Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Editors of The Saturday Evening Post also tried to woo him—they’d be eager to pay $4,000 for a piece of fiction and up to $2,500 for any article he’d like to write.

  The wooed man also saw—abortively—a sad, anxious, apparently potted F. Scott Fitzgerald, who’d come up to New York from Baltimore for the publication of Tender Is the Night, the novel that both Fitzgerald and Max Perkins were praying would resuscitate a fading reputation. Fitzgerald was not quite seven years from his early death in the screenwriting mills of Hollywood. Tender, of course, is the story of an impossibly charmed couple, the Divers, Dick and Nicole, whose lives are charmed no longer. Doctor Diver is mysteriously going down; he’s lost some essence of himself, some indefinable emotional vitality. The pride and discipline are draining away. Just as mysteriously, his emotionally ill spouse is regaining her health. The creator of this beautifully written but structurally difficult-to-follow fable hadn’t published a novel since The Great Gatsby. That was nine years before. In between had come Zelda Fitzgerald’s breakdowns and institutionalizations, and the collapse of the world’s economy. The twenties were over, and the poet of the Jazz Age feared in his bones his book would fail. As critic Alfred Kazin once wrote, Fitzgerald had labored over Tender while “struggling against a mountain of debt, his notoriety as a drunk and a has-been, and his despair over his schizophrenic wife.” So there is a way to think about Fitzgerald’s achievement in heroic terms, even if so much of his ruin was self-inflicted. He feared for his book’s failure even as the friend and fellow author who’d supplanted him at Scribners—and who’d just bought a new boat, and before whom the supplanted man was apparently behaving like a pathetic drunk—seemed to do little else but succeed, at least insofar as Scott’s blurred vision could register. I say “apparently” behaving like a drunk because we have no one else’s word for what happened that weekend but Hemingway’s, and it is so brief that it’s hardly word at all (though there are other accounts of how badly Scott was behaving in general, waiting for his book to appear).

  Fifteen months earlier, in January 1933, also in New York, Scott had met Ernest in a drunken state, and that time, too, things had gone badly. Edmund Wilson was present and recorded the night in his journal:

  Scott with his head down on the table between us like the dormouse at the Mad Tea Party—lay down on floor, went to can and puked—alternately made us hold his hand and asked us whether we liked him and insulted us.… Hemingway told him he oughtn’t to let Zelda’s psychoanalysis ball him up about himself—he was yellow if he didn’t write.… When Scott was lying in the corner on the floor, Hemingway said, Scott thinks that his penis is too small.

  According to the late critic-biographer Matthew Bruccoli, who wrote acutely about Hemingway and Fitzgerald for decades, the 1933 encounter possibly prompted the following entry from Fitzgerald in his notebooks: “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.” But they did, a year later, on that April weekend in New York. What survives is an oft-quoted letter from Hemingway to Fitzgerald, written about eight weeks later, from Key West, after Hemingway had read and made his thumbs-down critical judgments about Tender. (By then, however, Hemingway had slowly begun to revise his first opinions of the novel, albeit grudgingly.) Fitzgerald ached to know what Hemingway felt. He had allowed himself almost to grovel for Hemingway’s response. “For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings,” Scott had written on May 10, a month after their meeting. It was a brief note. What he got back was a long letter dated May 28 from a supposed friend who knew he had every psychological advantage; a friend who by turns bullied and lectured and counseled and pitied and forgave him: pure Hemingway. It couldn’t have helped matters that the letter contained brilliant and offhand turns of phrase. “I’d like to see you and talk about things with you sober,” Hemingway wrote. “You were so damned stinking in N.Y. we didn’t get anywhere.” (More on that later.)

  Tender Is the Night, published at $2.50 a copy and contracted to earn its author thirty-seven-and-a-half cents a copy in royalties, went through three small printings and sold about fifteen thousand copies in all, a disappointment, but not an out-and-out commercial failure, as has often been said. It netted its strapped author an eventual $5,104.65. But what the novel has come to represent in American literature obviously has no price.

  Something else apparently happened to Hemingway that weekend, involving a woman who, so far as I know, has never been identified in print. That is close to astonishing considering this long-dead woman’s claimed importance—by Hemingway himself—as the principal inspiration for what is one of his two or three greatest short fictions, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The extravagantly wealthy Manhattan society matron, according to Hemingway, invited him to tea and presented him with an alluring offer. (You might also call it provocative.) She would foot the bill for a return trip to Africa, apparently whenever he wished, as soon as he wished, as long as she could go along, accompanying Pauline. Carlos Baker says briefly of this incident: “As Ernest later told the story, he considered the lady’s offer and politely declined.” Baker doesn’t say her name, either in his text or notes, and neither will her name be found among his archived papers in Firestone Library at Princeton.

