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Summary
Summary
From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood.
Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961--from Hemingway's pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide--Paul Hendrickson traces the writer's exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar .
We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities.
Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway's sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer's boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity--to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend.
We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a cross-dresser, and died squalidly and alone in a Miami women's jail. He was the son Hemingway forsook the least, yet the one who disappointed him the most, as Gigi acted out for nearly his whole life so many of the tortured, ambiguous tensions his father felt. Hendrickson's bold and beautiful book strikingly makes the case that both men were braver than we know, struggling all their lives against the complicated, powerful emotions swirling around them. As Hendrickson writes, "Amid so much ruin, still the beauty."
Hemingway's Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.
Author Notes
Paul Hendrickson, a prizewinning feature writer for the Washington Post, is on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. He has degrees in American literature from St. Louis University and Penn State.
Hendrickson's books are Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award); The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (finalist for the National Book Award in 1996); and Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
NBCC-award winner Hendrickson (Sons of Mississippi) offers an admirably absorbing, important, and moving interpretation of Hemingway's ambitions, passions, and tragedies during the last 27 years of his life. When Hemingway purchased the sleek fishing boat Pilar in 1934, he was on the cusp of literary celebrity, flush with good health, and ebullient about pursuing deep sea adventures. The release from his desk was a reward for productive writing and the change replenished his creative energy. But eventually Hemingway's health and work declined. When he committed suicide in 1961, he hadn't been aboard the Pilar in many months. Acutely sensitive to his subject's volatile, "gratuitously mean" personality, Hendrickson offers fascinating details and sheds new light on Hemingway's kinder, more generous side from interviews with people befriended by Hemingway in his prime. Most importantly, Hendrickson interviewed each of Hemingway's sons. He suggests, not for the first time but with poignant detail, the probability that Papa's youngest son, Gregory (Gigi), a compulsive cross-dresser who eventually had gender-altering surgery, was acting out impulses that his father yearned for yet denied. Hendrickson makes new connections between ex-wife Pauline's sudden death after Hemingway's cruel accusations against Gigi, and Gigi's lifelong guilt over her death. In the end, Hendrickson writes of the tormented Gigi and his conflicted father, "I consider them far braver than we ever knew." 23 illus. (Sept. 23) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In previous, riveting books about Robert McNamara (The Living and the Dead, 1996) and civil-rights-era murder (Sons of Mississippi, 2003), Hendrickson peered into the intersection of melancholy and history. The story of Ernest Hemingway offers more of that, in spades. Less a biography than a deeply reported, achingly considered meditative essay, Hemingway's Boat covers a vast amount of territory in the life of the mythic, difficult-to-understand Papa, all of it coming back in some way to Hemingway's beloved 38-foot, two-engine, ocean-plying Pilar. Fishing, fatherhood, manhood, writing, the infinite pull of the Gulf Stream these constitute only the starting point of Hendrickson's sympathetic, illuminating wanderings. To him, the Pilar represents the nexus of Hemingway's outsize, complicated, and sad yearnings, personal relationships, and many losses, none perhaps as poignant as the volatile chasm between Hemingway and his youngest, gender-confused son, Gregory. Hendrickson has previously profiled the three Hemingway sons. In returning to this much-traveled country, he tracks down overlooked voices and continues a personal quest. Of fishing, a young Hemingway wrote. It's not the duration of sensation but its intensity that counts. Hendrickson's book is filled with intensity, humanity, and more.--Paul, Stev. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still. Here he is in a letter to his mother, July 1924, describing the San Fermín bullfighting festival in Pamplona, Spain: "It is a purely Spanish festa ... and there are practically no foreigners." Two years later he published a novel set in Pamplona, and from that moment on his letter's description of a sleepy town would never hold true again. The 2012 college grad who will be gored running with the bulls in Pamplona next July, and the thousands of others safely drinking too much behind the barriers, are all living out the fantasies of one man. That man seems to hold our interest, and inspire imitation, in ways other writers don't. His personality and his travels continue to fascinate as much as, and perhaps more than, his fiction. A broad Gulf Stream of books about him flows on and on, year after