeed, his very predictions of his demise, serving as a diffuse array of suicide notes to be mined for nuggets. Even as a young newlywed on the way to Paris with his bride he contemplated jumping into the wake of the steamer somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, leaving behind only the mystery of his disappearance. His first major work, In Our Time , published when he was in his twenty-sixth year, is the usual starting point for psychoanalysis of his life through his fiction.
In the story “Indian Camp” (1924), he wrote of a country doctor modeled on his own physician father and of his young son, obviously a reflection of the young Ernest, as they are summoned to a difficult delivery. A Native A
