Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Pauline and her sister and the boys came on June 24. The Mexican Mouse began browning like a real Mexican. The Irish Jew was getting over his fear of water and learning to swim. Bumby was gone from his bed by every dawn, fishing from the docks or out in the shallow flats from a leaky outboard with his newfound black pals. All of this got told, no, exuberated over, in letters to friends. On the beach he and the kids built a cabana out of thatched palms. Fresh fish got cooked on open-pit fires on the sand, using driftwood bone-whitened from the sun and scoured by the wind. (This image would appear in the opening pages of Islands in the Stream.) Sometimes, after dinner, he’d lead expeditions through the town cemetery, studying the mix of English and African names, calculating the life span of the community. Sometimes he’d go over to the jewel box–size Wesley Methodist Church, with its miniature belfry and board-on-batten walls and sit alone in that perfect architectural space. Later, the limp bars, with their cold beer and sand flooring.

  Early in July, Pilar needed an engine overhaul, a new strut bearing, and a copper painting on her bottom parts. It didn’t dent his spirits. He fished off the docks. He wrote letters. He read proofs of his Africa book. To Perkins, he said: “This is a lovely spot—The kids are crazy about it. Swimming on a wonderful sand beach in the middle of the gulf stream—a fine cool house with ocean on both sides of it for 20.00 a month—servant 20.00 more.” He was betting on Green Hills selling more than twenty thousand copies—okay, fifteen. “[I]t’s the best writing I’ve ever done and the more often I read it the more I think it gets that extra dimensional quality I was working for.” He meant the extra dimension in the landscape, that ineffable, Cézannesque quality. He had to turn the last page of the letter upside down to get his signature in: “Best luck to you—Ernest.” He drew a circle and wrote inside it: “My best to Scott.”

  Four and a half months before, in February (the Maestro would have been just striking off for the cold north and the rest of his life), he hadn’t been so magnanimous. He and his editor had had a set-to over money, specifically about the price Scribner’s was offering for serialization of the new book. Fighting about money was always the worst. He’d wanted $10,000 for the first-serial magazine rights; Perkins had said the company could offer only $4,500. Hemingway had gone down to the Key West Western Union office close to midnight on the day he got the offer and fired off a night letter of 150-some-odd words, starting with this: LETTER JUST RECEIVED SORRY UNABLE UNDERSTAND YOUR ATTITUDE PRICE UNLESS YOU MEAN YOU WANT ME TO REFUSE IT TO RELEASE YOU FROM PURCHASING STOP. The master of cable-ese had made “New York” NEWYORK—probably saved him a penny. It’s true that his mood hadn’t been helped by those horse doses of emetine the doctor had him quaffing for the latest flare-up of his amoebic dysentery, which had never completely gone away since Africa. (Some mornings there’d be a cupful of blood in his stool.) Then, too, the semi-devout Catholic had made the mistake of giving up serious drinking for Lent. He’d limited himself to one drink a day. Christ, how long was Lent anyway? But that was then, wintertime. All was summer light now. Or mostly.

  Eight days later (it’s July 10), he writes to Sara Murphy, and again the manic onrush of sentences:

  You would love this place Sara. It’s in the middle of the Gulf Stream and every breeze is a cool one. The water is so clear you think you will strike bottom when you have 10 fathoms under your keel. There is every kind of fish.… There is a pretty good hotel and we have a room there now because there have been rain squalls at night lately and so I cant sleep on the roof of the boat. That’s not a very nautical term but a fine cool place to sleep.… Tell Patrick I have a Thompson Sub Machine gun and we shoot sharks with it. Shot 27 in two weeks. All over ten feet long. As soon as they put their heads out we give them a burst.… I don’t know any more news.… You can catch snappers, tarpon, and 25 kinds of small fish right from the dock here. About 400 people live in the town. Mostly turtling boats and spongers. Bonefish are common as grunts.… There is no kind of sickness on the island.… It is under the British flag.… We have celebrated the Queen’s Birthday, the Jubilee, the Prince of Wales Birthday, the 4th of July, and will celebrate the 14th of July, getting drunk on all of these.