year, leaving him, I fear, more read about than read. This abiding interese in the man, as opposed to his books, has three causes: the undeniably adventurous and outsize details of his tragic life; his intentional cultivation of celebrity (and the resulting mountain of documentary records); and the fact that he wrote fiction so closely tied to the actual places, people and details of his life. We feel we know him because we have read his stories of protagonists very much like him doing things he actually did in places he really lived with characters very much like his family and friends. This is unfortunate, though, because it kills - or at least weakens - the power of his fiction, limits how we think of it. We start to read it small, view it as merely well-pruned memoir. It becomes an illustration of his life ("Oh, that character's really his first wife"), when of course the best of his fiction is unique because it is not just one man's story. It is great art because of its range of possible meanings and effects. His finest fiction is vast, universal, open to interpretation, changeable and debatable, intentionally opaque, impersonal. It is ours, not his. Three recent books in that tide of Hemingway iconography present different glimpses of him, and imply different relationships between his life and his art. "The Letters of Ernest Hemingway," covering the years 1907-22, is the first of more than a dozen planned volumes, collecting just about everything he ever wrote that was not meant for publication. And, to be clear, those of us who admire his fiction should take a moment to acknowledge that these letters were not intended for us. To his executors: "I hereby request and direct you not to publish, or consent to the publication by others, of any such letters." We are snooping. If you love the artist's work, if you respect what you think you know of the man, then you can honor his wishes and stop reading right here. On the other hand, Pauline, the second of his four wives, burned her share of the letters, and their son Patrick said of that decision: "At least she was logical. She didn't want her correspondence to be immortalized. That was the way to deal with it." The existence of some of these documents (predating Hemingway's fame) is close to a miracle, and "The Letters" is without question a spectacular scholarly achievement. Letters about boyhood fishing trips in Michigan that resemble his early Nick Adams stories; notes passed in class; brave and boastful letters home from the hospital in Italy after his wounding in World War I with descriptions of artillery that prefigure "A Farewell to Arms"; courtship letters to his first wife; gossipy letters from Paris describing the literary world he was discovering: these are extraordinary. From 1922, to Sherwood Anderson: "Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers. ... Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. ... I've been teaching Pound to box with little success." Sigh. But of course, complete means complete, and there is much here that is repetitive and dull, or merely cute. In 1907, after all, Papa Hemingway was 8. The little boy writes his father, in that honest, one-true-sentence Hem style: "I put sone fresh staw in flossys nest. All the squabs died." In other letters, he asks his mother permission to wear long pants, he orders some baseball posters, he thanks his grandfather for the ring-toss set. That storied beast, the general reader, may find his skimming finger getting itchy. And, too, the project's editorial precision can shade into the precious, even fetishistic: "Hemingway's occasionally uncrossed t's and undotted i's appear correctly without editorial comment." Besides honoring Hemingway's wish that we not read his letters, you might also want to stop because there is much not to like about the man as he reveals himself in his correspondence. He is, to be fair, still young even at the close of this volume, but a reader's wishful thinking struck me as I marked yet another occasion of casual racism and anti-Semitism, grudge-bearing and bullying, braggadocio and brutality: I began to hope the letter-obsessed young man (who is also sociable, funny, insightful, tender, hardworking, dutiful, ambitious, kind) might grow up to become some other man than the one I know is coming. The photo album "Hemingway: A Life in Pictures," assembled by a team including his granddaughter Mariel Hemingway, offers snapshots and portraits starting from his infancy (when his mother famously, and perhaps formatively, dressed him as a girl for six years) until shortly before his suicide in 1961. It also includes reproductions of passports, family baptism records, bullfight tickets, rough drafts of "A Moveable Feast" and military citations. (The biographer Scott Donaldson memorably described Hem as "one of the most decorated noncombatants in military history.") There are also letters to Hemingway, including the Dear John note ("Ernie, dear boy") from Agnes von Kurowsky, the nurse who broke his heart and thereby became a seed for some wickedly bitter short stories and "A Farewell to Arms." All of this is interesting precisely in proportion to how much Hemingway and his myth matter to you. For the editors of this collection, that mythic life has devoured and dissolved Hemingway's actual work almost entirely. On the one hand, they write in their introduction, "If we think that Ernest's writing is a simple transformation of his life story, we are mistaken." But they continually