Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  But listen again. This is Hemingway writing of the “tea-taking” in a posthumously published 1981 essay in The Paris Review titled “The Art of the Short Story.” He wrote it in 1959, when the journey to shotgun destruction had reached the point of no exit. As Hemingway himself might have said, 1959 marked the end of the beginning of all that. “The Art of the Short Story” is a terrible piece of writing—mawkish, boastful, truculent, almost incoherent in places. But there are paragraphs less embarrassing and more coherent than others, and that includes those in which he writes about the origin of “The Snows”:

  Anyway we came home from Africa, which is a place you stay until the money runs out or you get smacked, one year and at quarantine I said to the ship news reporters when somebody asked me what my projects were that I was going to work and when I had some more money go back to Africa.… Well it was in the papers and a really nice and really fine and really rich woman invited me to tea and we had a few drinks as well and she had read in the papers about this project, and why should I have to wait to go back for any lack of money? She and my wife and I could go to Africa any time and money was only something to be used intelligently for the best enjoyment of good people and so forth. It was a sincere and fine and good offer and I liked her very much and I turned down the offer.

  So I get down to Key West and I start to think what would happen to a character like me whose defects I know, if I had accepted that offer. So I start to invent and I make myself a guy who would do what I invent.… So I invent how someone I know who cannot sue me—that is me—would turn out.… I am not gambling with it. Or maybe I am. Who knows? Real gamblers don’t gamble.… So I make up the man and the woman as well as I can and I put all the true stuff in and with all the load, the most load any short story ever carried, it still takes off and it flies.

  How someone I know who cannot sue me. I am not gambling with it. Or maybe I am. Who knows?

  I spoke earlier of hints left inadvertently behind, and of clues outside the story. I believe that Hemingway left a telltale sign on an envelope that weekend—Arnold Gingrich’s envelope, the one mailed from Chicago with the cash. The word I am referring to is partially obscured by a tiny brown blot. But what I believe is written on its front, along with “Wire Philadelphia” and “go to Museum” and “guy at 11:45 at Scribner,” is: “write Mrs. Whitney.” The last letter of “Whitney,” if it is Whitney, has the little dab of brown. I believe this was Hemingway’s notation to himself to drop her a note of thanks for having him over. Thanks, but no thanks, Mrs. Whitney.

  No correspondence between Hemingway and Whitney has ever surfaced, or vice versa. Which isn’t the same as saying it didn’t once exist.

  One more clue: Jock: The Life and Times of John Hay Whitney, by the late New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn Jr., was published thirty years ago and is the only full-length biography of Jock Whitney. In its opening pages, there is this passage about Jock’s mother: “Helen herself, though she all but stopped writing about the time that a third child was born to her in 1912 and died in infancy, never lost her interest in literature. It pleased her when people like Ernest Hemingway came to call. The story goes that she told him his works were mostly potboilers, and that he concurred.” There are no endnotes in Kahn’s book to pin down when such a visit might have taken place. But if the real Helen Hay Whitney did indeed have the real Ernest Hemingway to a private séance in her salon, and if she did indeed make him an intriguing offer, and if she did indeed tell him that his stuff wasn’t pure literature, and that he should try to do better, did her much younger guest take it all in with a predatory grin and ingrained midwestern politeness, knowing that he’d soon enough fix her up in print?

  The woman named Helen in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is not Helen Hay Whitney, any more than the dying author named Harry is Ernest Hemingway. But there are just enough seeming allusions and parallels and associations to make clear that Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing and had some part of her in mind and some part of himself in mind when he sat down and began to tell lies terrifically, almost recklessly, in the way of a beautiful gambler.

  “There was a lot more to the story,” Hemingway wrote to Buck Lanham.

  But never mind. Because a boat-happy man is on his way home, full of benevolence and momentary good feeling toward humanity, in the wool overcoat he can’t wait to shed. The April balminess of the Keys is two rail nights away.

