Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  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. It was almost as if he’d had no real apprenticeship but had sprung full-blown into American consciousness as a serious writer. It wasn’t true; it only seemed true. What is true is that, for nearly his whole life, Hemingway had a genius, among his many geniuses, for gathering knowledge inside of him with astonishing speed—lore, know-how, the names of streets in Kansas City. He seemed to learn everything and anything so early, almost as if to defy the word “learn.” The statement can apply as much to the intricacies of big-game fishing as to the art of shaking daiquiris as to the craft of writing fiction: he simply found out, and lodged it inside him very fast. In so many instances, he seemed to mutate from eager novice to acknowledged expert with barely any larval stage in between. The pattern was to learn from his betters—betters at the time—and then to lap them on the track as if they were standing still.

  The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s slim and enduring first novel about world-weary expats doing the bullfights in Pamplona, sixty thousand lyric words, was published when he was twenty-seven. He completed the first draft in eight weeks—really, almost the whole novel was there in that first manic burst. It was as if the world had a new kind of writing on its hands—laconic, ironic, dialogue-driven, painterly in the way of an Impressionist canvas. Only the opening section was badly off in its tone, self-conscious and affected. (“This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins, she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story.”) His new friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, three years older, convinced him to drop those opening pages, and Hemingway quickly did, and after that the pitch of the book was nearly perfect (that is, if you were willing to overlook its casual anti-Semitism), and possibly the extremely grateful author never quite forgave Scott for his critical acuity. Certainly, he would begin condescending to him as a fellow artist almost the minute he was able to—another verifiable fact.

  Fitzgerald had gone out of his way to help bring Hemingway to the prestigious American publishing house of Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he was a star. He’d written to his editor, the esteemed (if not yet quite legendary) Maxwell Perkins: “This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemmingway, who lives in Paris (an American), writes for the transatlantic Review + has a brilliant future.” That was early October 1924, even before Fitzgerald had met Hemingway. (Their first meeting came six months later, early spring 1925, at the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse, right after the publication of The Great Gatsby.)

  Soon there would be a new Scribners star edited and soothed by Perkins. You can pick up almost any page of Sun today, and at its center, the story of a war-wounded man, seeking to conceal his softness with cynicism, will seem as fresh in its language and feeling as it must have seemed to cognoscenti on both sides of the Atlantic in 1926. “It is awfully easy to be hardboiled about everything in the daytime,” Jake Barnes confesses, “but at night it is another thing.” The famously war-wounded man has been wounded in his genitals. He’s incapable of making love.

  As for the short stories, which Hemingway learned how to do before the long-form fiction: it was as if these, too, had sought their own level of near perfection without real apprenticeship. It only felt as if modernism in prose had begun with a young husband and father out of the Midwest—a rube, really, no matter that he’d glimpsed war and suffered wounds—sitting down at a table in La Closerie des Lilas in Paris in August 1924 and finishing a long “fish story” (in two parts) and, in the bargain, creating a new kind of American language. On the surface, nothing seems to be happening in the story. Its setting is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The stream he is fishing, as well as the title of the story, are given the musical-sounding name, “Big Two-Hearted River.” A young man named Nick, who seems vaguely to be troubled, has gone camping alone. He leans over a railroad bridge in a burned-out town and watches trout far down through “the glassy convex surface of the pool.” In a meadow, not far from the glinting river, he makes his camp, slitting off “a bright slab of pine” from a stump and chinking it into tent pegs. He fixes cheesecloth across the “open mouth of the tent.” He crawls in and already there is “something mysterious and homelike.” He climbs out. He places a wire grill over a fire and with his boot forces the four legs down into the ground. Now the beans and spaghetti are warming. They’re “making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface.” “ ‘Chrise,’ Nick said, ‘Geezus Chrise,’ he said happily.” The story is proceeding in such inconsequential fashion, with attentions being paid to the smallest rituals of camping and fishing, as if this is all the story were about.

  Many years later, no longer a young or well man, in a Paris memoir as elegant as it was often cruel, the author would say of that story, without naming it: “I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote. When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it.” The author remembered that he wrote the story, with everything beneath the surface, at the café table in blue-backed notebooks, with two pencils and a dime-store sharpener beside him—to sharpen your writing instrument with a pocketknife was too profligate. When his so-called fish story was finished, the excited young husband and father, twenty-five years old, who lived with his wife and baby boy above the sawmill on rue Notre Dame des Champs, wrote to his bohemian literary friends, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, sounding exactly like the rube of the middle border he essentially still was. He told them he’d been “trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about the fish, but isn’t writing a hard job though?”