insist just the opposite, pleased to point out what they view as proof that his fiction is nonfiction, that it will tell us about the man himself and his relations with those around him. Of Hemingway's injury on the Italian front, they write: "There are contradictory ... accounts of what really happened. ... The most authentic version is undoubtedly that depicted in 'A Farewell to Arms' and stories." Really? The undoubted truth is not in eyewitness reports or military citations or Hemingway's own letters, but in work specifically labeled as fiction? This recurrent notion that one of the century's great novelists couldn't (or couldn't be bothered to) make stuff up is exemplified in their extraordinary caption to an extraordinary photo. A group of friends sits drinking at a table in Pamplona. "From left to right: Jake Barnes (Ernest ...), Brett Ashley (Lady Duff Twysden ...), Robert Cohn (Harold Loeb)." Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn are, of course, fictional characters in the novel "The Sun Also Rises." Ernest Hemingway, Lady Duff Twysden and Harold Loeb, drinking at the table in the photo, were real people. Hemingway brought this confusion upon himself. He certainly blurred the distinction between his life and his fiction. He shaped real people and events into stories, but he also explicitly said stories and memories were different. The fiction was meant to serve a larger purpose. It seems the life project of some scholars (and now even his granddaughter) is to shout him down, to remind us only to read his great works small. Also, for those who are into this sort of thing, "Hemingway: A Life in Pictures" has no lack of photos of him grinning next to animals he has just killed: rhinos, buffaloes, lions, marlin. Marlin and other deep-sea game - whined about, obsessively cataloged, literally machine-gunned - play a starring role in Paul Hendrickson's heartbreaking but peculiarly uneven semi-biography, "Hemingway's Boat." Superficially, the book can be summarized thus: Hemingway was not an absolute swine to absolutely everyone absolutely all of the time, but it was a close thing. Still, he suffered so much in his life that he should get credit for those occasions when he behaved decently. Also, he liked to fish, especially from his boat. And yet, though that is most of the book, it is the least important part. The title's two characters are not really what inspire Hendrickson's best writing. "Hemingway's Boat" includes some of the most moving, beautiful pieces of biography I have ever read, except - and, tempting though it may be, please don't omit this exception for publicity purposes - except when the book is discussing Ernest Hemingway and his boat. Hendrickson set out to write "far less a biography than ... an evocation, with other lives streaming in," and in this he has succeeded magnificently. Again and again, he wanders off the main path to research and write the biographies of people only tangential to Hemingway's life: his high school friends, museum naturalists, reporters, houseguests, fans, boat salesmen and, most movingly (and not tangentially), Gregory/Gloria, the writer's tormented third child. Hendrickson, the author of "Sons of Mississippi," reveals how people who knew him were affected by Hemingway, sometimes years after only a brief meeting with him, how his influence echoed on and on in ordinary people's lives. HENDRICKSON faults previous biographers for their lack of compassion, and his own store of it is seemingly bottomless. In the best of these streaming "other lives," he seems to become another writer. He leaves behind the Hemingwayesque mannerisms and strained connections that mar his writing about the novelist (and his boat), and instead his two strongest gifts - that compassion and his research and reporting prowess - combine to masterly effect. To take only the finest example of several brilliant pieces: In 1950, Walter Houk, a young American diplomat in Havana, accepted an invitation from his girlfriend to visit the house of her boss, the famous writer for whom she was a secretary. Hendrickson traces what resulted from this introduction to Hemingway: kindness, fishing trips, talks, a wedding banquet for the Houks given by the writer. Walter Houk went on to other things after his years of friendship with Hemingway: a marriage, a career spanning continents, compromises, family, retirement, widowhood, old age, creeping infirmity, Hendrickson's Houk embodies all the manly virtues Hemingway neglected. The diplomat is loyal, kind, satisfied, forgiving, self-effacing and self-sacrificing. Houk's loyalty extends especially to Hemingway, his host of decades before, whom Houk refuses to judge, despite Hem's undoubted personal failings, despite the clumsy pass he made at Houk's girlfriend. Decades after that friendship with Hemingway in Cuba, Hendrickson found Houk "on an ordinary street, in a tuckedaway corner of greater Los Angeles," befriended him, wrote his biography and folded it into this strange and often lovely book. As I followed the story of this decent man over the years, as he grew old and isolated in California, never forgetting his time with the writer 60 years before, I confess Hendrickson had me in tears. The bit player had stolen the scene. I had long since lost interest in the novelist and his boat, and cared only for the man who still liked him. Arthur Phillips is the author of five novels: "Prague," "The Egyptologist," "Angelica," "The Song Is You" and "The Tragedy of Arthur."