  Hemingway departed New York on Monday the ninth, by rail, in the early afternoon, ticketed through to Key West, but with a stopover in still-chilly Philadelphia to meet the “scientificos” of an institution that liked to bill itself as “the oldest continuously operating natural history museum in the western hemisphere.” Their names were Charles Cadwalader and Henry Fowler, and they were high officials of the Academy of Natural Sciences. (For the rest of his life, Hemingway could never quite get the name right.) Later that summer, these easterners, stiff in their personalities and dress, both a good deal older than Hemingway, would take him up on his renewed invitation to go fishing with him in Cuban waters aboard his new boat. It was to be a month’s expedition, but in the bargain they’d have something like the adventure of their lives, not to say something for their obituaries some decades hence: that they’d once fished big game with Hemingway.

  Homeward on the Paris, one day out of New York harbor, Hemingway had answered a letter from Cadwalader, the museum’s managing director. The letter had been forwarded to France by Scribners. Cadwalader inquired whether Hemingway might be interested in helping the academy’s naturalists conduct research in the Gulf Stream on sailfish, marlin, tuna, and other game fishes, “in order that our knowledge of these fish may be advanced.” Hemingway’s reply of April 2—one week before he and Cadwalader met—was written in longhand in blue ink, on a small piece of manila stationery folded in half, thus giving him four sides. “On Board” Hemingway wrote over the sepia typescript of “S.S. Paris.” He followed with the old flooding graciousness: “I would be very happy to co-operate with you in any way.… It would be very interesting to have a complete collection of these fish and determine scientifically which are truly different species and which are merely sexual and age variations of the same fish. No one has studied them as they should be studied.”

  Hemingway’s father, Clarence E. (friends and relatives knew him as Ed, which is how I’ll refer to him through the rest of this book), the deeply troubled physician, had an eye for detail, an interest in science and the natural world. He loved microscope slides even as he loved the life of the outdoors. Grace Hall-Hemingway, for all her crushing will, was artistic and refined and highly intelligent. It makes whole sense that the son of Grace and Ed Hemingway would have been drawn to the academy’s proposition.

  Cadwalader received Hemingway’s shipboard reply on the fifth, the day—I feel certain—Ernest and Pauline were at the foot of Cropsey Avenue securing Pilar. The scientifico, who hadn’t yet been awarded that word as his Hemingway nickname, cabled the author immediately, and then followed it up with his own letter, inviting him to be his houseguest in the Philadelphia suburbs. On the sixth (the day he showed home movies to envious friends), Hemingway cabled back at 1:35 p.m.: CAN COME PHILADELPHIA MONDAY AFTERNOON ENROUTE KEYWEST SAME NIGHT WILL WIRE TIME ARRIVAL MUSEUM MONDAY THANKS INVITATION REGRET HURRY UNABLE ACCEPT HEMINGWAY.

  For all his adult life, Hemingway was in love with and expert at the economic art of cable-ese. Economic in more senses than one. The pull and sport of telegram expression, in which the sender seeks to relay as much information as possible in as few words as possible, went back for him to at least 1922, when, having just been elevated to a staff reporter, he was wiring dispatches about the Greco-Turkish war from Constantinople to his penny-pinching bosses at the Toronto Star. As the great literary historian Malcolm Cowley once wrote, cable-ese for Hemingway “was an exercise in omitting everything that can be taken for granted,” which is another way of understanding how he arrived at his literary method.

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bsp; On Monday, he sent another telegram from New York to Philadelphia at 11:50 a.m., an hour or so before boarding a train: ARRIVING MUSEUM THREE FIFTEEN HEMINGWAY. Ten minutes later, the cable was logged in at a Western Union office at 2111 Market Street in Philadelphia. (It would have come over the wire within a minute or so—somebody at the receiving end must have been out for a smoke or busy with other wires.) The words were taken off the teletype paper and glued in narrow strips onto a half sheet. The teletype paper was of the cheap, brownish colored, newsprint kind. The half sheet that the words were pasted onto was inserted into a Western Union envelope, and the envelope was hustled over to Nineteenth and Parkway, about six blocks distant, where it was likely handed to a receptionist at the museum’s front desk, in return for a casually flipped coin. Somebody would have then quick-stepped the wire upstairs to Director Cadwalader’s office, where its throat—the envelope’s—would have been slit with a sterling-silver opener in just the way they always do it in old black-and-white movies. That nearly eight-decade-old wire, with its slit envelope, with its logged-in times, with its raised and glue-crusted strip of words on the cheap teletype paper, can still be fingered in a high-vaulted room in the academy’s turn-of-the-century library on Logan Square in Philadelphia.

