Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  The toxins he had, but also their opposite, and often those opposites would come out quickly, and in letters, when a child he loved was at risk—or past risk. One such letter was written not to a threatened child, but to the child’s parents, Gerald and Sara Murphy. The child himself had died two days before, at fifteen, of spinal meningitis. The illness had seemed to erupt out of nowhere, and this was a great part of the shock. A seemingly ordinary case of measles at prep school in Rhode Island after Christmas break had turned into a double-mastoid ear infection that had passed critically into meningitis. And then Baoth Murphy, with all that life in him, was gone. The letter sent from Key West, trying to make sense of it, was eight paragraphs long and had an elaborate Pilar metaphor at its end. Hemingway wrote it up in his second-floor writing room on Tuesday, March 19, 1935, so about three weeks before that abortive first try for Bimini, when he wounded himself. He had tried to write the day before but found he could only go around his house in grief. “Dear Sara and Dear Gerald,” he began. “You know there is nothing we can ever say or write. If Bumby died we know how you would feel and there would be nothing you could say.”

  He went on: “It is not as bad for Baoth because he had a fine time, always, and he has only done something that we all must do. He has just gotten it over with.”

  He went on: “About him having to die so young—Remember that he had a very fine time and having it a thousand times makes it no better. And he is spared from learning what sort of a place the world is.”

  On: “It is your loss: more than it is his so it is something that you can, legitimately, be brave about. But I cant be brave about it and in all my heart I am sick for you both.”

  On: “Absolutely truly and coldly in the head though I know that anyone who dies young after a happy childhood, and no one ever made a happier childhood than you made for your children, has won a great victory. We all have to look forward to death by defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed; but it is the same dying we must do; while he has gotten it all over with, his world all intact, and the death only by accident.”

  On: “You see now we have all come to the part of our lives where we start to lose people of our own age. Baoth was our own age. Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.”

  And then he came to his boat metaphor:

  We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other. It seems as though we were all on a boat now together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know now will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad; and especially because we know now that there will be no landfall we must keep the boat up very well and be very good to each other. We are fortunate we have good people on the boat.

  Hemingway and Dos Passos had been out fishing on the Stream when the wire about Baoth had come from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. They hadn’t caught much that Sunday afternoon, St. Patrick’s Day. When they’d gotten up to the house from the navy yard, along toward dark, Pauline was in the doorway with the manila sheet, which had been addressed simply “Passos Hemingway.” It was time-stamped 2:17 p.m. Its first four words: BAOTH DIED THIS MORNING.

  The Murphys had three children—a daughter and two sons. Baoth, two months shy of sixteen, was the middle child. Hemingway had known and loved all three Murphy kids since they were tykes in buckled swimsuits on the Riviera, in the mid-twenties, when his own firstborn was building moats and castles beside them, and when he and Hadley, and Scott and Zelda, and Archie and Ada, and the rest of that supposedly luck-struck crew who were privileged members of the Murphy expat circle, watched from beneath big striped umbrellas poked into the sand.

  The other part of the shock of Baoth’s dying was that he was the supposedly healthy son. If one of the Murphy kids was figured to die, it would have been his little brother, Patrick, who’d been struggling against tuberculosis for nearly six years.

  Decades later, in a 1982 memoir about her family called Sara & Gerald, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, the eldest child, would say that of all her parents’ famous friends from the twenties and thirties—and the unfamous ones as well—it was Hemingway who’d paid the closest attention to her and her brothers, who’d seemed to care for and understand each of them as if they were his own. In late summer 1932, the Murphys, save for Patrick, who was too frail to go, had joined Hemingway and his family for two weeks at the L-Bar-T Ranch in Wyoming. Hemingway, who had to catch more rainbows than anybody, who’d recently finished the final proofs for Death in the Afternoon, made big campfires at night and sat around with the kids in a goofy Tyrolean hat, roasting marshmallows, telling scary stories.