Choice Review
Writing in the first person, prize-winning nonfiction writer Paul Hendrickson (Univ. of Pennsylvania) offers a hefty, creatively told exploration of the last 27 years (1934-61) of Hemingway's life. He takes readers along as he travels and does extensive research into the archives and the inner lives of the Hemingway sons. His vehicle is the boat, primarily Hemingway's Pilar, the Cuban 38-foot love of his nautical life ("She'd been intimately his for 27 years," writes Hendrickson). This is a study of self-inflicted "ruin," a striving for "sainthood," and the "tensions unresolved in American males." Building the boat serves Hemingway as a metaphor for keeping his life and art intact and afloat. Hendrickson's innovative writing and approach make for a book that is both delightful and profound. Well documented and rich with Hemingway quotations, this is an indispensable resource for literary scholars. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. N. R. Fitch University of Southern California
Guardian Review
Hemingway's Boat is deeply idiosyncratic: it wanders everywhere and nowhere, beginning after his greatest artistic success in the 1920s, once The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms had made him rich and famous. As he turned to non-fiction travelogues, the critics began to turn as well. In order to buy his beloved fishing boat, Pilar, he began writing "letters" for Esquire magazine about fishing. Hendrickson never mentions that these shamelessly self-promoting letters also led to his critical decline, declaring: "Fuck all those critics who wouldn't accept him after 1930." As defences go, it's not very convincing. Hendrickson is a Hemingway aficionado to the point of being a stalker. He met and interviewed all of Hemingway's sons, he has fished the same streams, pored over the Pilar logbooks. The amount of research is stupefying - and sometimes so is the detail. However, he has a tremendous feel for Hemingway, as both writer and man, and his own writing is vivid and personal, if sometimes showy. - Sarah Churchwell Hemingway's Boat is deeply idiosyncratic: it wanders everywhere and nowhere, beginning after his greatest artistic success in the 1920s, once The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms had made him rich and famous. As he turned to non-fiction travelogues, the critics began to turn as well. - Sarah Churchwell.
Kirkus Review
A splendid view of Papa and his beloved boatPilar."You know you love the sea and would not be anywhere else," wrote Ernest Hemingway inIslands in the Stream. In 1934, already the "reigning monarch of American literature" forThe Sun Also RisesandA Farewell to Arms, he bought a 38-foot motorized fishing vessel at a Brooklyn boatyard and set out for the Caribbean. "Mr. H. is like a wild thing with his boat," wrote Pauline, his second wife. An integral part of his final 27 years,Pilaroffered afternoons of solace on waters between Key West and Cuba, during which Hemingway fished, drank, wrote, bickered with wives and sons and entertained visitors. A formerWashington Postfeature writer and winner of a National Book Critics Circle award, Hendrickson (Nonfiction Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania;Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, 2003, etc.) offers a moving, highly evocative account of Hemingway's turbulent later years, when he lost the favor of critics, the love of wives and friends and, ultimately, his ability to write. Drawing on interviews, documents (including 34Pilarlogs) and secondary sources, the author succeeds in restoring a sense of Hemingway the man, seen as a flawed, self-sabotaging individual whose kindness and gentleness have been overlooked in accounts of his cruel and boorish side. Even as he attacked critics and fired his shotgun angrily at sea birds, the tortured author proved remarkably sweet and friendly to many, including Arnold Samuelson, an admiring young writer who became Hemingway's assistant onPilar; and Walter Houk, now in his 80s, who remembers the author fondly as "a great man with great faults." Seven years in the making, this vivid portrait allows us to see Hemingway on thePilaronce again, standing on the flying bridge and guiding her out of the harbor at sunrise.Appearing on the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death, this beautifully written, nuanced meditation deserves a wide audience.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
From the trout streams of his youth to the Gulf Stream of his adult years, boats and water were a constant presence in Ernest Hemingway's journey. Hendrickson (Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy) takes a unique tack by framing the last 27 years of Hemingway's over-dissected life with his yacht, Pilar. Outlasting marriages and relationships with friends and family, the 38' Brooklyn-built fishing machine was the lasting love of his life. Hendrickson has come neither to praise nor to bury his subject, but to give him a fair shot. Hemingway is filtered through the eyes of friends and family; with full chapters focusing on Pilar's strange mate Arnold Samuelson and several chapters following Walter Houk, a still-living acquaintance from the Cuba days. Hemingway's youngest and most troubled son, Gregory, is also featured prominently. Hemingway had such a dominating personality that he unknowingly damaged those around him, with siblings and offspring suffering the worst. VERDICT Featuring spry writing and clever insight but thankfully little critical analysis of EH's work (that's been done to death), Hendrickson brings fresh meat to the table, delivering one of the most satisfying Hemingway assessments in many years. A delight for Ernesto's numerous fans.-Mike Rogers, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
AMERICAN LIGHT APRIL 3, 1934. The temperature in Manhattan got into the high sixties. G-men shot an accomplice of Dillinger's in Minnesota; the Nazis were running guns to the Moors; Seminoles were reviving a tribal dance in honor of alligators in Florida; Lou Gehrig had two homers in an exhibition game in Atlanta. And roughly the bottom third of America was out of work. According to "Steamship Movements in New York," a column that runs daily in the business section of the Evening Journal, nine liners are to dock today. The SS Paris, 34,500 tons, is just sliding in after a seven-day Atlantic crossing, from Le Havre via Plymouth, at Pier 57 on the West Side of New York City. "Expected to dock: 5:00 P.M.," reports the newspaper. And she does. If this were a Movietone News item about Hemingway the big-game hunter, arriving home after eight months abroad, and you were in a darkened movie palace of the thirties awaiting the feature, you'd see ropes being thrown off, gangplanks being lowered, steamer trunks being unloaded, and passengers starting gaily to stream off. You'd see the New York press boys with their rumpled suits and stained ties and skinny notebooks and Speed Graphic cameras clawing for position. The blocky white lettering superimposed on the flickering images would announce: "Back from Lion Hunt in East Africa!" They'd bring up the sound track-something stirring, to suggest the march of time. And then would come the voice-over-wouldn't it be Ed Herlihy's?