  There’s no documentary record of what transpired at the museum, but things had to have gone well, judging from subsequent correspondence. Surely the celebrity in their midst would have taken a little time out to look at mounted fish, at beetles and shells and minerals in glass cases, at the recently installed dioramas of wildlife. That would have brought back memories of Saturday boyhood outings to The Field Museum of Natural History on Lake Shore Drive in downtown Chicago.

  Late that night: he’s hurtling through blackness on the Havana Special, proudest train name of the Florida East Coast Railway. At the end of the nineteenth century, industrialist Henry Flagler invented South Florida as a world-class tourist destination. Then, in the first years of the twentieth, the empire builder sought to polish his myth by erecting the Key West Extension: 157 miles of track, over trestles and bridges and viaducts, across coral and mangrove swamps and limestone outcrops and spits of sand, to the southernmost town in the continental United States. (On a meridian, it lies 755 miles farther south than Los Angeles.) As you go down, the Gulf’s on your right, the deep-blue Atlantic on your left. Flagler’s Key West Extension, completed in 1912, never made a profit; now, in the mid-Depression, passenger traffic on the line is down to one train a day in each direction. The extension’s in receivership. Seventeen months hence—September 1935—the “Railroad that Went to Sea” will be wiped away by a murderous hurricane, and afterward the remains of its bridges, viaducts, and roadbeds would be used by the government to construct highway U.S. 1. By 1938, travelers by land will be able to go to the bottom of the Keys via a two-lane without having to drive their car onto a ferry between some of the islands.

  The Havana Special is so named because of the way it connects at the end of the line with six-hour steamer service to Cuba. The waiting boats anchor at the town’s old seaport, out at Trumbo Point. The trains chug in along the north side of the island and pull up to the piers alongside the boats. The passengers walk down the steps of their Pullman car and up the gangplank of the Peninsular & Occidental Steamship Company.

  The rest of this has to be conjured, the train rolling through the dull electric glow of cities and towns on the other side of a Pullman glass, Perryville and Baltimore and Washington and Richmond and Savannah and Jacksonville and St. Augustine and East Palatka and Daytona and West Palm Beach; the deeply satisfied man going in and out of dining cars and lounge cars with their white-jacketed Filipino waiters and silver-stand ashtrays. By morning light of the second day, Wednesday, April 11, 1934, Hemingway’s on the five-hour leg out of Miami: Homestead, Florida City, Key Largo, Rock Harbor, Plantation, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine, Pirates Cove, Boca Chica, and, at last, at almost exactly noon, end of the line, end of the continent, the little water-encircled town of 11,600 “conchs.” Locals amuse themselves here by cultivating orchids in the forks of trees, tying them in with nylon hosiery, so that their white, twisty, spindly-legged roots will work down the sides of the trees, embedding themselves in the bark like bulged veins in a grotesque leg. Almost all the cigar factories have closed down. The average income is seven dollars a month. Civic government operates like a lazy Latin palace, and the city council will soon declare municipal bankruptcy. A Negro orchestra plays in a downtown hotel every Saturday night and balcony seats at the picture show go for a dime (fifteen cents in the orchestra). Turtle is one of the local delicacies. The evening sky can bleed from pink to red to purple into the deepest azures, and the sailor bars along the wharves are like dank caves of sin. Maybe best of all, mornings are glassy and cool, raked with the sea’s quiet. Ernest Hemingway is going to continue to live and work and sink himself deeply into the offerings of the sensual world in this subtropical offshore place for about another five years before upending everything again and expatriating himself and his boat and his not-yet-third wife more or less permanently to Cuba, an even more exotic locale for a writer.

  Thirty-six hours after boarding in Philadelphia, he’s stepping down from his Pullman car to cheers and a jazz band. The Key West Citizen has a reporter on hand to take notes and to get it semi-accurately. The story will be on page one tomorrow, a one-column news feature, alongside a larger piece about FDR having just concluded a fishing trip in the Bahamas.