  A Farewell to Arms, coming three years after The Sun Also Rises, a longer, more mature, more moving novel (Hemingway’s finest sustained literary achievement, in my view), was published in September 1929, two months after he’d turned thirty. He’d started the novel in Paris, had worked on it in Key West; in Piggott, Arkansas; in Kansas City; on a ranch at Big Horn, Wyoming—other places, too. His wife gave birth to his second child by difficult cesarean section while he worked on it, and also his father killed himself. “I remember all these things happening and all the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year,” he once said. “But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been.” Living in that book, making the country, a man still so young had written a passage so immortal as this, about a retreat from a place called Caporetto:

  I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.

  From a beginner at long-form fiction to a master of it inside of three years
—this was the impression that the world had formed of him, and it wasn’t altogether wrong. “Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty: / Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master—” the poet Archibald MacLeish would say years later in a poem, but also saying, in the line immediately above: “And what became of him? Fame became of him.”

  But now it was the thirties, and his thirties, and suddenly the critical “swine” were attacking his books. It was as if the reviewers had secretly gotten together at a club in New York and voted to pile on—certainly in Hemingway’s view. They’d done it firstly with his nonfiction meditation on bullfighting in Spain, Death in the Afternoon, published in 1932, and even more with his third volume of short stories, Winner Take Nothing, published on October 27, 1933, when Hemingway was in Europe, about a month before the trip to Africa. Individual stories in the fourteen-story work certainly had been admired—“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “Fathers and Sons,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “Wine of Wyoming.” But as an aesthetic whole, the book was judged by some of the country’s most prestigious reviewers to be tedious and anti-intellectual and boorish in its subject matter. Louis Kronenberger of The New York Times: “One reads a story like the first and finest in the present book, a story called ‘After the Storm,’ and one regrets that in the main such incomparable equipment as Hemingway’s goes off so many times with a proud and clean report—and hits nothing.” T. S. Matthews of The New Republic: “Some of his current subjects are the kind of abnormalities that fascinate adolescence but really have very little to do with the price of our daily bread.… This may sound like an attack on Hemingway, and it is. I think he is one of the few exciting writers we have, and that consequently we ought to see, if we can, what all the excitement is about. And I think that what it is about is adolescence.” H. S. Canby of the Saturday Review of Literature: “When you are bored by Hemingway, as I frankly am by a half dozen of these new stories, which are repetitive with the slow pound, pound of a hammer upon a single mood, there is nothing to revive you except flashes of excellent observation.” Max Perkins had tried to send a pacifying letter to Hemingway in Paris, along with half a dozen of these reviews, while Hemingway was engaged in last-minute errands for the safari. He would not be pacified by his editor, even though the book was selling well enough.

  Insult to injury, his onetime Paris mentor, Gertrude Stein, had also turned on him savagely in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Several installments had appeared in The Atlantic. Stein had actually called him “yellow.” Well, just like Eastman, he’d get her back in spades. That old fat lesbian bitch.

  It was in Paris, just before leaving for Africa, that this alternately gloomy and exhilarated and lashing-out man had written “A Paris Letter” for Arnold Gingrich’s Esquire. He’d become a contributor to this new (and surprisingly successful) men’s monthly, published out of his hometown, Chicago. In “A Paris Letter”—it appeared in the February 1934 issue, while Hemingway was on safari—the author had talked about Paris not belonging to him any longer and, presciently, about the coming of another war in Europe. It was all very gloomy, he wrote. “This old friend shot himself. That old friend took an overdose of something.… People must be expected to kill themselves when they lose their money, I suppose, and drunkards get bad livers, and legendary people usually end by writing their memoirs.”

  And what of Hemingway’s marital relationship with the boyish-looking woman in the zebra-striped suit and funny hat standing beside him in this held moment of Manhattan time?

  Hemingway had been married to his second wife for seven years, the wedding having taken place within a month of his divorce from Hadley Richardson in April 1927, and there is evidence to suggest that the marriage was mostly over in Hemingway’s mind by April 1934. He and the former Pauline Pfeiffer of Piggott, Arkansas, who were the parents of two young sons—and whom they’d been away from for months—would remain together, nominally, for the next five years, until 1939, but by then Hemingway’s affair with his next wife-to-be, Martha Gellhorn, would be almost three years old.

