Avi Selk at the Washington
Post offers a piece on a new book about Ernest Hemingway’s head injuries.
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.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
Note: Paul Newman, in the center of the above photo, portrayed the "battler," the brain-damaged former boxer, in Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man.
The Battler and The Killers are two of my favorite Hemingway short stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment