HAVANA--Ernest Hemingway's house in Cuba seems like such a healthy place. It is light, welcoming and beautifully situated. There are hundreds of his books lining the shelves, testimony to all the reading he did there. There's a baseball diamond nearby where he used to pitch to local boys.
Yet Hemingway was not a healthy man during the latter phases in his life. He was drunk much of the time; he often began drinking at breakfast, and his brother counted 17 Scotch-and-sodas in a day. His wives complained that he was sporadic about bathing. He was obsessed with his weight and recorded it on the wall of his house.
He could be lively and funny, the organizer of exciting adventures. But he could also be depressed, combative and demoralized. His ego overflowed. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who endured a psychological crisis at about the same time, observed that Hemingway "is quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy."
Even as a young man Hemingway exaggerated his (already prodigious) exploits in order to establish his manliness. When he was older his prima donna proclivities could make him, as one visiting photographer put it, "crazy," "drunk" and "berserk."
He was a prisoner of his own celebrity. He'd become famous at 25 and by middle age he was often just playing at being Ernest Hemingway. The poet David Whyte has written that work "is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself ... losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation." Hemingway seems to have lost track of his own authentic voice in the midst of the public persona he'd created.
His misogyny was also like a cancer that ate out his insides. He was an extremely sensitive man, who suffered much from the merest slights, but was also an extremely dominating, cruel and self-indulgent one who judged his wives harshly, slapped them when angry and forced them to bear all the known forms of disloyalty.
By this time, much of his writing rang false. Reviewer after reviewer said he had destroyed his own talent. His former mentor Gertrude Stein said he was a coward.
Yet there were moments, even amid the wreckage, when he could rediscover something authentic. Even at these late phases he could write books like For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea and passages like some in To Have and Have Not and Islands in the Stream that remain loved and celebrated today.
This is a process that we might call "getting to zero," when an artist--or anyone--digs through all the sap that gets encrusted around a career or relationship and retouches the intrinsic impulse that got him or her into it in the first place. Hemingway's career got over-layered by money, persona and fame, but sometimes even at this late stage he was able to reconnect with the young man's directness that produced his early best work.
When you see how he did it, three things leap out. The first is the most mundane--the daily disciplines of the job. In the house, there is a small bed where he laid out his notes and a narrow shelf where he stood, stared at a blank wall and churned out his daily word count. Sometimes it seems to have been the structure of concrete behavior--the professional routines--that served as a lifeline when all else was crumbling.
Second, there seem to have been moments of self-forgetting. Dorothy Sayers has an essay in which she notes it's fashionable to say you do your work to serve the community. But if you do any line of work for the community, she argues, you'll end up falsifying your work, because you'll be angling it for applause. You'll feel people owe you something for your work. But if you just try to serve the work--focusing on each concrete task and doing it the way it's supposed to be done--then you'll end up, obliquely, serving the community more. Sometimes the only way to be good at a job is to lose the self-consciousness embedded in the question, "How'm I doing?"
Finally, there was the act of cutting out. When Hemingway was successful, he cut out his mannerisms and self-pity. Then in middle age, out of softness, laziness and self-approval, he indulged himself. But even then, even amid all the corruption, he had flashes when he could distinguish his own bluster from the good, true notes.
There is something heroic that happened in this house. Hemingway was a man who embraced every self-indulgence that can afflict a successful person. But at moments he shed all that he had earned and received, and rediscovered the hardworking, clear-seeing and unadorned man he used to be.
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David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.
Editorial on 04/27/2016