Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  The critic to whom Hemingway sent his late-night diatribe was Clifton Fadiman of The New Yorker, known to friends as Kip. He’d done a long and serious review of the story collection Winner Take Nothing in the form of an open letter (“A Letter to Mr. Hemingway”), in which the reviewer was essentially entreating the author—it was obvious how he admired Hemingway’s work—to go on to other themes if he wished to grow as an artist. Hemingway’s reply, a month after the review had been published, was written four days after the Metzinger had left Marseille for Africa. He put at the top of the upper-right-hand corner on the first page: “A Bord du General Metzinger, le 26 Novembre 1933, One day out of Port Said.” The letter got more rageful and scornful as it went on. It was as if Hemingway was writing to somebody whom he knew was both sympathetic and tough-minded toward his work—and yet couldn’t stop himself from sounding immature and churlish. Besides, he told Fadiman lies. They were inconsequential, but they were lies, from a lifelong prevaricator. He said twice that he was thirty-five. (He was thirty-four.) He said he’d gone to war at seventeen. (He was eighteen, about to turn nineteen.)

  He said: “You see, what is important, is that you write about what you know—the time is very short—for me especially—and because of having learned too much about too many things too early.”

  He also said: “Will be glad to have you come to lunch when I break max Eastman’s jaw. Plan to have rather gala occasion.”

  He railed against turncoat friends like Gertrude Stein; against such stinking critics as “a merchant like T.S. (Chickenshit) Mathews [who] says it [the material in Winner Take Nothing] is all about the war and the others about lesbians, insomnia, castration, syphilis.”

  At 11:30 p.m., the steward came in to say that the writing room was closing for the night. The letter writer decided to write four postscripts at the bottom of the letter, one of which talked again of how “the time is short.” Almost certainly he meant his life. The fourth postscript said:

  Look, I’m 35, I’ve had a damned fine life, have had every woman I ever wanted, have bred good kids, have seen everything I believe in royally f——d to hell (for Scribner’s sake amen), have been wounded many times, decorated many times, got over all wish for glory or a career before I was 20, have always made a living in all times, staked my friends, written 3 books of stories, 2 novels, a comic book and one fairly exhaustive treatise and every chickenshit prick who writes about my stuff writes with a premature delight and hope that I may be slipping. It’s beautiful. But I will stick around and write until I have ruined every one of them, and not go until my time comes. So would not advise you to hedge yet.

  The second letter was written to Patrick Hemingway, five years old. At the top: “A Bord Du General Metzinger Le 2 December.” It was as if the letter writer was speaking to someone his own age—say, about eleven. What boy wouldn’t crave to get a letter like this from his dad? If you studied this letter years later and didn’t think too much about anything else, it might make you forget that Hemingway—and his spouse—were absentee parents to very young children.

  Dear Old Mex:

  Well here we are almost at the southern end of the Red Sea. Tomorrow we will be in the Indian ocean. The weather is just like Key West on a nice day in winter. Yesterday we saw a big school of big porpoises and many schools of small porpoises.

  It was cold and rainy all the way down to Egypt. Then it was hot and fine. Coming through the suez canal we went right through the desert. We saw lots of Palm trees and Australian pines (like in our yard) whenever there was water. But the rest was mountains and hills and plains of sand. We saw a lot of camels and a soldier riding on a camel made it trot alongside the ship almost as fast as the ship could go. In the canal you have to stop and tie up to the side sometimes to let other ships go by.

  You would have liked to see the other ships go by and to see the desert. The only birds we saw were some snipe and quite a lot of hawks and a few cormorants and one old blue crane.

  I miss you, old Mex, and will be glad to see you again. Will have plenty of good stories to tell you when we come back.

  The letter went for a few more sentences and finished with: “Go easy on the beer and lay off the hard liquor until I get back. Don’t forget to blow your nose and turn around three times before you go to bed. Your affectionate papa, Papa.”

  In Hemingway, early in his life and late in his life, kindness and gentleness and understanding and probity seem never far from his most appalling behavior.

  The man entertaining reporters and posing for pictures at the Paris disembarkation rail had come triumphantly back to America with his African trophies, all right (slain beasts were on their way to the taxidermist, and there were numerous Kodak exposures and also eight-millimeter film documenting the khaki-clad hunter kneeling beside his antlered or maned or horned prey), but it was hardly all one great adventure. The safari, a huge experience of an outdoor life thus far lived, had suffered its own huge tensions, owing mainly to competitive bile.

  Green Hills of Africa, the loosely factual account that came out of the safari, published in 1935, is almost naked on the page in portraying Hemingway’s jealousy at being largely outhunted by his easygoing friend Charles Thompson. Hemingway started writing the book almost immediately upon returning to Key West. He continued working on it through the spring, summer, and fall as he fished the Stream with his new boat in both Florida and Cuban waters. Parts of the book were written, or at least revised, aboard Pilar. Other parts got drafted in a hotel room in Havana, and still others—including all the early and late sections—were done in the writing studio above the garage at the author’s home in Key West. But wherever he worked on the African book, as Hemingway referred to it, salt water was always close by.

