Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  All I did was work like a convict on this book for a year—then laid off and fished and shot and took grand trips with Pauline and Dos and old Waldo Pierce. Wrote it everywhere—Paris—Key West—Arkansas—K.C. Wyoming—back in Key West—Drove 17,000 miles in a new Ford. Now can’t write a damned thing. It always seems like that—either working and not speaking to anyone and afraid each day you will get out of it and living like a damned monk for it—then a fine time after it’s done then hellish depression until you get into it again. My father went in for shooting himself and leaving a family and etc. on my handsto support.… If you ever hear I’m dead don’t believe a word of it as will turn up in blackface having changed name or something to get rid of economic pressure.… Paris is going to pot. Seems awfully lousy. More traffic than N.Y. Everybody has too much money and it’s expensive as hell and after where we’ve been and what seen and how felt this last year there’s no damn fun in drinking at a café with a lot of hard faced lesbians (converted ones not even real ones) and all the little fairies when you-ve been out day after day on the carribean in a small boat with people you like and black as a nigger from the sun and never any shoes nor any underwear and champagne in the water butt covered over with a chunk of ice and a wet sack—dove for the champagne out on the reef where a rum boat went aground—flying fish instead of fairies—and with only so long to live why come back to cafes and all the little snivelling shit of literary politics.

  What the hell does success get you? (Money of course but I always dont get that) All it gets is that people treat you snottily because they think you must have a swelled head. That’s the lousiest thing of all. I may quit the whole business and buy a boat with what dough I can get together and shove off.

  He wouldn’t have shoved off, even if he’d been able to acquire Pilar on the spot, because the bite of fame had already chomped down too hard.

  GONE TO FIREWOOD

  Docks of Bimini, 1935

  IF YOU MADE YOUR WAY now to the hemmed-in wedge of metropolitan New York still referred to as the foot of Cropsey Avenue, you wouldn’t find a trace, not a wooden shaving, of Wheeler Shipyard, Inc. So much craftsmanship in oak and pine and fir and cypress and cedar and mahogany—gone from this ground. So much timber that once got bent on this ground, lovingly curved and steamed and hammered and milled and sawed and planed and joined and otherwise coaxed toward improbable shapes and watertight angles on these premises—vanished. Where has it all gone? Oh, say to firewood, collectors of vintage boats, a museum or two, buzzards, a hillside in Cuba, the sludgy bottoms of coastal waterways, the photo albums of Wheeler descendants, the posthumous pages of Islands in the Stream, which, true enough, may be one of Ernest Hemingway’s lesser novels but is nonetheless incredibly rich for any student of Pilar. “The mate shrugged his shoulders and bent down to the second anchor and Thomas Hudson eased her ahead against the tide, watching the grass from the banks riding by in the current. He came astern until his second anchor was well dug in. The boat lay with her bow into the wind and the tide running past her. There was much wind even in this lee and he knew that when the tide changed she would swing broadside to the swell.”

  There’s a Pathmark Super Center at Cropsey’s foot now. It shares a pocked parking lot with a diner. (I ventured in, and my server said, in response to my question, “Sorry, darlin’, never heard of a boat business around here, and I’ve been a waitress in crappy joints in this neighborhood for a long time.”) Coney Island Creek, where they used to put in the new boats, for their virgin launches, is still here, but these days the creek is an imperceptibly moving slit of diseased-looking water that hardly seems big enough to hold a flotilla of toy boats. But even in Wheeler’s boatbuilding days, Coney Island Creek—which flows into Gravesend Bay, which in turn flows out into the Atlantic—was known to be a pretty narrow and impure thing, not something you would have chosen to sit beside for a Sunday picnic with your sweetheart. One of the reasons they stopped making boats at this site after World War II (there were lots of reasons, not least economic) was because there was too much mud in the launching water.

  In the middle of the Depression, New Yorkers thronged to the national boat show every January at Grand Central Palace. They wished to gape at the new models: cruisers, streamliners, racers, V-bottoms, hard-chines, runabouts, sedans, cigarette boats, sea skiffs, salons, sportfishermen, twin-cabins, bridge-cabins, trawlers, luxury yachts.