-with its electric charge: "Famed author Mr. Ernest Hemingway, just back on the French liner Paris with Mrs. Hemingway from conquering the lion and the rhino and the wildebeest and the greater kudu, says that death in the afternoon is far less engrossing in a Spanish bull ring than on the African veldt." The press boys clotted at the bottom of the gangplank badly want Hemingway, and they want Katharine Hepburn (she is on the boat, too, and makes wonderful copy, when she deigns to speak), but apparently none of them knows (for none of their papers will have it tomorrow) that an even bigger trophy has just berthed at Pier 57: Marlene Dietrich. She's going to give them the nifty slip. Publicity? Who needs it? Maybe Dietrich's hiding out in her stateroom. She might have registered under a different name-glamorous figures routinely do this. In fact, Hepburn is on the manifest as "Miss Katherine Ludlow." (Her husband is Ludlow Ogden Smith.) She has decided not to hide from the pack. The famous and close and long-lasting Dietrich-Hemingway friendship dates from this Atlantic crossing. For the rest of his life, Hemingway mostly called her the Kraut, when he wasn't addressing her as "daughter," the latter being how he liked to address women younger than himself, famous or otherwise, whom he'd not-apparently-taken to bed. Dietrich was two and a half years younger. There is a well- traveled story about how she was stepping into the ship's dining room to join a dinner party. Every open-jawed man at the table rose to give her his chair, but just as she started to sit down, the international flame with the statuesque body and lusty voice counted the mouths and saw that there were twelve diners. "Oh. I'm the thirteenth. You will excuse me if I don't join you. I'm superstitious about thirteen at dinner," she said, starting to withdraw. But just then Hemingway blocked her way. "Excuse me," he said. "I don't mean to intrude. But I'd be glad to be the fourteenth." Afterward, they supposedly strolled the decks arm in arm and told each other-maybe like Bogart and Claude Rains in Casablanca, except that that movie hadn't been made yet-that this was going to be the start of a beautiful friendship. At least this is the legend, and Dietrich herself greatly helped it along in 1955 in a first-person cover story in the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. The piece was titled "The Most Fascinating Man I Know." She talked of how she and Hemingway had depended on each other through the years, how she'd protected his deeply personal letters to her in a strongbox. Actually, Dietrich may not have even written the piece- according to Mary Hemingway, it was ghosted by journalist and scriptwriter A. E. Hotchner, one of Hemingway's last confidants, or toadies, depending on your point of view, for the two-decades-younger Hotch, as Hemingway often called him, has been described as both in the vast, roily, envy-ridden sea of Hemingway studies. In any case, among smaller errors, Dietrich or her ghost got the name of the boat wrong; she said it was the other (even grander) star of the French line, the Île de France. But this is a newsreel of the imagination. Hemingway's poised at the Paris's rail with his spouse. He's intent on purchasing a boat, but right now he's allowing photographs to be made, and he's popping quotes. Freeze the frame. Stop time in a box. Pauline Hemingway is in a zebra-striped suit and an almost dowdy hat, curled at the brim, tilting right to left. Her right shoulder touches her husband's left. She is so small beside him. Her hair is cropped like a boy's. She has a boyish physique and is known for her disinclination to use makeup. (It's true she likes to keep her nails and toes manicured for her husband, often lacquering them in light pink.) Her body is turned a few degrees away from the rail, as if she might decide to walk off any second now. She's probably not getting a word in edgewise. She isn't a beautiful woman, but she isn't unattractive, either. She is four years and a day older than her husband, who is leaning forward, right into the middle of things, as if right into the middle of reporters' notebooks. Both his arms are on the rail, and his right hand is holding the brim of a fedora that has a wide, dark band. He's wearing a suit and tie and there's a sliver of handkerchief visible at the top of his vest pocket. No matter his dress, he's unmistakably a man of the outdoors, with the body of an athlete. His hair looks Brylcreemed and newly cut, although a strand or two at the back of his head are out of place. Around his seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck, inside his dress shirt, is a scapular: he's a convert to Catholicism, which is his wife's devoutly practiced faith. (She's a "cradle Catholic," while his on- again, off-again devotions are reputed to have arisen out of the shocks of World War I.) He's known to wear his scapular unfailingly in these years. It's got an image of Christ on it, suspended from a brown, shoestring-like loop. At home, in Key West, friends have observed