Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  The hitcher and rail rider left town somewhere around the end of the first week of February. He kept notes all the way, hoping for stories. When he wasn’t making notes, he struggled with The Brothers Karamozov—the mentor had put it on the reading list. After he reached Minnesota, Arnold sent a letter to Key West, and on February 26 Hemingway answered: “Glad to hear you got home all right. Ten days was good time.” He filled him in on the latest news, which included getting a new exhaust pipe for the boat and doing a minor repair and paint job on the engines. “[S]he looks swell and we have discovered how to fix a black paint that won’t blister.”

  The returnee worked on a fishing piece that turned out badly, and then spent two weeks writing another fishing piece that he felt was good enough to send out—but it was quickly sent back by two sporting magazines. “When you don’t look it over the stuff doesn’t seem to go so hot,” he told Hemingway in a letter that May. But in the same letter Samuelson had some good news: another fishing piece, with his mentor at the center, had been accepted by Outdoor Life. The editors said they’d pay him one hundred dollars and publish it that June. He could scarcely believe it. (When he saw the piece in print, he could scarcely believe how much they’d changed some of his sweated-out sentences.)

  He went out to North Dakota and built a dugout tar-paper shack into the side of a hill. When the doors and windows were closed, the shack smelled like a dirt cellar, but it was a place to be alone and think and try to write. He came back to the Twin Cities and worked on construction projects for his brother, the Minneapolis doctor who’d dropped him off at the north side of town four years before. It was summer now, and in the mail came sixty dollars from Key West—payment on an old promise. “Dear Ernest,” he replied, “The maestro is always happy a long time after he gets a letter from you, and for the last one with the check in it I’m especially grateful. I’m sitting pretty now. I had left fifty bucks out of the other dough, after a couple months dissipation like a rich nigger in Minneapolis, building the shack, buying a rifle and a few months of good living in the country. The hundred and ten I have now will carry me through very comfortably until next summer.… It is damned marvelous being able to live the way you want to live and doing the work you like even if it doesn’t sell.” He was going to Dakota again, to try to get the writing started again. Eleven days later, from White Earth, he wrote: “I couldn’t get at ease in the city where most of the people I knew thought a great deal about making money and spending it.” He added, “I’ll start writing again tomorrow on some new stuff.” He added, “Out here a fellow can write a little every day and if you keep visiting with the neighbors you don’t feel like you’re going dry.”

  In the fall, Arnold rode the rails down to Arizona and on to Mexico. He kept filling up the notebooks, hoping to find stories. Once, he played the fiddle over a Mexican radio station. In the spring, he came back to Minnesota, bringing some horsehair ropes and belts and two rawhide lariats. “Just blew in yesterday in a cold wintery rain,” he wrote to Hemingway on April 28, 1936. “Wish to hell I could be down there chewing the fat with you now.”

  The trip into Mexico did yield up a piece, and he was able to sell it to Esquire. It can’t be said whether Hemingway midwifed it into the magazine, which by now was considered by writers to be one of the top publishing venues in the country. “Dear Mr. Samuelson,” wrote Gingrich’s secretary. “Enclosed is our check for $125 in payment for North American rights on your manuscript, MEXICO FOR TRAMPS, including pocket size digest rights for which you will be given additional compensation, if and when sold.” The story appeared in the November 1937 issue of the magazine and was labeled “Article,” although some of it sounded made up. It had a snappy beginning and the usual clear Hemingway echoes: “When they saw me yawn and knew I was getting sleepy the cook led me through the kitchen out the back door to a shed built of shipping boxes, the thin boards shrunk so there were half-inch air spaces between them for the wind to blow through.”

  Late in that same summer, 1936, having been back and forth across the country twice since leaving Key West, he wrote: “The hell of it is you can’t write or even try to when you’ve got a ten hour a day job in this goddamned heat.… My brother has made a respectable, hardworking fellow out of me; I have got a job now, a 1931 ford coupe that looks like new and a redheaded mistress with a pretty face and broad hips.” He said he had just read “the gangrene story” in Esquire. He meant “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In August, when the letter caught up to Hemingway, the headlines in the world’s papers were about Franco and his fascist troops launching war against Republican Spain.

