Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  That daughter, Diane Samuelson, had left home in 1964, at seventeen, on the day she graduated from Robert Lee’s high school. She didn’t come back until her father’s death. She attended college in Lubbock, Texas, and studied communications and lived for a long while on the West Coast, going through divorces and name changes.

  Arnold’s son, Eric, a brilliant kid, or so nearly everyone in Robert Lee remembers of him, had become by the late sixties a troubled teenager, although destined to become an even more troubled and unwell adult.

  Once, in their upper years of school in Robert Lee, their father had stomped to town and claimed that the people who ran the school were trying to poison his children.

  Arnold’s daughter got the Betty Crocker Award. She was on the Pep Squad in junior year. She made Miss Citizenship. Under her portrait, this self-description: “Why aren’t they contented like me?” Like photographs, yearbooks can bald-facedly lie.

  A single sheet of paper, typed and handwritten. There’s no date on it. But Samuelson’s daughter, who retrieved it from among his things after her father died, feels it was a journal entry of some kind and that it might have dated from the mid-sixties and perhaps from as early as the fifties, although it also could have been written in the seventies. Some of the sentences on the sheet don’t syntactically track. There are scratch-outs and write-ins. Words and phrases are hard to make out. It’s as if an emotionally tortured man can’t get out what he aims to say, or at least can’t get it out in any way that pleases him. Arnold isn’t telling a story on this sheet, although in another way you might say he’s telling the whole story.

  He’s trying to parse his thinking on something.

  My problem is that I have a year of Ernest Hemingway’s life [the word is mangled] locked up in my head.… I have everything to work with … the diary, the log dictated by Ernest during the quiet intervals as we fished, a three hundred page manuscript outlining the conversations and the action that I wrote when the events were fresh in my mind. But the manuscript was badly written and never worked over. and is in no shape for publication. Much was left out and I am the only one who can put it back in.… If I do nothing to the Hemingway diary and the 300 page manuscript, when I am dead. it will have no value to anyone. On the other hand if I can fix it up so that it can be read, who knows, it might be literature.… I was lucky enough to have that experience, and now I would like to put it out on paper and give it to others. It happened to me, now let me see if I can make it happen to you.

  Vivian Samuelson left her husband and went to live with her daughter in California in the late 1970s. Arnold’s spouse of forty years told her children she would put up with any amount of verbal abuse, but not his violence. After he hit her, that was it.

  Alone, he went around naked on his property. His beard—not quite the full wreath of a Hemingway beard—turned white. He collected old fiddles and repaired them. He’d now walked off from Mesquite Lumber Company, abandoned houses he was in the middle of constructing. Sometimes he’d stay up for twenty-four hours straight, making tape recordings and sending them to members of his family. He was bald and no longer had his teeth and ate his dinner by candlelight, mashing the food with his tongue against the roof of his mouth before swallowing—“like a snake,” he reported. The photograph on his driver’s license is almost scary—a man looking deeply medicated. (He apparently wasn’t, but the pattern of bipolar behavior, especially on the manic side, now seems overwhelmingly clear.)

  One Christmas, he stared at the TV all day with the sound off. It was pro football, which he could have cared less about. He was down to three dogs, and he said that they were good enough company. (Once, a pack of dogs had roamed among the stacks of lumber and ready-builts.) He still found great solace in music. Sometimes on Friday afternoons he’d meet for an hour of playing with a friend named Josephine Bird. She was a pianist and the postmistress of a small town nearby. She and her husband, Ulmer, a Texas poet and newspaperman and cultivated man, had always seemed to understand Arnold, befriending him when almost everyone else wished to ridicule.

  His letters of this period make grim, if riveting, reading. To his estranged wife, he wrote: “Have been burning personal effects, so no strangers can root through our private lives, hauling books to the library and junk of no value to others to the city dump.”