  When Baoth took ill, in mid-February of 1935, his mother was in the Keys with Ada MacLeish, visiting the Hemingways and the Dos Passoses. Sara hadn’t really wanted to go south that winter. Her husband had urged her to go. Sara’s nerves had become badly frayed, and being around Hemingway always seemed to be a kind of tonic. (They spent hours alone with each other on Pilar through the years; no one knows for sure if they were lovers.) Instead of going to Florida with his wife, Gerald had stayed back to tend to the family’s ailing Mark Cross leather business, but more importantly to be close to Patrick, who’d suffered a relapse. As scholar Linda Patterson Miller has put it, the double tragedy of Baoth Murphy’s death was that “it coincided with the period of Patrick’s worst relapse.”

  Six months before, in the fall of 1934, during a checkup, Patrick’s doctors had discovered a patch on his good lung, on which he’d been principally breathing since he was nine. So instead of being able to go off to prep school, like Baoth, the youngest Murphy was now in his bed at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, with his wood-carving set and his stamp collection. He had the bed faced toward the window, so that he could look out and see the boats going up and down the East River. This has been told vividly in Sara & Gerald.

  When Hemingway first heard about Patrick’s relapse, he’d been finishing up the first summer in Cuba with his new boat. On September 30, 1934, he’d written to Sara and Gerald from Havana and said he’d like to give Patrick one of his trophies from Africa—a Grant’s gazelle or an impala, whichever he wanted. He had a hunch Patrick would love the impala.

  Five months later, in Newport, at St. George’s School, when Patrick’s brother went to the infirmary with an earache and some red splotches on his face, no one was particularly worried—at first. From New York, Gerald had kept track of the situation. In a wire to Florida on February 20 he’d told Sara that their otherwise healthy middle boy was nicely on the mend, that she should just try to enjoy herself down there.

  When it was clear the case of measles was spiraling in on itself, Gerald wired Sara to come north as fast as she could. In the middle of a late February night, Hemingway cranked up his boat and, with both engines going full out, roared Ada and Sara along the Keys, landing them on the Florida mainland in time for a flight to Boston.

  For the next several weeks, the Western Unions had come to Key West about Baoth’s condition. You can sit now at a polished table in the clinical quiet of a university archive and read the telegrams in sequence, and they might strike you as their own kind of cryptic novel, with a novel’s cruelly false springs. They might strike you as their own kind of rebuke to that whole Lost Generation lie about living well always being the best revenge. On March 1, a wire time-stamped 10:10 p.m. arrived: BAOTH STILL UNCOMFORTABLE BUT IMPROVING ALL SEND LOVE YOU ALL MURPHYS. Four days later: BAOTH MAY HAVE TO HAVE SECOND OPERATION DECISION WILL BE MADE TODAY. March 12: BAOTH HAD ANOTHER EMERGENCY OPERATION LAST NIGHT CONDITION NOT HOPELESS PRAY FOR US LOVE SARA GERALD. On the fourteenth: BLOOD TRANSFUSION TOMORROW TO COMBAT TOXEMA AND REPLENISH CONDITION STOP HOLDING HIS OWN WE ARE HOPEFUL STOP WE FEEL YOUR PRAYERS MUCH MUCH LOVE SARA AND GERALD. The next day: SECOND TRANSFUSION THIS EVENING RESISTANCE MIRACULOUS STRONGLY HOPEFUL KEEP PRAYING. And then that final one, on the seventeenth, sent by a family friend: BAOTH DIED
THIS MORNING SARA GERALD WONDERFULLY BRAVE DETAILS UNDECIDED.

  Two days later, Hemingway had been able to write his own words.

  Here is another Hemingway letter. He wrote it on April 5, 1935, two days before the Sunday-morning shove-off for Bimini. It’s a letter to a child about an imminent adventure, and it’s as if it’s being written from one Boy Ranger to another. It’s nearly three pages long, typed, single-spaced, something like two thousand words. It’s to Patrick Murphy. The fevered and bedridden boy, who’s lost his brother, who’s lost his appetite, whose breathing comes with great difficulty, can’t go on this adventure with his fellow Ranger. And so the Ranger, in his writing room at Key West, in the midst of his packing and boat-loading, has come up with the next-best idea: he’ll make his pal a virtual participant from his bed. He’ll go into loving detail about all the things a fellow Ranger wants to hear about: nautical charts and hickory rods with twenty-three-ounce tips; the wahoo and big sails and giant tuna they’ll hope to snare; the sea skiff he intends to use as a pair of water skis when he gets a tuna on the hook; and, oh, yes, the movies they’ll make along the way, and of how these movies will be developed and sent to him straightaway.