  It seems like such a historical disconnect. How did the companies making these luxuries manage to stay in business? The short answer is that many didn’t. The more complex answer is that even in terrified times, life goes on, weekend leisure goes on. No question that pickings were far slimmer for Depression boat manufacturers than in the previous decade—or than they would be, in the years following the war, when the idea of a modest-priced boat sitting on a trailer in a suburban garage seemed part of the middle-class dream and bargain. (This was part of Chris-Craft’s marketing genius and strategy in the 1950s.) But even, or especially, in the Depression, there were still boat dreamers who wanted to be out on water, beyond sight of shore and its anxieties, and some of them even had the means to negotiate that dream.

  Dream. You could be in rags and still dream. In the Sunday paper, you’d see a picture of a beautiful girl, her hands gripping an enormous steering wheel, her hair streaming back, her head tilted toward the wind in what looked like sexual pleasure. She was churning through open water in a nineteen-foot runabout. Where was this—Lake George? Northern Wisconsin? That part didn’t matter; it was the feeling that you got from looking at the girl making whitecaps in the boat that she was piloting alone. Her racer, with its long inlaid snout, had a windshield that looked like something on a British convertible sports car. There was a flag whipping at the stern. The leather seat that the girl sat on looked as plush as a banquette at a Hollywood restaurant. You saw this photograph in the depths of winter, with its goofy caption (“All Hands on Deck”), and all you wished was to pull on your ratty old overcoat and woolen hat with the earflaps and go out the door to catch the first subway or bus or streetcar you could find to the Palace. Maybe you barely had carfare and gate admission. Maybe you’d left the snarling missus and the bawling kids behind. But there was that picture in your brain of the girl in the nineteen-foot runabout. (I am describing an actual newspaper photograph published in The New York Times in the Depression. It’s in the Chris-Craft collection at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia.)

  Some of the staying-in-business had to have been accomplished with smoke and mirrors. The Gar Wood firm in Marysville, Michigan, liked to promote itself in advertisements as “The Greatest Name in Motor Boating.” According to C. Philip Moore’s Yachts in a Hurry, Gar Wood’s boats “were considered the Buicks of Jazz Age mahogany runabouts, with Chris-Craft products being the Chevrolets.” In the summer of 1929, a couple of months before the stock market crashed, Gar Wood employed something like 150 master carpenters. By 1933, the company was down to three employees—but you wouldn’t have known that from looking at its ads in the boating journals. Gar Wood’s major biographer is a cultural and boating historian named Anthony Mollica Jr. For both Moore and Mollica, the study of boats, not just in the Depression, is a kind of social lens on America itself. “I had no idea when I started out my research that they had shrunk like that,” Mollica told me. “It’s really what happened to a lot of those venerable companies.… You see, when a boat business goes bad, when it dies, the owners just walk off. It’s the failure of it all. I think it’s even more true for boat companies than for other companies.”

  One Wheeler offspring I tracked down, in his upper seventies now, never wanted anything else for himself but a career in boats and marine engineering. He got it, too. His name is Wesley D. Wheeler, and he is the son of Wesley L. Wheeler, and is the grandson of company founder Howard E. Wheeler. He was born the year before Ernest and Pauline Hemingway came to his grandpop’s boatyard. His own dad, who was close in age to Hemingway, was, for many yea
rs, the firm’s chief naval architect—so he’s the man who would have designed Pilar and so many other Wheeler pleasure craft. “You could ask anybody, Wheelers were known as the Cadillac of the industry,” Wes Wheeler told me, with understandable pride if not razor accuracy. “The World’s Finest Yacht Construction” was the corporate slogan Wheeler used to run on its catalogs in the fifties. When I asked Anthony Mollica (along with some other boating historians) what he thought a Wheeler was closest to in automobile paradigms, he said without hesitation: “A Wheeler is a Packard. A prewar Packard. Big and strong and comfortable and sturdy. Beamy. Sea-kindly. Very well thought out. Extremely well made. Some sly, deceptive speed. Its own form of beauty. In other words, not a tug, but not a racing boat, either. It’s got eye appeal, but of a subtler kind. The price structure would be right, too.”