  I believe, however, that Hemingway left behind enough clues, in both life and art, some deliberate, some inadvertent, to allow us to identify her. The deliberate ones he inserted into “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” a parable about many things, but perhaps most centrally about the corruptions of wealth, and about what those corruptions have done to a kept man who once saw himself as the possessor of a true writing gift but is now dying bitterly from gangrene on the African plain. The man in the fiction wishes to blame his fate as a failed writer on his rich bitch of a wife, whom he has never loved, not really.

  The real-life woman breathing behind this work, or so I believe, controlled a fortune in the neighborhood of $179 million. Hers was one of the greatest and best-known surnames in America. The name stood for money, for sport, for art, for philanthropy, for noblesse oblige. She would have been twenty-three years older than the not quite thirty-five-year-old author who came to call on an April day before he entrained home to Key West. She was a big-boned, middle-aged widow, well preserved, with high flair, with noted cheek, with literary abilities of her own (she’d published a lot of poetry in her youth, some of it quite erotic for its time), whose financier husband had died seven years before of an attack of acute indigestion, leaving her the owner of one of the finest racing stables in America. Her name was Helen Hay Whitney, who’d won the Kentucky Derby, with Twenty Grand three years earlier, and she very much intrigued her guest.

  I believe Hemingway both wanted and didn’t want us to know her name. It’s almost as if Hemingway was baiting his future chroniclers with hints, not to say courting libel in his own day. What a dangerous game, dangerous down to the point of giving the “made-up” woman in your story the same first name as that of the person with whom you’d been to tea in the enraptured afterglow of buying your boat. (According to Hemingway, “tea” was a few knock-backs of whiskey.) When the story was published, Helen Hay Whitney, with all her wealth, would have been very much and litigiously alive. But that’s not why the incident is worth pausing to think about. Rather, it’s because it goes straight to the heart of Hemingway’s method of creation: telling terrific lies about real people, rearranging and transposing and conjoining, so that what he made up was somehow truer than if it had actually happened.

  “Stop it. Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?” pleads the woman in the story whose name is Helen.

  “I don’t like to leave anything,” answers her husband. “I don’t like to leave things behind.”

  What happened, apparently, is that the widow of Payne Whitney had read about Hemingway in the papers, had seen his photograph. She saw the papers of April 4 in which the author stood beside his wife and held
his banded fedora and told the ship-news reporters of his intention to return home to Florida “to work like hell and make enough money so that I can go back to Africa and really learn something about lions.”

  She sent him a note. Please come by. Hemingway doesn’t say where the visit took place. Were just the two of them present? His couched words in subsequent years seem to suggest that. According to Hemingway, his hostess told him there’d be no need to worry about making more money for Africa because she had all the money required, and would be pleased to share some of it, since money was something only to be used well by those who possessed it.

  Was she propositioning him with her money? Certainly you could construe that from what Hemingway later said, when he was spinning it all into myth, even though he also seemed to go out of his way in his several written accounts (there are only the written ones to go on, although Hemingway is said to have told the story more than once to friends) to say how “sincere” her offer was, how truly “nice” a person she was. It’s possible her offer was no more and no less than what it purported to be on the surface. Where does the truth reside?

  Here’s Hemingway writing of the incident in a January 1, 1947, letter, a decade after “The Snows” was published, to General Buck Lanham:

  I put what I thought about the very rich (on a very limited scale) into The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Probably told you the story of that one. When I came back from Africa where I had been happier than I ever was in my life some reporter asked me what I was going to do and I said earn enough money to go back to Africa. So that was in the paper and the next day one of the richest (and nicest) women in US. wrote me a note and asked me to have tea (Bourbon was tea) with her and told me she had read what I said in the paper and that I didn’t need to make money to go to Africa. She had all the money that was needed for that. There was a lot more to the story but I wrote the Snows as a study of what would or could have happened to me if I had accepted the offer.

  Where is that note she supposedly sent to him? I wish I knew.

  The dying man in the fiction is filling with gangrene, while his spouse, the good and rich bitch, “this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent,” waits with him for an evacuation plane from Nairobi. The story takes place over the course of most of one day and that night. The rescue plane doesn’t arrive in time. Harry dies because he has done something so simple as to fail to use iodine two weeks previously when a thorn had scratched his knee, as he and his wife had crouched closer with their cameras to a herd of waterbuck. And so he goes in and out of his dreams and deliriums and acid accusations while the rot rises and the hyenas inch closer. “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.” The things he’d never get to write are presented in the form of five italicized and intensely poetic flashbacks.

  But it’s really himself Harry hates. “He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it … by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook.”

  As I have said, there’s no question that Hemingway’s imagination is conflating and rearranging and transposing and upending several women and different events from his life in the service of his art. He’s amalgamating two wives, one a former, one a current, both older than himself, both of whom, in one way or another, in lesser or greater ways, had kept him. At the time he wrote “The Snows,” Hemingway had been married just twice. If he’d had four wives by the mid-thirties, perhaps each would have made it in, in one rearranged and unflattering way or another. There are clearly disquieting messages for Pauline Hemingway, but there’s no question that Hadley is a rearranged presence, too, and so also Agnes von Kurowsky, the Red Cross nurse for whom the young volunteer ambulance driver had fallen, so headlong, during his recovery from shrapnel wounds in a Milan hospital in World War I.