  “If your father will order the chart showing Florida and the Bahamas you can tell just where we are and where the places are that I will refer to,” he says.

  “I will send the films from Miami with your address on them. So you will be the first to see them. Then we can get copies from them later,” he says.

  He confides: “I have been feeling very gloomy with too many visitors and haveing to take the treatment for my amoebic dysentery that makes me over three quarters goofy. But now am cured, I think, and want to wash myself out clean with the Gulf Stream and the best soap I know—which is excitement or whatever you call it. Anyway we will try to can some of it on the films and send it up to you.”

  Trying to sign off: “Well Bo if there is anything you want to know about the trip.… Well So Long old Timer. Write me to Bimini will you? … Well, So Long again.” He signs it, “Your friend Ernest.”

  Ernest’s friend Patrick Murphy lived not quite another two years, until a few months past his sixteenth birthday. He spent much of the last part of his life at Saranac Lake in upstate New York, where it was thought that the cool Adirondack climate and treatments at a sanitarium might cut back the disease. Patrick’s friend Ernest came to see him there in early 1937, at the point at which he’d entered into his adulteries with the woman who’d eventually become his third wife. In her beautiful memoir about her parents, Honoria Murphy Donnelly describes how Patrick saw him and said, “Hello, Ernest,” and of how his friend had said, “Hello, Patrick, how are you? I hear you’re doing well.” He stood on the right side of the bed. They talked of boats and fishing and the sea. “I think I can come back later to say good night, Patrick, but I don’t want to tire you out,” he said. Quickly he left the room. In the corridor, he began to weep—“openly” as Honoria wrote. “He looks so sick. I can’t stand seeing that boy look so sick,” Honoria remembered Hemingway saying.

  Patrick died on January 30, 1937. The wires went out. The next evening, from Tryon, North Carolina, F. Scott Fitzgerald said in a letter to Gerald and Sara, “Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these.” As for the toxic artist, he, too, wrote a letter, but it got lost in the mail. We’ll never know what he attempted to say.

  EXUBERATING,

  AND THEN THE JACKALS OF HIS MIND

  Bimini, summer 1935

  FIVE DAYS AFTER the knobbing of Mr. Knapp, the puffed-up pugilist, accompanied by his wife (she’d just been over to Bimini on a conjugal visit), paid his twenty-two dollars and flew on the seaplane to the Florida mainland, then trained home down through the Keys. It was great to be with the kids—the Irish Jew, meaning Gigi, was causing hell’s own havoc and making his father secretly pleased about it. (The repairmen were fixing hinges on the doors, and the Gig-man helped himself to their carpenter’s glue and painted all the knobs with it. Soon enough, he’d be painting a pair of Persian cats green.) There was a month’s worth of magazines to unwrap. Included in that pile was his piece about shooting himself, just out in Esquire, and also Arnold Samuelson’s story in the current issue of Outdoor Life about the 420-pound blue marlin Hemingway had caught the summer before in Cuba. There was continuing business with the coming Africa book. There were consultations to hold with Pauline about improvements to the house: porches were being reinforced at 907 Whitehead, and a new wide one had just been built at the back of the master bedroom, and he and his wife were talking about a backyard pool (it wouldn’t happen for two more years), and then, too, they wished to get going as quickly as possible—or he did—on the first edition of some kind of fence or wall to keep the world out. Toby Bruce had just arrived from Piggott, Arkansas. They’d put him on the job. Hemingway was damn tired of people peering in at him through the gate like a zoo animal. The city fathers had put 907 Whitehead at number 18 on the list of tourist attractions, behind Johnson’s Tropical Grove, ahead of the lighthouse and the aviary. Even if he raged for his privacy, being only number 18 would have smarted like hell.