  Some of that almost sounds like a description of Hemingway’s own body mass: the lumbering athlete who could surprise you with his quick feints. Once more, how intuitively Hemingway had chosen. He’d found a boat, located a company, in synch with himself, probably much more than he ever knew. Call it again the phenomenon of easy first luck—built, of course, on all the hard work of looking, investigating, intuiting.

  The majority of Depression boat manufacturers in America had their yards in the Northeast or in the Great Lakes region or along the Atlantic Seaboard—it remains pretty much true today. (There was another boat-building community on the West Coast, and Canada also had its clot of wooden-boat makers.) Then as now, boat sales tended to follow the wealth of the country, so the greatest concentration of manufacturers was in the New York metropolitan area. But it’s both pleasurable and instructive to pick up old boating magazines and chart the place-name geography of North American boatbuilding.

  As with most thirties manufacturers, Wheeler didn’t have its own dealer network. (Chris-Craft, the General Motors of the industry, was the great exception.) Wheeler had a few distributors around the country, but mostly it sold its products—certainly in the thirties—either at the annual boat show in New York or straight from the factory floor. Wheeler never went to its customers so much as its customers came to Cropsey Avenue. For a brief time, after World War II, the company had its own showroom on Park Avenue—one of the things that helped take Wheeler down.

  The “factory floor” at the foot of Cropsey was really a jerry-built collection of wooden building berths and tin-roof assembly sheds, some of which hung out precariously over the unprepossessing stream, next to a drawbridge. Just across that drawbridge, with its scrolled ironwork, on Coney Island itself, were some five-cent Depression thrills named the Cyclone and the Thunderbolt and the Loop-O-Plane: Wheeler’s artisans built their wares in the shadow of Coney’s amusement dreams. When they built boats on the north side of this creek and slid them into the water, a drawbridge was crucial, so that the bigger Wheelers could get through and out into the bay.

  When they launched the new boats in this water, the idea was to get them out of it as quickly as possible. “If you left them there a week or ten days, the hulls would start to turn purple,” Wes Wheeler told me. Nonetheless, if it could talk, this maligned channel of once-navigable water (minimally navigable, it is said by New York historians) would have its tales. Today, all that exists of the historical strait between the two bays is the little ribbon of pollution on the creek’s western edge, running perpendicular to the foot of Cropsey. On the snow-crusted winter afternoon when I stood at the edge of the supermarket’s parking lot and stared at the water, trying to see a just-wet Pilar bobbing in it, seven decades past, Coney Island Creek had a grocery cart without wheels washed up on its trash-strewn bank. The water looked swollen, pea green.

  The phone number here used to be Esplanade 2-5900.

  They used to have planking races here. They’d put the Swedes on one side of a hull, the Norwegians on the other.

  When you’re building a boat, the keel gets laid down the middle. The frames come up the side, vertically, then the horizontal planking, over top of the ribbing. The Egyptians were doing this—planking on framing—five thousand years ago. At Cropsey, the oak frames sometimes got bent hot right on the boat—the boards were grabbed piping hot by the artisans from the portable steam boxes that had been pulled up alongside the hulls. Whether you’re in the framing or planking stage of boat construction, you’re essentially trying to follow the natural inclination of an organic material, something that has its own specific grain, its unique anatomy. (In Japan, when sawyers are examining a tree trunk, they speak of “reading the wood.”) It’s true that a new shape is being willed and forced by the shipwright, but in an even truer sense the shape has already grown into the boards before they’re in the shipwright’s hands. So the shape is predetermined, you might say, and the true builder must respect this idea and work with it, not go against the nature of things. He seeks to be guided by the inclination of the wood itself as he creates the curvy, swooping, shadowy angles and shapes.

  They used to squash bananas on the launching rails here. It was easier this way to get the finished boats into the water. The rails, made of wood, ran from the shop floors down the bank and into the creek. The banana-squishing was a cheap and ingenious Depression way of greasing skids. Even so, Wheeler must have used up a ton of bananas, because it’s a fact that this nearly always financially threatened company produced a lot of boats in its gaudy, roller-coaster, roughly half-a-century history. No one seems to have a precise count of how many boats got built, but three thousand is a figure that Wheeler descendants like to cite. And it should also be noted quickly that not every Wheeler, whether a pleasure boat or some type of military craft during war years, was produced at the Brooklyn plant. Every time the boating world wrote off the company, the company seemed to find a way of coming back, in a slightly different incarnation, with a slightly different legal variant on its well-known name. At least once, after a bankruptcy, the Wheeler family, or members of that family, took over another boatyard and just started in again. In this regard, and some others, too, you could compare the bounce-back and up-and-down commercial and legal fortunes of Wheeler boats to the bounce-back and up-and-down life and literary fortunes of the man who bought Pilar.