  Arnold got married. Her name was Vivian Stettler. She came up to his shoulder blades and had rolls of curly dark hair and a sense of adventure nearly to match his own. The two took off to see the continent again on a rebuilt Indian motorcycle. He liked going with his shirt off, head low, his beloved clinging to his belt loops with the wind rushing past their ears. Sometimes he rode with a ridiculous-looking Abe Lincoln stovepipe hat pulled down tight. Sometimes he worked all night at his writing notes by campfire light.

  There was a temporary job down in Texas, breaking wild broncos. Arnold had been around horses for most of his life. He took the job and then came back to the Midwest, where he helped his physician-brother, who didn’t want to be beholden to other people’s rules, build his own hospital. When that was over, there were other construction projects. These always got in the way of the writing intentions. “Dear Maestro,” Hemingway wrote on April 24, 1942. “It was good to get a letter from you and to know that you are okay. After all, the building trade is quite a lot like writing, when you boil it all down, and I know you will get back to the other too.”

  With world war on, the Samuelsons went to Alaska, up near the Arctic Circle, where they found work as civil servants on a government construction project. After the war, yearning for warmer weather and what he thought of as a Thoreau-like existence, Arnold convinced his spouse to go back down to Texas. Robert Lee, the place where they settled, was the seat of Coke County, named for the man who’d led the South against the North in the Civil War. It was on the remote edge of the great Sonoran Desert, at the confluence of Mountain Creek and the Colorado River, in the valley of what is called the Edwards Plateau. The whole of Coke County had a population of barely three thousand people, making it one of the most sparsely populated counties in America. Robert Lee was its tumbleweed metropolis. A wealthy and ex-Olympic polo player named Fred Roe, native of those West Texas parts, gave Arnold a job of retraining his polo ponies for ranch work.

  He fell in love with his new home—the bluebonnets in the spring, the sun going cloudlessly toward noon for seven or eight months of the year. Things black as the ocean at night and a red sky at morning. Husband and wife scrounged savings and bought property on the outskirts of town, at the south end, in what was thought of as Mexican Town. They built a small, tin-roofed, cinder-block house back in the brush, off a dirt road, a house that for the next four decades would be a kind of Rube Goldberg work ever in progress. In their front yard, they began Mesquite Lumber Company, constructing inexpensive, well-made, ready-built houses at the rate of about one every six months. It was a little hard to run a lumber company without a telephone, but the head of the household vowed he’d never have one.

  After the move to Robert Lee, Arnold rarely traveled again. When he did venture out after 1946, it was for temporary construction jobs on bridges in other parts of the state. Those damp fields blurring by in moonlight from the rackety doorway of boxcars were history, and so was that kid dancing on a boat over a porpoise sighting, crying “Yi! Yi! Yi! Oh, boy! Oh boy! Wow! Eeeeyi! Yi!” That had been only little more than a decade ago.

  A daughter was born in 1947, a son three years later. Correspondence with Ernest Hemingway grew sparser.

  In 1955, his mother died. “Dear Arnold,” his closest sibling wrote on May 5 of that year.

  As you know mother is no more with us. I stayed with her all night
the last 3 nights. She would not let go of my hands. She would give me messages to everyone. I tried to call you but they said you would not come to the phone [he means a neighbor’s phone]. I told her you would not be coming and that I had tried to get you. She was satisfied that it was impossible.… Enclosed you will find a bank draft with $1,000 of her money for you.… Your brother, Sam.

  That same year, an ex-hobo, who must still have been carrying somewhere inside dreams of becoming a recognized writer, sold a second story to Esquire. It was called “One Too Many,” and it picked up some of the old Mexico adventures. He wrote about its acceptance to his mentor, and from Cuba came a wire of congratulation, care of Mesquite Lumber Company: HAPPIEST YOUR SALE ESQUIRE VERY PROUD SURE YOULL SELL OTHERS IF STORES AS GOOD AS YOUR LETTERS BEST LUCK ERNEST. That December, in his Christmas card, Hemingway wrote: “Dear Maestro: Love to you and your family and congratulations on all the good work this year. Best always. Ernest.” But for whatever reason, “One Too Many” didn’t get published.