  Ten days later, he brings in his tenth and eleventh catches of the season and puts them up on the dock along with two other marlin and then poses for many photographs. The next day, the gods arrange for him to land, on his birthday, a huge blue, 540 pounds, in thirty minutes. At the end of the month, he inventories the recent bounty for his various correspondents, sometimes listing weights and times with little arrows between the respective numbers, lest there be any confusion. To Gingrich: “540 on my birthday—Big current now and another run due in next 10 days. Sure—540 was 12 feet 8 inches—jumped 18 times—ran out 450 yards of line twice.” To Perkins: “Only thing have piles from lifting them—it is work to take one that size up over the stern!” To both editors, he describes the newest island pastime. He says it’s called “Trying Him.” He’s offered 250 bucks in U. S. currency to anybody who can stay with him for three rounds of boxing. “Since the Knapp thing when anybody is tight here or feels dangerous they ask me to fight.… Have fought 4 times in last 2 weeks—twice with bare fists, twice with gloves—all knock outs—Don’t know whether it is working the fish has built up my shoulder muscles or what but can really hit now.”

  A thirty-six-year-old light-heavyweight in peak condition, Hemingway had issued an island-wide open challenge, with serious money attached. Some Hemingway chroniclers—not least his youngest son—have worked hard to debunk these old fight stories on Bimini. Was Willard Saunders—whom Hemingway claimed to have fought bare-fisted on the dock, finishing him off in something over a minute—really able to carry a piano on his head? Probably not, even though you can go into the waterside bars of Alice Town right now and hear that claim. Even the debunking son could acknowledge in his Papa: “And you know, it is something to issue a challenge to an island, and ultimately to the whole Bahamas, that you could knock out anybody before the end of three rounds. Sure, it was Hemingway, the twentieth-century Byron, overcompensating for being dressed as a girl for the first two years of his life.” In a letter to Gingrich on July 31, two weeks before he took Pilar home, Hemingway said, “Bimini is just about the size place that I could be heavyweight champion of!” But that sounds feigned, like an amateur fighter’s too-obvious feint.

  A week or so earlier, from Manhattan, on the engraved hotel stationery of the Waldorf-Astoria, Baroness Blixen had written. On the envelope: “Ernest Hemingway Esq. ‘M.S. Pilar’ Bimini, Bahama Islands.” From the letter: “Darling fat Slob! I read a terrible story in the newspaper this morning about a marlin which had the cheek of weighing more than yours. Ernest you really can’t have that!” Eva was leaving for Sweden—whether with Blix or without him wasn’t clear from the letter—but she planned to return to Africa at summer’s end. “Do come clown in the autumn,” she said. Nope. His book was coming out. The pub date was now set, October 25.

  Somehow, it was as if once he stepped off the island, and back into America, everything in his life had to change, to foul. It began with Pilar herself.

  He aimed his boat toward Key West just after midnight on August 14. He made it in twenty-six hours, arriving at about 2:00 a.m. on the fifteenth. That afternoon he could read about himself in the Citizen: “Ernest Hemingway the author who, when not writing intensely interesting novels and articles, seeks to capture prize specimens of the larger denizens of the deep, arrived in port this morning on the Cruiser Pilar.” Oh, the hackdom.

  The plan was to get the boat back, clean her up, rest her up, then hire a crewman or two to help him steer her over to Havana for the first two weeks of the September blue marlin runs. (Carlos Gutiérrez would rejoin the boat in Cuba.) The previous year they’d been “thickest” in the first three weeks of the month. But on the way down from Bimini, Pilar had begun to burn serious oil, and by the time he’d angled her through the little cut at the northwest corner of the sub
marine pens at the navy yard, the big Chrysler was smoking two quarts an hour. He ordered a new set of piston rings from Detroit, only to learn the best mechanic was not in town. Havana began to look seriously off.