  At Cropsey, its mother yard, Wheeler had a furniture shop, a machining shop, an upholstery shop, a sawmill, and a four-room hospital with a full-time doctor and nurse. For a time, during World War II, this company had its own fifty-six-piece marching band, made up largely of employees who wore uniforms embroidered with corporate insignia. A day or two a week, the band would saw away on a stage in the middle of the yard while the rest of the workforce—in metal hats and coveralls with “Wheeler” stenciled on the back—ate lunch out of black pails. Sometimes the programs went out over the radio—Wheeler had its own broadcasting operation for a few years. Actually, this part of the Wheeler legend isn’t directly connected to Cropsey Avenue, but to a second and larger yard, which got thrown up on the eve of war, at Whitestone, Long Island, on the East River. Almost overnight the company payroll had leaped from a few score prewar master boatbuilders making pleasure craft in Brooklyn to a workforce of six thousand, round-the-clock shifts, seven days a week, at two sites. The company had ceased all private-boat production so that it could produce 83-foot wooden Coast Guard cutters at Cropsey and 136-foot wooden YMS antimagnetic navy mine sweepers at the Whitestone facility. Sometimes, as the band played, and before everybody turned back to the work, the progenitor and founder—he of the Palmer-perfect penmanship and wild hair and outlandish mustache and absurd pork-chop sideburns—would pass through, handing out watches to the boys who’d soon be going overseas.

  Howard E.—which is how he was addressed when he wasn’t being called Pop Wheeler—was married to Edith Berentha Clayton Wheeler. She was a vital part of this company, too, in on all major decisions, known to keep an eye on the books and personally sign checks. Judging by photographs and family recollections, the matriarch, at least in middle age, was great-bosomed and tended to dark clothes
and bomber hats with stickpins in them that must have scared the bejesus out of her many grandchildren. She was easily the sternest Methodist of them all in this close-knit clan of boat-making Methodists who’d come out of English Methodism, and who’d settled, in the early years of the century, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and who’d later moved to Flatbush.

  Everybody in the extended family had something or other to do with the advancement of the boatyard, even if it was only showing up at banquets during World War II when the navy or the Coast Guard or the army was awarding another “E” pennant for production excellence. Mother Wheeler was known to tolerate no drinking or smoking in her presence—even Coca-Cola was sinful. It sounds a little like the repressive, God-fearing, Oak Park household presided over by the bomberish Grace Hall-Hemingway in the first and second decades of the century, when her recalcitrant first son was straining for escape.

  In 1961, outsiders took control of the business and sent the Wheelers into exile. Some family members tried to start things anew, unsuccessfully. But in the hot heart of it, from, say, the mid-twenties to the late fifties, the Wheeler story, which is first and last a family story, seems so, well, American, meaning that it was ever boom to bust and back to boom again, its highs so high, its lows so low.

  First and last, the old man seems to have been a salesman, so maybe it wouldn’t have truly mattered whether the product was frying pans or toasters. He was born in 1869. The family myth is that he’d started out in his newly married adulthood, before the turn of the century, building houses with a brother-in-law in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He is said to have owned one of the first gas stations in Brooklyn. He got interested in boats and bought a small piece of property at Twenty-third Avenue on Gravesend Bay in Bensonhurst. World War I came along, and America’s entry into it, and the salesman-visionary caught a train to Washington and bid on a contract for 110-foot wooden submarine chasers. He’d never really built a big boat before, but he ended up building nine chasers—and when six of those were finished ahead of time, he got contracts on four more, as well as commissions on tugs for both the army and the navy. All the Wheelers lived at the family boatyard. As the younger sons finished school at Erasmus Hall, they joined their father in the business, putting on the apron and getting knee deep in shavings in the mold loft, taking college classes at night for engineering or drafting or naval design.