  The “abused share cropper of the high seas”—as Hemingway had once mocked him in a letter to a mutual acquaintance—was in his mid-forties by now, still fit, with a goatee. Late at night, he’d sit with his shoes and socks off in his favorite corner, next to the immense fireplace that he’d set into mortar, rock by rock. He’d be reading, or playing his violin, or studying Russian, or recording things onto cassette tapes, or making journal entries, or just puffing on a homemade pipe. His family was aware of a long-ago manuscript he’d drafted in the company of Ernest Hemingway—that’s about all they knew. He’d grown increasingly reticent around them, especially his children.

  But in other ways, his eccentricities raged. He enjoyed dressing like the rag-picker’s son. He carved his sandals from rubber tires. He wore his belt over top of the loops—he’d learned to do that on Pilar. He’d show up in Robert Lee on a Saturday wearing three and four hats stacked on top of one another. He’d drive through town in his beat-up pickup with his beloved horse Bozo in the rear and then let the nag out to graze on the courthouse lawn—where was the city ordinance that prohibited it? He walked through the streets sawing away on his violin, acknowledging no one. He’d sit in the back of the Baptist church and sing loudly and off-key and out of synch with the rest of the congregation—and stay afterward to offer a point-by-point critique of the pastor’s sermon. He’d start arguments with the Ford dealer or the guy who had the hardware store, and then quote to them arcane points of tort law, for he’d become something of a self-taught lawyer, having scrounged out-of-date Texas law books at garage sales. Still, most of it seemed harmless enough, the various actings-out of a Coke County crank.

  Harmless? There’s a cartoon of him that his daughter drew—she might have been perhaps seven or eight at the time, so this would have meant the early fifties. It’s of a figure with horns and huge teeth and menacing eyes and a pointy tail and freakish-looking ears and an ugly stubble of whiskers. The caption bubbles surrounding the monster: “Ears that hear everything.” “I am boss.” “Fool.” “Take your bath.”

  If that was the scary father, there was the good one, too, only you never quite knew when he would show. Sometimes in the summer, Arnold would tell his daughter to fetch her playmate Lois Eubanks (the Eubankses were the Samuelsons’ closest neighbors), and Arnold would spend the afternoon towing the two, squealing, on an old rubber raft through the floatable parts of the Colorado.

  In 1956, he made the papers again when he stole his own horse from the town pound. He said that Bozo, who was fourteen years old and fairly broken down, had been taken from him illegally and wasn’t being properly fed and watered and so he had every moral right to take him back without permission. About one hundred spectators crowded into city hall for the comic horse-opera trial. Even out-of-town reporters showed. “I’m appearing,” he announced, “as an attorney for the defendant and not as the defendant.” The county prosecutor wouldn’t let him operate a popcorn stand during recess. He was found guilty of the theft and fined one hundred dollars. “They think I’m crazy,” he told a reporter. Vivian Samuelson and the two children had stayed home.

  Could such behavior have been masking something else? Could it have represented some form of redirected rage and plowed-under bitterness? “A writer not writing is practically a maniac within himself,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said.

  “My father kept a journal and wrote constantly, but he was never satisfied with his efforts,” Arnold’s daughter would write, many years hence, in the quiet introduction to the book her father wouldn’t live to see published.

  Another telegram arrived, with another family shock: PLANE CRASH SAM AND BOYS BILLED. It was August 26, 1957. “Billed” was supposed to be “killed.” Dr. Sam Samuelson and his young sons had gone down in a light plane that the physician was piloting. I wonder how long Dr. Sam’s brother might have stared at the crazy word “billed.”

