Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on Courage)

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated."—Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

(After a slew of biographies, it’s more apparent than ever that Hemingway—born on this date in 1899—experienced the fight of his life not on the battlefield or in the boxing ring, but within a psyche weakened by genetic inheritance, his own machismo-driven attempts to live up to past exploits, and the primitive psychiatric treatment of the time. Take a look at that family predisposition toward suicide, one that claimed first his father, then his brother and a sister, then granddaughter Margaux. Even his son Gregory, who underwent a sex change operation in his final years, was afflicted with depression and died of natural causes in a jail after being arrested for indecent exposure. Is it any wonder, given these multiple tragedies, that the Nobel laureate also took his life?

Michael Reynolds’ excellent biography, Hemingway: The Final Years, chronicles the mounting damage in the last two decades of his subject’s life: several concussions during the war; two plane crashes on a single trip to Africa, with the second leaving him with a ruptured kidney, a sprained arm and leg, crushed vertebrae, a paralyzed sphincter, a burnt scalp and the temporary loss of hearing and eyesight; and excessive drinking. The plane crash led to high blood pressure, whose treatment necessitated a drug with depression as a side effect. In turn, the shock treatment he received to alleviate the depression left him with memory loss, a devastating deficit for a writer heavily dependent on sensory experience. His suicide in 1961 occurred on the first day after returning from his 36th shock treatment. Just think—today it could all be handled with Prozac or a similar anti-depressive.

I love this quote for the day because it illustrates the aspect of his work that I find continually compelling: his celebration of proud, unbowed losers, such as the fisherman hero of The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago. Within this circle of the destroyed-but-undefeated, we must count the novelist himself. After his death, a number of people chortled that the “Papa” who extolled “grace under pressure” could not face it himself. All such comments reveal is ignorance of what a devastating disease depression can be. The marvel is that, with his tangled family history and his increasingly grave physical ailments, Hemingway stuck to his craft for as long as he did, by force of will and self-discipline.)