Papa Hemingway (42 page)

Shortly afterward the small plane had begun to develop engine trouble and had had to be landed at Casper, Wyoming. On leaving the plane, Ernest had tried to walk into a moving propeller, but Don had had him by the arm and pushed himself between Ernest and the propeller, although in so doing Ernest had almost inadvertently bumped Don into the whirling prop.

It had taken a couple of hours to repair the plane, but Ernest had seemed quiet until they were on their way again; then over South Dakota, having feigned sleep for an hour, he had made a second attempt to jump out of the plane.

Mayo doctors were waiting for them when they landed in Rochester, and Ernest, who was now docile and greeted the doctors like old friends, was immediately taken to St. Mary's, where he was placed in a special security section and put under constant surveillance.

"You know the date?" I asked.

"The twenty-fifth, isn't it?"

"Yes, almost three months to the day since they discharged him."

"Not a very long cure, was it?"

The first week in May, I went to see Cooper for the last time. During February and March on his good days, he continued to enjoy life the way he always had. One afternoon he had invited me to his splendid modern house on Baroda Drive to witness in the garden a spectacular demonstration by five karate experts. And there were occasional dinner parties at the Coopers', when old-time friends would carry on as if Cooper were perfectly all right.

But by April the pain and ravages of the cancer had finally knocked him down for keeps, and when I went to see him that afternoon in May he was a wasted figure, lying immobile in his darkened room. His hair was gray-streaked where the dye had left it. His wife took me into the room, then left us alone.

"Papa phoned a couple weeks ago." He paused between words, because it was very painful for him to speak. "Told me he was sick, too. I bet him that I will beat him out to the barn." He smiled and closed his eyes and seemed to doze off. "Heard on the radio he was back at Mayo's." The eyes flickered open. "That right?"

"Yes."

"Poor Papa." His eyes shut again but he seemed to be listening as I told him how the hunting had been the previous season in Ketchum and related little gossips about people he knew there.

He was hit by a big pain and his face contorted as he fought it off; sweat instantly covered his face. When the pain had passed, Cooper reached his hand over to the bed table and picked up a crucifix, which he put on the pillow beside his head.

"Please give Papa a message. It's important and you mustn't forget because I'll not be talking to him again. Tell him . . . that time I wondered if I made the right decision"—he moved the crucifix a little closer so that it touched his cheek—"tell him it was the best thing I ever did."

"I'll tell him."

"Don't forget."

"Don't worry, Coops, I'll tell him."

He died ten days later.

This time the Mayo doctors had advised Mary not to go to Rochester. They thought it would be better for Ernest if he were cut off from all contact with the outside world. So Mary stayed in Ketchum and kept in touch with the doctors by telephone.

Two weeks after Ernest had entered the hospital Mary telephoned me in New York. "I have a letter from Papa, the first I've received. Long letter, the handwriting pretty good, much more lucid than he's been for a long time. But still harping on our lack of finances—and presenting me with a new worry which, do forgive me, I have to share with you. Poor Hotch. Papa writes he has to buy clothes—of course I filled his Val-pack with everything he could possibly need—and then he says, 'Also I should start working and want to be out of here the soonest I can.'"

"Do you think the doctors read that letter before he sent it?"

"I don't know, but I wrote back telling him all the local news and all that, and then I said, 'Please don't con your friends there into letting you come home until they are absolutely sure your cure is complete because neither of us wants a repetition of the last three months of hell we spent in Ketchum.' But, Hotch, I worry that he'll do just that. And then I worry that that may not have been the proper thing to write him. You know how direct I am. But for all I know, by writing to Papa like that he may turn the persecution convictions against me. So far I've been spared that."

"I can see that the direct approach may not be the best, but we don't know what approach the doctors are taking."

"That's it. Well, what I wanted to ask you is if you could talk to Dr. Renown about this. I hate taking your time, also worrying you. But being totally ignorant of the whole subject, I have nothing to guide me. I also worry that Papa is not being taken deep enough into the causes of all his aberrations. The first time at Mayo's, I think the doctors did disabuse Papa of his immediate hallucinations, but aren't there deeper things that have to be touched? I don't even know what electric shock is supposed to achieve."

"Are they giving shock again?"

"The last time I spoke to the doctors they said they were going to start a series of them. But I don't even know how many that would be. What alarms me, though, is his talk about returning home. One thing I am sure of is that a repetition of the last three months would destroy me in one way or another. That isn't a threat; it's just a fact. So I just wondered if you could go to see Dr. Renown and ask his advice. For me to do it on the phone, he not knowing me, seems an awkward way of getting at this problem. Maybe we should make a new attempt at transferring Papa to Menninger's. Perhaps you could ask Dr. Renown about that, too."

As a result of my subsequent meeting with Dr. Renown, I learned something about Ernest's condition. Dr. Renown first spoke in a general way about obsessions and delusions and explained that very little was definitely known about the interrelationships of various symptoms—obsession, phobia, depression, delusion, depersonalization, anxiety and others—and the various shifts of emphasis that may make one more prominent today and another, tomorrow; but that the classic symptomatic digression is from obsession to delusion. An obsession is an idea that obtrudes itself on the psyche. The person is aware of its lack of logical basis and regards it as alien to his ego or self, but he succumbs to it in order to avoid the anxiety that he experiences if he challenges or ignores it. A delusion, Dr. Renown went on to explain, is a false belief that is impervious to logical and factual demonstration of its falsity. In some instances, he pointed out, this fine line is crossed in one way and then in the other; thus there may be obsessional behavior in one area and delusional in another.

