Now that we’ve fetishised the terms, it seems that all the great artists of the past were queer, left-handed epileptics. Or, because we’ve invented the terms, they were all bi-polar, œdipal narcoleptics. Usw.
However, since his life time fell within our own era of pseudo-psycho-science, it can be truly and honestly said that Ernest Hemingway was indeed depressed. He was principally depressed about two things in particular. Women and America. And these two things were connected.
The thing that depressed Ernest most about America was its obsession with motoring. And the thing that depressed him most about American motoring was the newly-invented freeway. And the thing that depressed him most about freeways was the fact that, to ride on some of them, you had to pay. For Ernest, this last cultural fact became an obsession, to the point of absolute clinical paranoia — there’s another one — because it robbed him of the one woman he believed could make him truly happy and content in life.
In the 1910s and early 1920s, he had to travel to work each day via a short tollway into the centre of Chicago where he worked as a journalist. He hated this trip above all horrors that might come his way in the course of a working day. Rising fascism, the Ku Klux Klan, even the Republican Party could not get his guts to grumble so much as that daily stop at the toll booth where a hideous little toothless man, disfigured beyond all possible human proportions, collected his 5¢, Monday to Friday, week in, week out. This dwarf came to stand in young Ernest’s over-developed literary imagination for all that was ugly about America. He had bad dreams in which he fought him, bare chested, man to dwarf, but never came off victorious.
Then, one bright July day, the man was gone. He’d been replaced by the most gorgeous, stunning red-haired woman Ernest had ever seen. Officially, Ernest was “in love” with Hadley Richardson, also a beautiful red-head whom he would later marry. Literary history’s page, so far, does not record how much woe Ernest actually felt. Skipping to Paris to marry Hadley seemed to all those who knew him like his dream. And all the biographies concur. Yet he carried a secret candle, all those years, for the beautiful woman who now took his nickel on the way to work. She, it appeared to him, in his deepest, unspeakable, heart of hearts, could transform his twin depressions about America and women in a single moment of joy. But he was never to have her despite the protestations of his intimate friend Sherwood Anderson.
It is only now, in the final months of 2010, that Anderson’s personal journals have come to light and the truth can be known. For Anderson recorded their private conversations in his diary and the entries for this period show nothing other than an utter idée fixe with the mysterious redhead in the booth.
Summarising, Hemingway speaks of his true love but also of his prior commitment to Richardson which, as a man of honour, he could not break. Anderson, by contrast, speaks of Ernest’s obligations to his own heart. But the most frequent topic of their conversations was Hemingway’s fear that “she” (for she is never named) would be already be promised to another. And what chance would he have to discover the truth during their necessarily brief conversations? The dilemma perplexed him to the core; while Anderson urged him, regardless of her status, to press his suit.
Anderson, as I’ve already made known, failed. Hemingway was to be abjectly miserable for the rest of his days. His friend’s final words on the subject, recorded just before Hemingway and Richardson’s departure, must have stayed with him until, and perhaps were partly the key to, his death by suicide: “Ask not for whom the toll belle is, the toll belle is for thee”.