  To his only daughter, who’d never really given up on him, no matter how he’d hurt her, hurt them all, he wrote: “I’ve been swimming twice a day, listening to music that is good and loud and so far there has been nobody down except the west Texas utilities man.… No use putting on pants for him.” In another letter to Diane, he said: “Life here fairly simple. Keep wearing the same clothes and when they get stinko swim with them. Floor never needs sweeping, and it doesn’t matter if the roof leaks.” In another to Diane, he said: “Sorry to hear about Eric passing the bar. Shows our local judicial system going to pot. You’d think they’d have some way of weeding out the misfits.” Another: “As usual keep studying music all day every day with very slow progress. Now through all the available violin solo books and into ten concertos.… This hole and the isolation are perfect for studying music and I’ve been taking full advantage of it.” Another:

  I have been like a lone survivor having to dispose of the contaminated effects after everybody has died off in a village plague. Getting rid of forty years of accumulation is no fast job for the one who is left.… The keepsakes once of value are now the things we want most to get rid of so no strangers will be snooping through our private lives when I leave here. Your teddy bear, dancing shoes, letters and cards etc etc once kept so carefully have now gone up in smoke. Less personal stuff has been hauled off to the city dump. Fifteen pickup loads so far.

  And one final letter to Diane: “Have reconsidered your suggestion that I get another woman. If I ever leave my solitude and go out into the social world I will try to find a suitable mate that likes to get screwed to the ground.”

  This is worth quoting because perhaps the most bizarre behavior of all had taken hold: the father had fallen headlong for his son’s former girlfriend. “Every animal has to go through its own existence in its own way separate from all others and the next turn is never predictable,” Arnold wrote to this woman, years younger than himself. Eric had apparently brought her to Robert Lee to meet his father. Whether Eric’s father actually did have some kind of fleeting physical relationship with her isn’t clear. The letters, and there are piles of them, are often addressed to some variant of the word “Desired” and are often signed “Antonio Bazar.” They amount to unnerving, manic mash notes, and sometimes they go on for pages. It was as if an impotent writer was no longer impotent. For her, he pledges to give up “my dirty hermit routine.” For her, he promises “to move over and make room for you in my bed and in my life, as simple as that, so you see it was not the temporary thing of a strong moment.” All he can think of is that “I want your lips, our strawberries, your hands on me, and our bodies crushed together, naked waist up and waist down night and day.” In one cracked letter to “Desireee,” he says of his son: “I’m not responsible for his confusion. It is caused by self-inflicted chemical brain damage. A lifetime of counseling wouldn’t help.”

  That son: no matter how hard he’d sought his father’s approval, Eric Samuelson had rarely ever gotten it—or this is what his sister will say, as well as others who glimpsed the family from the outside. In the middle of high school, he’d been jerked out of class by his dad and put into a job corps center in another part of Texas. (Arnold believed his son had stolen something from his truck.) Eric, with a GED certificate, somehow made himself into a champion debater in junior college in California. He could beat practically anybody at chess. He attended the University of Southern California and then earned his law degree from the University of Texas (where he was on the prizewinning moot court team). And yet this same brilliant Eric Anders Samuelson, in the years following these uphill achievements, following a divorce and various other emot
ional reversals, would sever almost all communication with anyone to whom he was related by blood. Gradually, he would transform himself from practicing attorney into conspiracy theorist of the World Wide Web. There, he’d post offers for “conspiracy scholar training programs.” There, he’d claim to other like-minded souls that he possessed the true gen on America’s “elite secret groups”: the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Knights of the Garter, the 33rd Degree Masons, Skull and Bones, the Knights of Malta, the Trilateral Commission, Rhodes Scholars.

  The terrible things we do and hand to our children, wittingly and unwittingly.

  But long before this, on September 11, 1981, the naked body of Eric Samuelson’s dad was discovered on his property by his friend Ulmer Bird. (When Arnold hadn’t shown up at their home for a standing music date, Bird, who lived with his wife in another part of the county, drove to Robert Lee to check on him.) It was late in the day, and Arnold was stretched out on his back, as if taking a nap. Apparently, it was a heart attack. He’d just returned from San Angelo on his new motorcycle, the first new mechanical thing he’d bought for himself in decades. A box of groceries was roped to the back of the still-warm bike. He was sixty-nine.