  “The Snows” is the story in which Hemingway makes the famous crack about his friend Fitzgerald and his “romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott.” When Fitzgerald saw that passage on page 200 of the August 1936 Esquire, he wrote to his friend and asked him to lay off in print. Hemingway apparently wrote a nasty letter back, which we don’t have. For republished editions of the story, Hemingway changed Fitzgerald’s name to Julian. But there was no chance any serious Hemingway student could have missed the true target of his scorn.

  “The Snows” is the fiction in which the verbally abused older wife says, “You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a middle-aged woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do.” Harry’s wife has a great house on Long Island. She has a “well-known, well loved face” from magazines like Spur and Town & Country. She isn’t what you’d call pretty, although Harry does appreciate her face. Harry’s wife has a great gift for the bedroom. She is fond of drink. She has a daughter who made a debut. She has survived the tragedy of a husband’s early death. Things had commenced easily enough between the widowed Helen and Harry. “She liked what he wrote and she had always envied the life he led. She thought he did exactly what he wanted to. The steps by which she had acquired him and the way in which she had finally fallen in love with him were all part of a regular progression in which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away what remained of his old life.”

  In the spring of 1934, Helen Hay Whitney was fifty-eight years old. Although she was matronly looking, and had sort of a mannish face, the First Lady of the American Turf, as the sports pages liked to call her, still had piercing eyes and a way with long-trailing leopard-print scarves. She lived at 972 Fifth Avenue, that is, when she wasn’t living at the family’s 438-acre Greentree, in Manhasset, Long Island. It was one of the greatest houses on Long Island—twenty-one servants, stables, kennels, three grass tennis courts, its own nine-hole golf course, baseball diamond, indoor and outdoor pools, four Rolls-Royces in the garage.

  She’d gotten married in 1902, in a Washington wedding attended by Theodore Roosevelt and all of his cabinet and the justices of the Supreme Court. Her father, John Hay, had once been President Lincoln’s private secretary, and then President McKinley’s secretary of state, and then TR’s secretary of state. She was the mother of two adult children, Joan Whitney and John Hay Whitney, better known to the world as Jock.

  In the fiction, the woman named Helen had lost her husband “when she was still a comparatively young woman and for awhile she had devoted herself to her two just-grown children, who did not need her and were embarrassed at having her about, to her stable of horses, to books, and to bottles.”

  When Payne Whitney died, his wife was fifty-one. Their two just-grown children, Jock and Joan, respectively, were twenty-three and twenty-four.

  Jock Whitney was destined to become a much more famous Whitney than either his mother or sister. Among other things he was a financier, sportsman, philanthropist, and would become the last owner of the New York Herald Tribune, in whose editions of April 4, 1934 (this would have been three decades before Jock controlled the Trib), on page 4, Ernest Hemingway’s photograph appeared beside this headline: “Stalking Lions Was ‘Exciting’ to Hemingway.”

  As for Jock’s only sibling: by the spring of 1934, Joan Whitney was Joan Whitney Payson, whose Wall Street husband, Charles Shipman Payson, was waiting for the Wheeler boatyard in Brooklyn to complete his custom-built yacht, already named Saga. Not that Hemingway—in whose unfathomable head an idea for a story seems to have grown, following a spot of tea and spirits with a rich society lady—might have even known of that watery connection.

  “The Snows” is almost nine thousand words long. Hemingway had first worked on the story in the late summer and early fall of 1935, after a season of great fishing on Bimini with Pilar, and had the
n put it away and didn’t come back to it until the spring of 1936 in Cuba. In the early draft, the dying writer’s name is Henry Walden, but by the time the story appeared in print the main character is just Harry. If Hemingway had kept to his earlier plan, the initials of his protagonist, no less than those of Harry’s wife, would have been HW. (Hemingway doesn’t say the name of Harry’s wife until late in the piece. Only then does he begin calling her Helen, whereas earlier she’d been “the woman” or “she.” It’s almost as if he was daring himself. In for a dime, in for a dollar.)

  Literary critics have argued for years whether Harry’s dream of flight to Kilimanjaro at the end of the story represents moral redemption. But apart from that, and separate from the beauty of the language itself, the real power of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is that an author still so young and in seeming control of his life and craft was able so vividly to foresee his own doom. There’s a school of critics and biographers who contend that, by the early 1930s—roughly around the time he got his boat—the arc of Hemingway’s creative life had crested and was on its way down. I think it’s far more complex than that. I think it’s a sine curve, like most of our lives.

  “The Snows” had been off the stands about a month when Hemingway wrote to MacLeish from Cooke City, Montana: “Me I like life very much. So much it will be a big disgust when have to shoot myself.”