  In my view, Hemingway’s staid, Protestant, suburban, midwestern roots—which he fought against all his life—could never allow him to reconcile his various adulteries and marriages past his first marriage, to Hadley, who was his truest love, or at least his truest marriage. In that sense, his subsequent marriages were doomed from the start. Also in that sense, Hemingway was much like another famous and onetime resident of Oak Park, Illinois: Frank Lloyd Wright. The two geniuses, who spent separate lifetimes flouting middle-class mores, even as they couldn’t seem to escape them, overlapped for about a decade in that Republican community of churches and impressive houses and upright families located eight miles west of downtown Chicago. (Wright was born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, and his career in architecture lasted until his death in 1959. In seven decades of work, he designed, if not completed, over one thousand buildings. He was in his early thirties, residing in Oak Park, struggling for commissions, with a growing family, when Hemingway came into the world in the summer of 1899.)

  There’s no question Hemingway had great passion for his second wife, for a time. In the beginning of the affair, in Paris, and on the ski slopes of Austria, and at the summer bullfights in Spain, Pauline had made a covert play for him, betraying her friendship with Hadley, just as Martha would make a shameless play for him a decade later—and he would more than willingly, if not immediately, comply. After Hemingway’s death, MacLeish—who had known him since the twenties in Paris and who, like almost all of Hemingway’s closest friends, had an ugly falling-out with him that would never completely repair itself (the second of two major fights was aboard Pilar, or at least began there, when Pilar was very new)—said astutely: “I have always suspected that his subsequent detestation for her [he was speaking of Pauline] was in part the consequence of his own sense of disloyalty.” At the close of A Moveable Feast—that aforementioned slender, wistful, posthumously published, and often gratuitously mean memoir of Paris in the early days—Hemingway talks so bitterly against Pauline and so tenderly of Hadley, with whom he’d had his first son, Jack, whom he liked to call Mr. Bumby, when Mr. Bumby was small:

  Before these rich had come [he was referring to the Murphys, Gerald and Sara], we had already been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.…

  When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs of the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr. Bumby standing with her, blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy.

  In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which is fiction, not memoir, the dying writer, by turns self-pitying and accusatory, says of his older wife: “She shot very well this good, this rich bitch.… She had a great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked her face.” As in all his fiction, Hemingway was making things up from what he knew. His imagination was conflating and rearranging and transposing several women and different events from his life. But it’s still hard to read parts of that story and not picture biographically the woman to whom the author was still married in the late summer of 1936, more than two years after the safari was over, when the story appeared for the first time in print, in Esquire, which was also about five months before Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn in the Key West bar named Sloppy Joe’s.

  Two letters, both written at sea, about a week apart, four months before this pictured moment in New York City, seem to say much about his state of mind. One letter is full of belligerence and prevarication and pridefulness; the other is tender, loving, funny, and boy-adventuresome. The firs
t letter was written late at night to one of his friendlier critics; the second was sent to his middle son. The first letter ran to more than eighteen hundred words and may have been typed (the original is apparently lost); the second was fairly brief and in longhand. The letters were written on a scow of a boat named the SS General Metzinger, part of the Messageries Maritimes line, on the front end of the African trip. The Metzinger had sailed from Marseille on November 22, 1933, bearing the Hemingway shooting party of three through the Mediterranean Sea toward Port Said, Egypt. The ship then navigated through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, to its landing at Mombasa, East Africa, on December 8, 1933.

  The shooting party of three bound for safari consisted of Hemingway, his wife, and Hemingway’s close Key West friend, Charles Thompson, who sold fishing tackle and ran Thompson’s Hardware store at the waterfront. Thompson and Hemingway had known each other for close to six years, since the spring of 1928. Both he and Thompson were tall, outdoorsy men, with similar physiques and similar interests, born in the same year, 1899. Thompson, whose family were old-time Key Westers, had a boat, an old-fashioned nineteen-footer. Evenings, when he got off work, Charles would come by and collect Hemingway—who was living with the pregnant Pauline in a sweatbox of temporary lodgings above a Ford Motor garage, working on A Farewell to Arms—and the two would troll into Jack Channel or over toward Stock Island to fish for grouper and snapper. They became fast friends. Charles wasn’t in the least a literary man, or even a very educated man, but the more telling difference between them was that he had a very soft personality. He was a man you could dominate. Originally, Hemingway had hoped that Archie MacLeish would go on the safari with him, and he had also invited other long-standing friends, including Henry Strater, whom everyone called Mike, a painter and amateur boxer and graduate of Princeton, who’d known Hemingway since Paris sparring sessions in 1922. Both Strater and MacLeish had known better than to give in to the repeated invitations. Hemingway was a friend you might not be able to live without—as MacLeish would one day say—but he also was a friend with whom you wouldn’t chance an extended shooting trip.