him with the scapular, and how he'll make the sign of the cross before he goes in swimming. That smile: hobnailed and hard-boiled all the way, just this side of aggressive. The more you study the photograph, however, the more you see that both Hemingways are holding a pose. This picture, or versions of it, is going to get picked up and run in many hinterland places, including in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where winter still has the earth in her grip, and where a young, self- styled, Hemingway-like character will see the photograph and tear it out of the Pioneer Press and fold it into his pocket and pack his knapsack and hop a freight to Florida, in hopes of meeting his writing idol. The young man's name is Arnold Morse Samuelson, and he is in for the ride of his life. But that's running out ahead. Not every city editor in New York-there are something like nine dailies in the city in 1934-has sent a reporter to the docks today to shag quotes and to compose deathless passages on deadline about the return of the native. (In the old days of the news business, these pieces were often known as "brights." Go get me a Hemingway bright, some pale, overweight editor at the Times surely growled at a reporter on the city desk.) And what is the "fascinating man" saying to the press boys? He's telling them how he gives first honors to the leopards, "because they strike the fastest." But the lion is such a noble beast, too, he says. "He is not afraid or stupid. He does not want to fight, but sometimes man makes him, and then it is up to the man to shoot his way out of what he has got himself into." With the lion and the leopard, "you're either quick or you're dead. I saw a lion do one hundred yards in three seconds flat, which may give you an idea." The hunter saw ninety-six lions altogether and at one point he photographed twenty-nine lionesses "preening themselves like a group of finishing school girls." He made a moral bargain with himself to bring down only animals that were utter strangers to him; the lions that he'd stalked with his camera he could somehow not force himself to shoot. But now he intends to return to his home in Key West and resume his vocation. His season of intense writing, he hints, may or may not concern Africa. The World-Telegram will have a seven-grapher tomorrow, page 11 ("Jungle Praised by Hemingway"). The lead: Ernest Hemingway, author_._._._is back home and "nearly broke" after eight months abroad, three of which he spent on the "dark continent." The trouble with bull-fighting, in the opinion of the man who admits he knows so little about it that he wrote a book on the subject, is simply that it's too formal. Like all invitation affairs, he holds, it has a plethora of rules. Out in the brush where the hunter fights for a clawhold with his prey as man to beast-and no rules committee in the offing-it's more fun. The Herald Tribune's subhead on its Hemingway bright (eleven paragraphs, page 4): "Author, Back from African Hunt, Says He Never Shot Beasts Trailed for Camera." The lead: "Ernest Hemingway, enthusiastic over the three months he had passed in East Africa stalking big game with rifle and camera, returned yesterday on the French liner Paris with Mrs. Hemingway, who shared his adventures. Mr. Hemingway was in such high spirits that he granted an interview, something unusual for him." The subject's first quote: "It's hard to describe just what there is to killing big game. It's very exciting and-uh-it gives you a fine feeling. It's the sort of the same thing as any killing; that is, it's fine, if you do a clean job of it and it's lousy if there's bad sportsmanship." Toward the end: "The pursuit of game having renewed his enthusiasm for life, he returned home 'to work like hell and make enough money so that I can go back to Africa and really learn something about lions.' " It must be the Herald Trib's account that E. B. White of The New Yorker catches on his way to work on the morning of the fourth. The Herald Trib is the highbrow newspaper of choice in Manhattan, and these quotes are apparently just too much for a domesticated literary man. Because the following week, a three-stanza Hemingway send-up titled "The Law of the Jungle" appears on page 31 of The New Yorker. White's final lines: And who, in time of darkest danger Will only dominate a stranger. Seventeen years from now, on the publication of Hemingway's weakest novel, Across the River and into the Trees, White, great American humorist, never a white hunter on the dark continent, will bring down Hemingway again in the magazine with a parody titled "Across the Street and into the Grill." By then parodying Hemingway will have become a cottage sport and pastime in America. White's piece will particularly enrage the author, perhaps because he instantly understands that it will get into anthologies and live way past his own death. What was Ernest Hemingway's interior state when he stood at the Paris rail with his