  About a quarter of the way into the story, two rhinos are taken. The narrator gets one. Charles Thompson—who’s known as Karl in the story—gets one.

  We had tried, in all the shoot, never to be competitive.… I was, truly, very fond of him and he was entirely unselfish and altogether self-sacrificing. I knew I could outshoot him and I could always outwalk him and, steadily, he got trophies that made mine dwarfs in comparison. He had done some of the worst shooting at game I had ever seen and … still he beat me on all the tangible things we had to show. For a while we had joked about it and I knew everything would even up. But it didn’t even up.… We had not treated him badly, but we had not treated him too well, and still he had beaten me. Not only beaten, beaten was all right. He had made my rhino look so small that I could never keep him in the same small town where we lived.

  On the last day of the hunt, Hemingway kills two huge kudu bulls. The horns are magnificent. He can’t wait to get back to camp that evening to show his trophies. “Karl” (Charles Thompson had an older Key West brother whose name was Karl) has just gotten a greater kudu, too. He comes back into camp from a different stalking area.

  “What did you get?” I asked Karl.

  “Just another one of those. What do you call them? Tendalla.”

  “Swell,” I said. I knew I had one no one could beat and I hoped he had a good one too. “How big was he?”

  “Oh, fifty-seven,” Karl said.

  “Let’s see him,” I said, cold in the pit of my stomach.

  “He’s over there,” Pop said, and we went over.

  They were the biggest, widest, darkest, longest-curling, heaviest, most unbelievable pair of kudu horns in the world. Suddenly, poisoned with envy, I did not want to see mine again; never, never.

  Two pages later: “But I was bitter and I was bitter all night long. In the morning, though, it was gone.” Yes, by first light, the bile has passed off. “I had accepted the big one now and was happy to see him and that Karl had him. When you put them side by side they looked all right. They really did. They all were big.”

  I don’t know whether Hemingway the artist understood precisely what he was doing in portraying his unsportsmanlike spirit so transparently—or if he somehow didn’t ge
t what many of his readers and reviewers saw so quickly. Green Hills—a work greatly undervalued by many Hemingway scholars; critically dismissed in its own day by such major critics as Edmund Wilson—will come up more fully in a later chapter of this narrative, at the chronological point when the author was working on the book; and when, still raging over Gertrude Stein’s attacks on him, Hemingway would write, without naming his antagonist, nor needing to, and in another way just describing himself: “ ‘It’s a damned shame, though, with all that talent gone to malice and nonsense and self-praise.’ ”

  And so the safari had ended. Had the anger of recent months—toward hostile critics, former friends, a good-natured hunting partner who’d bettered him—passed? Yes and no. He did seem happy and relaxed. The hunting party had sailed back up to France, via some deep-sea fishing in the Indian Ocean. Charles Thompson’s wife, Lorine, who’d come over on a liner from New York, had met them midway. She had showed Pauline pictures of the two young Hemingway sons bearing glum expressions. (Pauline kept a diary of her time on safari. There’s no mention in it of missing her children.) In Paris, the Thompsons and Hemingways had checked in again at the Hotel Dinard, on the Left Bank, where the shooting party had stayed on the outward leg of the trip. But the Thompsons left for home quickly. The Hemingways stayed on for nine days. They had gone to dinner one night with James Joyce and his wife; on another day Hemingway had met the American novelist Katherine Anne Porter at the legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company. On still another he’d visited Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare’s proprietor. She showed him an essay about him by the critic Wyndham Lewis. It was titled “The Dumb Ox” and took him apart for his anti-intellectualism. Hemingway had become so enraged that he smashed a vase of tulips on Beach’s table. All this has been told before, in other books about Hemingway.

  But what hasn’t been told quite as fully was how unsuspectingly decent and generous Hemingway was, in those days before sailing homeward, to a young journalist and novelist named Edgar “Ned” Calmer. The story is key to Hemingway’s character, to the notion of when it was good with Papa—the writing, the fishing, the drinking, the eating, the talking, the palling around—few things on earth seemed better.

  Ned Calmer was a reporter for the Paris Herald. He’d first come to Europe on the payroll of the Chicago Tribune. He and Hemingway met during the several weeks that Hemingway had spent in Paris before the safari. They’d been introduced by another Paris newsman and friend of Hemingway’s, Guy Hickok of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Because Hemingway had been a Paris newspaperman himself, he was partial to those who toiled for lousy wages in exotic places and were trying at the same time to be more serious about their craft. But he was especially partial to Calmer, because the journalist had a chronically ill wife and an infant daughter to support. On the side, he’d been trying to write fiction. “From the beginning,” Calmer remembered years later, “it was obvious in many ways that Ernest was generous and kind, with time and loans of money and patience, to other writers, of whom I was one.” When they met, Calmer had just completed his first novel, Beyond the Street. Priscilla Calmer was in a sanitarium in Switzerland, being treated for lung disease. Hemingway wished to give her a book and had gone all over Paris until he finally found a copy of Winner Take Nothing, so that he might sign it.