  In the early summer of 1961, after getting the news on the radio of another death (not yet termed a suicide), Arnold wrote to Arnold Gingrich. Gingrich had published him once in almost three decades, but the two had kept in sporadic touch because of the Hemingway connection, just as Hemingway and Samuelson had kept sporadically in touch. Gingrich’s Publisher’s Page column of that October, addressing the suicide and the magazine’s long association with Hemingway, was titled “E.H. A Coda from the Maestro.” He wrote: “We’ll let the Maestro end this. His name is Arnold Samuelson and we heard from him, right after the event, from Texas. ‘Ernest lived as long as he could. His last act was the most deliberate of his life. He had never written about his own suffering. He said it all without words in the language any man can understand.’ ” In a handwritten note to Samuelson, Gingrich said: “I was more moved by your letter, written on those sheets of that same old yellow paper from Whitehead Street, than I was by any other single thing connected with Ernest’s death.”

  Every now and then, a librarian or Hemingway scholar from some far place would send a letter to Robert Lee, making inquiries about the long-ago, chance relationship. Arnold wasn’t interested.

  Years later, the town fathers wouldn’t let him have a part in a historical pageant called “Old Coke County.” It was held at Mountain Creek Amphitheater. In the middle of the performance, the local agitator came up through the audience, playing his violin, halting things onstage.

  After the local paper stopped publishing his rants to the editor, Arnold began taking out his own paid announcements. You can read them now and envision rage disguised as humor: “Vote for Cheap at Half Price Samuelson. Community Candidate for County Judge.… If elected, I will be available at all times to commissioners desirous of voting themselves another raise. I’ll show ’em how to get both front feet in the trough and make room for me, too.” Even the ads for his lumber-and-housing business were a hoot: “Mesquite Lumber Company. Arnold Samuelson, Janitor in Charge. Special Notice: I’m not setting any price on the two bedroom house now under construction. When it’s finished the highest bidder gets it. The main thing is to get it out of here. If we can’t do anything else we might at least be able to clean up the yard.”

  In 1973, a book about the long-ago trunk murders and Winnie Ruth Judd (who was still alive, in California) was published. In Minnesota, one of the grown daughters of the late Dr. Sam Samuelson reviewed Winnie Ruth Judd: The Trunk Murders for her book club. Hearing about this, her uncle in West Texas became outraged. He sent a cassette tape to his niece filled with ramblings, labeling her activities bloodthirsty, shameful.

  Joan Davis, justice of the peace, lifelong Robert Lee–ite, was something of a Samuelson family friend:

  A strange man. I think they were prisoners of each other, Arnold and his wife. People get to doing that to each other. His joke was, the joke is on everybody else. He thought he was so far above everybody else. Of course when you come here as a Yankee, you’ve got one strike against you right there. I think those kids were ashamed of him. He might do or say anything. I think they felt
people avoided them because of their father. He could be insulting to people, rude. You never knew how he was going to react. His daughter used to baby-sit my kids—I wasn’t sure Arnold would ever allow it, but he did. I go to a lot of deaths here. They can’t move the body till I get there. I can’t imagine the effect of something like that trunk murder on him when he was so young. Your sister chopped into pieces. Even if you never saw it, you saw it in your mind. You know, toward the end of his life, after Vivian had left him, carloads of kids would drive in the gate and heckle him. I am ashamed to say that my own children were part of that. He’d run out of the house with a revolver over his head, shouting at the kids to go away. He never would have fired it at them. I was always more fond of him than angry at him. Here’s something. No one ever mentioned his book about Hemingway to me. I don’t know a single person in this whole town who ever mentioned it to me when it came out after he was dead. I do have a copy, though. I read it and liked it a good deal. His daughter sent me one.

  Joan Burns, Robert Lee–ite for most of her life:

  I can’t recall any real exchanges with him. He’d sort of have his head down if you passed him. I could never figure out what was eating him. It was as if he was just continually angry about something, frustrated. We always looked forward to what he was going to put in the paper. I did know he was abusive to his family. I’m not sure how I knew this. Maybe from my own children. I guess I would say of his own children, for lack of a better word, they were just … cowed. They went around looking not very good, you know, old clothes and cast-down faces. It was almost as if he wanted to keep his family out of town, as if he didn’t want them to mix with anyone. The Hemingway connection was kind of a rumor around Robert Lee. Probably a lot of people didn’t believe it. Maybe they never gave a hoot about Ernest Hemingway in the first place. I do remember certain things all these years later that stick—his daughter, for instance, she had the most beautiful blue eyes. Whatever happened to her?