petite and affluent spouse on the eve of acquiring Pilar? (Pauline's uncle, Gus Pfeiffer-a New York businessman, part of whose fortune had been derived from his interests in a Paris and Manhattan perfumer named Richard Hudnut, and who liked Ernest a good deal, at least then-had staked the safari somewhere to the bottom line of about $30,000. The safari had lasted just a little over two months, not three, as was reported. Hemingway had been in Africa for nearly three months, but not in the bush for that long, and for about a week of the actual safari he was confined to a hospital bed in Nairobi, having suffered an attack of amoebic dysentery that necessitated evacuation by light plane.) A whole lot of his state of mind can be glimpsed in his writing, not least his letter writing. Hemingway wrote somewhere between six and seven thousand letters in his life, by hand and by typewriter and by dictation, usually in free-associative bursts, often after a day's writing, to relieve tension, more or less in the way you'd speak in a conversation. This is particularly true of his letters to friends and to certain family members. "The desire to get to the man behind the work can be sometimes overwhelming. I always go back to the letters," Patrick Hemingway told me in 1987, a sentence that seems only truer with time. Hemingway's momentary high spirits in early April 1934 must have had at least two prongs: he was back from his excellent safari adventure; and now, before heading home by train to Florida, he hoped to go to a Brooklyn boatyard and put in an order for his own longed-for fishing machine. And yet, what his letters, cojoined with verifiable facts of his life just then, suggest is that what might have seemed so clear in a photograph and in what he told some shipside reporters didn't nearly reflect what Hemingway was generally feeling inside. Every good photograph has a secret, a critic named Mark Stevens once wrote: "Something mysteriously and tantalizingly withheld, even when the world seems laid out as plainly as a corpse upon a table." One verifiable truth is that the monarch of American letters had been riding through rough critical seas for the last few years-and much more rough going was up ahead. Somehow, nothing seemed quite as locked as it once did, and that included owning the reviewers. Not quite a year earlier-on June 13, 1933-the author for whom things had once seemed to come so effortlessly had written to his book editor: "I am tempted never to publish another damned thing. The swine arent worth writing for. I swear to Christ they're not. Every phase of the whole racket is so disgusting that it makes you feel like vomiting._._._. And it is a commonplace that I lack confidence that I am a man-What shit-And I'm supposed to go around with your good friends spreading that behind my back-And they imagine they will get away with it." He'd been referring specifically in this instance to his former friend Max Eastman (a fellow Scribners author), who'd just written a half-joking and belated review of Death in the Afternoon for The New Republic titled "Bull in the Afternoon." The Hemingway style, Eastman said, was that "of wearing false hair on the chest." In Hemingway's reading, and in the reading of some of his close friends, the piece wasn't trying to be humorous at all but rather was making overt suggestions to the effect that Hemingway must feel sexually inadequate. Well, he'd break Eastman's jaw the next time he saw him, and sell tickets to the event. One way to read Ernest Hemingway's life is through the phenomenon of remarkable first luck. He'd become an international literary figure, specifically as a novelist, so quickly-in the second half of the 1920s, less than a decade from when he'd started out. He'd started out with stories-actually, sometimes just intensely felt imagistic fragments of stories. Excerpted from Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 by Paul Hendrickson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Amid So Much Ruin, Still the Beauty | p. 6 |
Part 1 Getting Her | |
American Light | p. 25 |
That Boat | p. 47 |
Gone to Firewood | p. 59 |
States of Rapture | p. 72 |
Part 2 When She Was New, 1934-1935 | |
Home | p. 94 |
Shadow Story | p. 104 |
High Summer | p. 146 |
Catching Fish | p. 166 |
On Being Shot Again | p. 201 |
Outside Worlds | p. 220 |
Exuberating, and Then the Jackals of His Mind | p. 245 |
Part 3 Before | |
Edens Lost and Darkness Visible | p. 264 |
Part 4 Old Men At The Eege Of The Sea: Ernest/Gigi/Walter Houk, 1949-1952 And After | |
Moments Supreme | p. 300 |
Facet of His Character | p. 316 |
The Gallantry of an Aging Machine | p. 345 |
Braver Than We Knew | p. 381 |
In Spite of Everything | p. 389 |
"Necrotic" | p. 405 |
What He Had | p. 419 |
Reenactment | p. 446 |
Epilogue: Hunger of Memory | p. 455 |
Acknowledgments | p. 467 |
Essay on Sources | p. 471 |
Coda: On the Curious Afterlife of Pilar | p. 503 |
Selected Bibliography | p. 509 |
Index | p. 515 |