  Ernest Hemingway, famed writer, adventurer and big game hunter, who was absent from Key West on a big game hunt since last summer, returned home on the Havana Special from New York yesterday and was given one of the most enthusiastic ovations ever accorded a celebrity. Mrs. Hemingway, son, Pat, a group of artists and writers, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Thompson and other Key West friends were waiting with a jazz band to give a vociferous welcome to the returning author. When the train was pulling into the terminals the group gathered near the tracks and just as it was slowing down the band started a thrilling march accompanied by shouts of welcome as Mr. Hemingway stepped down from the Pullman.

  After eight months away, with a new boat coming, with a new book brewing, with two of your boys and your wife and John and Katy Dos Passos and half a dozen other friends waiting for you at the bottom of the steps, with live jazz, in the sunshine, you’re home.

  PART TWO

  WHEN SHE WAS NEW, 1934-1935

  If I had a boat

  I’d go out on the ocean

  And if I had a pony

  I’d ride him on my boat

  And we could all together

  Go out on the ocean

  Me upon my pony on my boat.

  —LYLE LOVETT,

  from “If I Had a Boat”

  There’s a small park in Old Havana called the Plaza de Armas where you can sit on cracked marble early in the morning, before the heat gets up. It’s a block from Hemingway’s hotel. The park dates from the 1600s. It’s shaded by immense trees, with a fountain in the middle. A crew of elderly women, in their blue smocks, their heads turbaned in towels, come to clean the park every morning. They work with stiff brooms and dustpans connected to long swivel handles. They inch along. It might take half an hour to make a ten-by-fifteen-foot section pristine again from the cigarette butts and gum wrappers and condoms of the night before. They’ll even comb the dirt around the protruding roots of the royal palms and Chinese banyan trees. They jabber in Spanish.

  By nine or so, the park is filling up with locals and tourists—Spaniards who’ve been disgorged the night before from Iberia 747s, Germans, South Americans. By then, too, the booksellers, who set up their portable wooden stalls every day on the perimeter of the park, are hard at their hawking—postcards of Che, last year’s calendars, Marxist manifestos, water-swollen baseball guides from the Cuban pro leagues of, say, 1946, bookmarks of Fidel and Hemingway shaking hands the one time they ever met. It’s something like the booksellers along the Seine in Paris. Present
ly, cartoonists materialize to produce ten-second likenesses with Flair pens on sheets of slick paper, hoping for the illicit Yankee buck in your pocket. Afro-Cuban women in flowing Technicolor garb, with firetruck-red lipstick, are coming over to plant huge stencil-like kisses on your cheek, hoping for the same payday. Vendors selling peanuts in skinny white paper cones are also passing by. The music makers are best, though. With their gourds and guitars and homemade instruments, they begin writhing around, their bodies transforming into S curves. They’ll laugh and pull you from your seat and try to get you to dance with them. (It’ll make you think of Hemingway, who famously couldn’t dance a lick. On the dance floor, he was said to be like a trained bear in a bad circus.) Meanwhile, the old women who’ve put the park new again have slipped from sight. They must be home, in their airless apartments, rich with Cuban aromas.

  The Plaza de Armas is situated almost exactly halfway between the hotel room where Hemingway drove his thoughts and memory-sensations into literature and the docks where he nightly secured his boat, in that first summer of Pilar’s history, after he’d brought her over to Havana for the striped marlin runs. If you’ve ever read anything about Hemingway in Cuba, before his permanent relocation there at the end of the 1930s, you know that the Ambos Mundos was his favorite hotel. The name means “both worlds,” new and old, Cuban and Spanish. Room 511 is a Hemingway shrine—maybe Fidel himself wouldn’t be allowed to sleep in it. The room is claimed to have the best view and cross-ventilation in the hotel and possibly in the city. It’s a large corner room, in a triangle shape. When you take the state-run tour of the room, it’ll make you remember all over again what a gift and sense and intuition he had for locating himself in the best symbolic place. The great critic Alfred Kazin once said that. For so many years, that luck and art and intuition held.