  After the safari, back in Paris, Hemingway called up Calmer to take him to lunch. He learned that Priscilla Calmer had been released from her Swiss sanitarium and was at home with her husband. He also discovered that their daughter, Alden, had not yet been baptized. As Calmer remembered years later: “Ernest … seemed genuinely concerned. The attitude was: this will never do! He came along to the church of St. Sulpice in Paris as sponsor at the ceremony.”

  One day he took the Calmers to eat at Chez Weber in the rue Royale. Hemingway knew that Beyond the Street had just been published by Harcourt, Brace in New York. At lunch, Hemingway “slipped a cheque across the table to me,” Calmer recalled years later. The check was for $350. “It was the ship fare home for myself and my wife and little daughter—totally unsolicited.… Years later I was able to pay him back and he thereafter liked to refer to me as Honest Ned, remarking that few others he had helped had ever bothered.… After his death, the estate lawyer sent me one of my cheques made out to Ernest which he had never cashed.”

  That day at Weber’s restaurant, the astonished and grateful newspaperman had presented Hemingway with a signed copy of Beyond the Street. Hemingway read it coming home on the Paris. He had agreed to read and react to some of Calmer’s shorter fiction. On May 28, 1934, back in America, he wrote to Calmer about his novel, apologizing for the delay: “I’ve been working like a what the hell should you call it.… I read it on the Paris—so did Pauline. We both liked it. That was not quite two months ago.… The faults of it were the faults everybody has in the first one but the virtues of it were not first novel virtues i e glamour, freshness etc. No, bo. The virtues were understanding, sympathy and a certain cleanliness of handling.” For the rest of his life, Calmer (who published a dozen or so novels and had a significant career in broadcasting for CBS Radio News) would remain grateful to Hemingway. The two renewed their friendship during World War II, when Calmer was reporting in war-blitzed London with Edward R. Murrow and other CBS newsmen. If they were never intimate friends, they managed to stay loosely in touch. Calmer apparently never dined out on it. He came to know all four of Hemingway’s wives, especially Martha Gellhorn. This was after her divorce from Hemingway, when she was living in Rome and he was working there as a correspondent. No bitter thing Marty Gellhorn could ever have said against her former husband—whom she liked to call Pig, and not only in response to his bathing habits—would have changed Calmer’s estimation.

  Priscilla Calmer died of emphysema in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1955. Calmer wrote Hemingway a note about her death. He didn’t hear back. The next time they saw each other, Hemingway blurted an apology: “I never was any good at wakes.”

  Ned Calmer died at age seventy-eight in 1986. He’d had three wives and two children. Several years ago, when I spoke at length to his son on the telephone about his father’s relationship with Ernest Hemingway, Regan Calmer said: “I never heard a lot about it growing up—and I also never heard a bad word about it. Mostly, he kept it to himself.… I don’t know, I guess it was just the fact that my father had such a high respect and even love for such a great writer like Hemingway who did him these unsolicited favors at a critical time. He could never forget it.”

  In late April 1934, Ned Calmer wrote to Hemingway. He was in America with his family. He was promoting his first novel. “It was a great thing you did for me,” he said. “Hope you acquired that boat.”

  There’s a passage in Green Hills of Africa: “If you looked away from the forest and the mountain side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away, across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of Lake Manyara.” I’ve wondered: months before he composed this landscape-painting sentence, when he was actually staring at that blue shine of African lake, so far from the Gulf Stream, did Hemingway squint and see a thirty-eight-foot Wheeler skimming on it? Did Pilar already have her name? One pictures—I do, anyway—a hunter seated by a campfire in a canvas-back chair, a million stars out, wide-brimmed Stetson safari hat pushed back, bush trousers hiked up, sleeves of his sweat-soaked shirt rolled past his thick forearms. The fire gives his unshaven face a kind of orangy glow. His wife is sleeping under mosquito netting on a canvas cot in a tent a few feet away. He sips tin cups of whiskey and soda. Earlier, he’d dined on roast guinea hen. He’s not bent on dominating man or animal. Somewhere in his mind is the greater kudu he might get to steal up on tomorrow at the salt lick. With his weak eyesight, the big-game hunter, who is even more of a big-game fisherman, is poring over fine print in a thumbed catalog for a twin-cabin cruiser, thirty-eight feet in length, offered by a manufacturer in
Brooklyn. He’s studying all the specs, calculating the various price arrangements. “If you are looking for a fine roomy cruiser with lots of comforts, and ability for long offshore cruising and fishing trips, we suggest that you look this boat over very carefully.” In the price column: “Afloat at the plant. For rail or steamer deliveries add $175 for cradle and cover.”

  THAT BOAT

  Pilar and master, before her flying bridge was built, circa 1935

  IT’S VERY LIKELY that somewhere in Hemingway’s dozen suitcases were catalogs and circulars and fold-over mailings from Wheeler Shipyard, Inc., whose listed address was “Foot of Cropsey Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y.” If Hemingway did have this clutch of boating literature with him, then it had traveled through Spain and France and Africa, through the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, through Babati and Kiunga and the Ngorongoro Crater.