  The death certificate, in a book on a shelf in the Coke County courthouse, got the date of birth wrong. Under Usual Occupation, somebody stroked in: “Carpenter.” The body was taken to San Antonio for cremation. The Robert Lee Observer ran a small story. Before Samuelson’s daughter was able to get there from California, vandals broke into the house and trashed it—drawers pulled out, closets ransacked. But they didn’t take a yellowed heap of manuscript with scribbles all over it about a long-ago sojourn on a boat with a famous writer. In that manuscript, the famous writer, up in his workroom, says to the kid who knocked at his door the day before: “Another thing you’ve got to have is talent. Some people never can write fiction. What would you do if you found out you couldn’t write fiction?” And the kid replies: “I don’t know.”

  Once, on his boat, in that first summer of their fishing, the master had crowed about his student: “ ‘Arnold Samuelson! The coming American novelist.’ ”

  Once, in a letter to a mutual acquaintance, about a month after the Mice was gone, the master wrote: “[W]e shipped back [Arnold] to wherever or whatever strange pastures he came from (never hire a son of a bitch because you are sorry for him).”

  I think the turn—my own slow turn toward a softer feeling—began once I traveled to Austin, Texas, and met Arnold Samuelson’s daughter, Dian Darby (who some years ago legally changed the spelling of her first name). It’s unlikely With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba would exist at all, at least as a published work, had it not been for her will and energy and love. Dian won’t quite come out and say that getting the book accepted by a publisher was a way of seeking to honor and validate a life of so much seeming failure—but that’s the way it seems to me. It was only after the first two or three visits to Dian’s home that I think I could begin to perceive that most of her father’s life, after Hemingway and Pilar, must have added up to one long inward scream of desperation: the scream of not being able to write, or at least to write well enough to satisfy your own standards, when writing well and writing seriously had once been the most important thing to you on earth. “Serious” is the word that Arnold Samuelson’s mentor had used to describe his character. Any person’s existence is a novel of riddles within riddles, and how much more so when it’s a closed-off existence. But this—the soundless inner cry over your inability to find the right words, or any words—must be a very large part of the Samuelson story, even as it’s a core part of the Ernest Hemingway story, the eventual Ernest Hemingway story.

  Arnold’s daughter, now in her mid-sixties, a doctor of Oriental medicine, a decent and kindly person with a patina of weariness about her, said to me one night, in a voice that kept rising to a series of question marks: “He definitely withdrew. I don’t know. You could speculate and speculate about it.… He never really left Robert Lee, except that one time when we were small and he went back up to Minnesota to build that lake house for his brother. I mean, before that he had traveled everywhere. He took off on his motorcycle. He had my mother on the back. Was being with Hemingway too powerful an experience for him? Is that it? Is this what caught up with him as the years went on? I don’t know. Could he never recover from Hemingway? I don’t know. Did he feel he could never live up to what he wanted for himself as a writer, after being on Pilar?” She paused. “What I think I know about him is that his whole life was overwhelmed by that year with Hemingway. Nothing was ever the same.”

  One night I said: “Did your father ever talk about Hemingway when you grew up?” She answered, “Well, first, he almost never talked to me, period. He never talked to any of us. He never talked about his own family. He never talked about his murdered sister. He never talked about his brother, Sam. He lived inside his mind.”

  Another night, I asked: “What were some of the good things about him?” She answered, “Well, he was very honorable, in his own way. He was a clean liver, in his own way. He loved my mother, and in his way he loved us. I think what I figured out about my father eventually was that he resented his kids. They took his wife’s attention from him. He wanted her all to himself.”

  “Why aren’t you more bitter?” Her answer: “You can’t miss what you never had.”