  It’s amazing to see what close attention the man with the genius for detail could pay to the dreariest household matters. From a Hemingway archive: “Isabel gets 8.00 Borrowed $1.50. So gets $6.50. Wants to borrow $2.00. So next week will get $6.00.” That’s from a little later in 1935. Isabel—the more accepted spelling of her name seems to have been Isabelle—was keeping the family fed, for eight dollars a week. There are letters in which Hemingway writes to Perkins, asking him to deposit funds into one of his New York accounts. He’ll provide the precise address: City Bank Farmers Trust, 22 William Street, New York City—as if Max lived in Afghanistan.

  Home two days, on June 2, having gone to Sunday Mass with the family at Saint Mary Star of the Sea, he’s writing to MacLeish about his newfound sporting paradise:

  [N]ever took my clothes off for a month. To go to bed just take your pants off and roll up in a blanket and in the morning peel off your shirt and dive off the top of the house. It is the clearest water in the world and the islands are right in the center of the gulf stream with the goddamndest fish on earth a quarter of a mile out.… Have a fine house there on the sea on a high ridge with a seven mile un-walked sandbeach for 20 dollars a month.… The water is so clear that youn think you are going to run aground when you have fifteen fathoms under the keel. You can see bottom at one hundred fathoms.… Finest sand beaches you ever saw.

  He signs it “Pappy.”

  Top of the week, Pappy was itching to get back. The wires were coming from Bimini about new runs of tuna. Instead of waiting for the Friday seaplane, maybe he could hitch a ride over on Captain George Kreidt’s Tuesday mail boat. On Tuesday, still home, he wrote to Gingrich, telling him all about the trimming of Dodi Knapp, hectoring him as well: “I wish to hell you would come. I will be fishing alone there from June 7 to June 25…. I wish to hell you would come down. It is really a fine place and that kind of fishing is a hell of a lot better with two guys than one.” He told Gingrich he was leaving for Miami on Wednesday the fifth. (He didn’t.)

  Meantime, he arranged by wire and letter for Carlos Gutiérrez to come to Bimini for the rest of the summer. Carlos would fly over from Havana. They’d meet in Miami, spend the night, go over together the next day, on Friday the seventh. Carlos was to be sure and bring with him for Pauline four or five bottles of Camomila Intea, which was the hair-lightening lotion she’d been lately using to turn herself into a bottle blond. (The lotion could be had absurdly cheap from the Havana mercados.) Pappy was also exuberating down at Josie Grunts’ saloon on Greene Street.

  Thursday night Hemingway took the train to meet Carlos. They bunked into the Miami Colonial Hotel, on Biscayne Boulevard. It was his regular Miami stopping-over place, seven blocks from the main rail terminal, with a good view of the turquoise bay itself and the speedboats plying it. The hotel, vaguely Mo
orish, was fronted by a row of royal palms and inside there was an adequate dark-paneled bar for a body to have a drink. Hardly the Hotel de Crillon, overlooking the place de la Concorde, where Jake Barnes waited at five o’clock for Lady Brett, but the joint would do.

  Back now, he brawled on, sported on, fished on. He adopted as his protégé twenty-one-year-old rich boy Tommy Shevlin, telling people of how Tommy, a serious sportsman despite his family’s preposterous wealth, had lost six marlins in a row until he’d personally begun coaching him, and then, what do you know, here’s kid Tommy hauling in a world’s record blue at 636 pounds. Shevlin did it on June 18 aboard a boat called Florida Cracker II. Same day, the instructor, working from his own boat, brought in a 785-pound mako shark, which was only twelve pounds shy of a world’s record. He got it in within thirty-five minutes, using his might-against-might technique. The jumping had been spectacular. Come September, Outdoor Life would publish an item about it in one of their columns: “New American and Atlantic Record. Mako, 786 lb. by Ernest Hemingway, at Bimini, aboard his own boat the Pilar.”