Applying this general background to Ernest's specific behavior, Dr. Renown said that the previous October in Madrid, Ernest's anxieties over his excess baggage and keeping his name off the manifest and taking a slow, old airplane to avoid detection, were all obsessions. But his later anxieties that his phone was bugged and that the Feds wanted to arrest him for impairing the morals of a minor and for not paying nonexistent taxes, were delusions. His obsessions could be dispelled by insistent logic, as witness our eventual hard-won triumph over the excess luggage anxiety. But these obsessions had hardened into delusions and no amount of persuasive logic or evidence could now have any effect on Ernest. The obsession had surrounded itself with an impregnable shell, and the fact that that delusion-shell was impenetrable necessitated the use of electrical treatment.

As for the electrical treatments themselves, Dr. Renown said that ECT (Electro Convulsive Treatment) was a concept that was now obsolete. He explained that in modern treatment the patient receives an injection that puts him to sleep, thereby eliminating the convulsion that was characteristic of the early use of shock. That once terrifying experience is now no more than an awareness of the injection, then oblivion until the patient wakens a few hours later, when he may or may not have a headache. A patient usually shows some response to three or four treatments, then the series of ten to twelve is completed in order to "fix" the improvement, although it may be necessary to extend the number to as many as twenty. If improvement is sustained a week or two after the completion of the series, the prognosis is good. If there is indication of relapse, a treatment a week may be given for several weeks, often with very good results.

I asked Dr. Renown whether the electrical impulses were directed to a particular part of the brain. He said there are fifty organic and fifty psychodynamic theories to explain how electrical treatments are effectual, which is, of course, a comment on our ignorance. We use many treatments in medicine, he said, that we are unable to explain: digitalis in heart failure; insulin in diabetes. We know only that they work. The electrical treatments are applied by placing the electrodes on each temple and the entire brain is affected. No one knows where memory is stored but it probably is closely related to molecular chemistry of the cells.

I asked him about Ernest's complaints that the shock doctors were ruining his memory. He said that the two most prominent side effects of electrical treatments, loss of memory and confusion, both disappear in a short time. It is true, he said, that details of illness and hospitalization may never be recovered to memory—this could be a function of the treatment or of the illness, but he felt that such details were not important anyway. But he was very definite that all facts and experiences that predate the illness become as available as ever, once the treatments have ended.

Dr. Renown speculated that Ernest's fears of impoverishment and of being in jeopardy physically and legally were probably related to his feelings of impoverishment as a writer, with attendant jeopardy of his identity and stature. His psychopatho-logical symptoms, Dr. Renown thought, were a defense against recognizing this. They were so dominant that he was not accessible to psychotherapy until they could be neutralized by the electrical treatments.

During the month of May, Ernest received a number of electrical treatments. When they were completed toward the end of the month, Mary was permitted to visit him for three days. She reported that Ernest was even more infuriated with these treatments than the previous ones, registering even bitterer complaints about how his memory was wrecked and how he was ruined as a writer and putting the blame for all this on the Mayo doctors, who had finally acceded to his demands that they stop giving him the ECT's. At the heart of this conflict between Ernest and his doctors was the fact that he would not admit that he had a condition that needed such drastic treatment. Apparently the doctors had not yet been able to make him face up to the magnitude of his problem.

He did not talk to Mary any more about killing himself and, in fact, firmly stated that he was all over thinking about suicide, but the delusions remained the same. By now they had broadened to include hostility against Vernon Lord and against Mary herself. The first night she was there he accused her of having dragged him to Mayo's to get hold of his money. But the following day he was loving and appreciative toward her. His moods oscillated wildly. He had developed a new delusion which had turned him against Ketchum: he could not possibly go back there because they were lying in wait to nab him and throw him into jail for not paying state taxes, and he accused Mary of secretly working with them and maneuvering him into going back there so they could nail him.

"How can we persuade him to have the treatment that he feels isn't necessary?" Mary asked. "How can we make him see the extent of his problem, to admit that he even has one, so the Mayo doctors can work on it? They don't seem to be able to make him realize why shock is necessary. Maybe we could. And seeing him there, all cooped up, never allowed out without an escort, was terrible. Poor darling. Isn't there some place where he could be outdoors? You know how Papa loves the out of doors. He talked about going abroad, even wiring friends in Spain and France, so maybe he'd go to a clinic in Switzerland or somewhere like that. It's so confusing seeing him there needing help, the help all around him, but not getting through to him. There must be a way."

Ernest's mind seemed to have constructed an intolerable prison from which there was no escape; projecting from the reality that he could never return to his house in Havana, delusion had built three other walls: he could not stay in Rochester for they were ruining his memory; he could not go to his apartment in New York for they would nab him for having impaired the morals of a minor who lived in that city; he could not go to Ketchum for they would get him for state taxes.

About the same time that Ernest was permitted to see Mary, he was allowed, by prearranged appointment, a few monitored telephone talks with me. He must have known they were monitored, for there were very few references that involved his delusions and even those were oblique.

What he was mostly concerned about in those talks was a sudden and new compulsion to have a motion picture made of
Across the River and into the Trees.
For ten years he had turned down all picture offers for the book, the most persistent of which came from Jerry Wald, and on one occasion he had returned a fifty-thousand-dollar option check from Columbia Pictures. It's true that he had agreed to let Cooper do it, but that was a gesture of accommodation rather than desire. Now, however, it was a vital matter. He wanted to know who I thought could play the role of fifty-year-old Colonel Cantwell. He asked about an actor, whose name he couldn't recall, who lived in Switzerland and who had been proposed by Jerry Wald for the part. I identified the actor. He said that was exactly who should
not
play the colonel. He then tried to think of two other actors who he thought
could
play the part but could not recall their names either, and he raged out at what they had done to his memory.