  I remember the first evening I knocked on her door. A wild barking took up on the other side of the door. “Pilar, get down, get down!” I could hear a voice commanding. Pilar was a purebred Chesapeake. “What else did you expect me to name him?” Dian said, laughing, holding back the dog.

  We spent some of that evening paging through old family photo albums and scrapbooks. White Earth, North Dakota, looked like a nineteenth-century town with false storefronts. “His mother, just like Hemingway’s, was the strong one,” she said. “Four kids on a farm, miles from anywhere, and she somehow made sure they all went to college.” She pulled down from a high shelf one of her father’s old violins. It was in a battered leather case with red-velvet lining. The strings were a fist of broken wires. Hemingway used to tell friends that the violin case made Arnold look like an underfed gangster.

  On another night, Dian talked of a high school letter jacket she had badly wanted as a teenager. “I hadn’t played enough on the girls’ basketball team to earn a letter. The jacket was leather and wool. I think it must have cost twenty-five dollars. There’s no way in hell we could afford that. But he came into my room and woke me up and said kind of roughly, ‘The jacket’s yours.’ I think he’d been up all night thinking about it.”

  Had any of Arnold’s apparently failed efforts at fiction or other pieces of serious writing ever been found? “No. I don’t know how much he tried after a certain point, or whether he burned it all, or took it to the dump, or whether he kept on, or just gave up and stopped years before. We don’t know. Only the Hemingway manuscript and the fishing logs from the boat. Well, a few other things. But when I found that sheet of paper where he’s talking about wanting to get the book out, but can’t, I knew I had to try.”

  A carbon copy of the incomplete Pilar fishing logs from the summer and fall of 1934 in Cuba now resides in the Hemingway archives at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, an intensely valuable documentary resource. Nearly all the log was dictated aboard the boat by Hemingway to Arnold, who took down the words in longhand, and who then, apparently, once he was back in Key West, not long before he left Hemingway’s company, transcribed the pages to type. (He must have done so at his mentor’s request.) This, from page 141 of With Hemingway:

  I went for the heavy notebook with the silver pencil marking the place. I spent a few minutes every day taking his dictations in the log. It was the one thing I could do better than anybody else on board.… “Where did we leave off yesterday?” E.H. asked. “Went into the cove for lunch,” I said.

  Dian took a year off to work on her father’s manuscript. She and h
er mother spent many hours deciphering crabbed handwriting written in over faded lines of type. She gave the book its unassuming title. From her foreword: “I whipped the manuscript into shape in much the same way my father was taught to whip big fish: by giving myself plenty of slack, striking some parts and pumping up others, reeling all the while, and finally mastering it.” She sent the book around to various publishers, including Scribners, which sent it back. She found an agent who believed in it and who got the manuscript accepted by an esteemed editor, Robert Loomis, at Random House, with a modest contract and a small printing. When it appeared, in the fall of 1984, With Hemingway died very quickly, although the book received some admiring critical notices. In The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrote: “This brief account of a year spent hanging around with Ernest Hemingway is an unexpected literary discovery, one of no particular moment but quite considerable charm.” The book won an overseas literary award. But it never made it into tiny Robert Lee’s tiny public library, not until a handful of years ago, when perhaps some late-blooming local consciences began to awaken.

  In the final pages of With Hemingway, the author has his mentor telling him, “The best stuff you’ve got is from your farm life in North Dakota and your sister’s murder. That’s something nobody else can write and nobody can ever take it away from you, but you don’t want to use it for a long time. Save your best stuff until you’ve learned how to handle it.” In Islands in the Stream, there’s a passage in which the main character, the painter Thomas Hudson—Hemingway in faint disguise—is talking about the creative process to his writer friend, Roger Davis (again, Hemingway, or certainly parts of Hemingway). Davis’s brother had drowned in a Maine lake when they were boys. Their canoe had tipped over. Davis, unable to save his brother, and haunted by that fact ever since, wonders if he can find a novel in the trauma. “You never will if you don’t try,” Thomas Hudson tells him. “Just start with the canoe—”