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4. Depression, Drink, and Dissipation: Dysfunctional Lifestyles and Art as the Ultimate Stimulant
- University of Illinois Press
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4 Depression, Drink, and Dissipation Dysfunctional Lifestyles and Art as the Ultimate Stimulant “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” —Rudyard Kipling There is a photograph of an aging “Papa” Hemingway at the height of his fame—bulky, puffy faced, his hair combed over his balding forehead, hoisting a bottle of Spanish wine to his lips at a bullfight in the summer of 1959. Hemingway had gone to Pamplona to relive the glory days of his youth that provided the setting for the critically acclaimed The Sun Also Rises. In the 1926 novel, drink played a vital role for the collection of expatriate friends who form the social circle in which Hemingway sets his psychological drama. Alcohol acts as an aphrodisiac, an energy stimulator, and a truth serum for the expatriates, fueling their partying, their sexual exploits, their repartee, and their witty but often ugly honesty with each other. After the book was published, young people and college students all over America were infatuated with it, and took to imitating the style, the mannerisms, the dialogue—and the drinking—of Hemingway’s characters.1 Hemingway’s romanticizing of drinking in the most celebrated novel of his youth provides a tragic counterpoint to the story of his last years—that of a depressed and despairing writer suffering from alcoholic psychosis, trying vainly to rediscover his lost talent, and ultimately committing suicide when he found himself unable to cope with the collapse of his body and mind. The biggest burden for the aging Hemingway (who made a series of secret trips to the Mayo Clinic where he unsuccessfully sought help) was to maintain the Hemingway myth—of machoism, of risk-taking, of the pursuit of danger and excitement, of hedonism and living for the day, of the worship of vitality and youth—against the reality of a burned-out life. An existence undermined by the very drinking that he so celebrated is demonstrated by the list of ailments he suffered in his waning years: paranoia and psychological disassociation, major depression, morbid anxiety, cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease, high blood urea, edema of the ankles, cramps, chronic sleeplessness, episodes of sexual impotence, disfiguring skin problems, and obsession with suicide. As early as 1936, when he was in his mid-thirties, Hemingway—faced with a serious depression after many critics panned Green Hills of Africa—confessed that he thought he was “facing impotence, inability to write, insomnia and was going to blow my lousy head off.” When older, he was said to be “merrier, more lovable, more bullshitty” while drunk; otherwise, he was “morose, silent, depressed.”2 Hemingway was in the front row of a gallery of journalist-literary figures who have battled the bottle and/or drugs, struggled with depression and psychological episodes, and often lived lives of incredible dissipation and sexual self-indulgence. Drinking and drugs often were used to ease the pain of psychological distress and mask the symptoms that can grow out of traumatic experiences; sexual antics and other compulsive behaviors compensated for feelings of inadequacy mixed with narcissistic self-images and grandiose delusions. Art itself can serve as the ultimate stimulant and an escape mechanism for those trying to deal with inner turbulence. Depression , in particular, with its painful experience of a loss of meaning in life, combined with the adoption of manic defenses as a way to stimulate oneself out of low moods and to deal with the anxiety that depression always lurked behind life’s ordinary events, has provoked many artists into embracing the intensity of writing as a method for restoring and retaining emotional equilibrium, no matter how fragile or short-lived. (“What a born melancholic I am!,” Virginia Woolf declared at one point. “The only way I keep afloat is by working.”) Still, psychologists have noted that any singular activity pursued with great fervor can prove to have an unbalancing impact on a healthy psychological foundation, and literary achievement often came as compensation for unhealed emotions and broken lives. As Graham Greene, one of the legendary drinkers, drug takers, and womanizers among the journalist-literary figures, put it: “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.”3 162 . chapter 4 [54.226.222.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:27 GMT) For many of the literary figures in...