  Almost no sooner was he back than out-of-town guests descended, staying five days. He was trying to get a story started. On August 25, the day after the company was gone, he took Pilar out on the Stream around Key West and tried to kid himself into thinking he could make Havana anyway. The next day he told Gingrich: “If it would not have been any worse would have left tonight at midnight. But it is plenty worse.” He meant the fouled rings. Cuba was now out for sure.

  A few days later, over the Labor Day weekend, a killer hurricane. It is said to be the first recorded Category 5 event in the country’s history. Although it struck all the Keys, the storm directed its full fury—an eighteen-to-twenty-foot surge—at the CCC (Civil Conservation Corps) camps occupied by World War I veterans on Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys, near Islamorada, about forty-five miles from Key West. Hundreds died. Key West was only nicked. All the same, it was the closest Hemingway ever came to losing Pilar. He wrote about that and about the storm itself in a famous piece titled “Who Murdered the Vets?” which was published in New Masses. Even though Hemingway had no use for the magazine’s Marxist agenda, he did the piece (after the magazine’s editor had wired, fairly pleading) mainly because of his own fury at how the vets at Matecumbe had been left criminally in harm’s way by the bureaucrats in FDR’s Washington—or this is how he saw it. They could have been evacuated in time. If his report was scant on hard journalistic fact and documentation, it was long on his passion.

  In the early part, he reports on Pilar herself, telling of how, on foot and with a flashlight and with the wind howling and trees falling and the rain in sheets and wires lashing down around him, he fought his way to the navy yard in the middle of the night. (His car, which he’d left in front of the house, because he feared for the rickety garage, was flooded out.) Earlier, in Sunday daylight, he’d done what he could, shifting Pilar to the safest part of the sub pens, securing her with fifty-two dollars’ worth of new ropes and cables, wrapping the lines themselves with heavy canvas as a ward against the fraying. The Coast Guard had recently seized a rum-running boat, and this scow was tied up next to his own. The boat was secured to the dock by lines tied to ringbolts in the stern, and he knew that they’d jerk right out when the storm came, and that the “booze boat” would then come smashing right into Pilar, busting her into pieces. He told himself: If my boat goes tonight, I’ll never get enough money in one place again to get another.

  The remainder of “Who Murdered the Vets?” is about what Hemingway saw at Camp No. 5 at Lower Matecumbe, after he and some other volunteers from Key West had gone up to be part of a rescue effort. Eight out of 187 vets at the camp had survived. Bodies were strung high in trees, “beginning to be too big for their blue jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry.” Corpses everywhere: “Hey, there’s another one.” He’s got “low shoes, copper-riveted overalls, blue percale shirt without collar, by Jesus that’s the thing to wear, nothing in his pockets. Turn him over. Face tumefied beyond recognition.” Hemingway seems to have written the piece in one sitting, five days after the storm was gone and he was home in Key West. On the same day, he told Perkins that he’d not seen such death since the lower Piave in 1918. Five days later, in another letter, he told Sara Murphy he was refusing payment. He wanted the editors to print a disclaimer to the effect: “We disapprove of Mr. H. and do not want anyone to ever be sucked in by anything else he may ever write but he is a very expensive reporter who happened to be on the spot and because he does not believe in making money out of murder he has written this for us for nothing.”

  His own inner hurricane of anxiety and bitterness, driving him deep into a new round of sleeplessness and old thoughts of self-destruction, came with the reception of his book by those angleworms in New York. He’d called them that on page 21 of Green Hills of Africa. Not quite a hundred pages onward, he’d spoken of book reviewers as “the lice who crawl on literature.” It was as if he was begging for it, and they, the lice, the worms in the bottle, obliged.

  Hemingway and his wife were booked into a suite at the Westbury Hotel at Sixty-ninth and Madison. He’d not been in Manhattan before when one of his books came out and he was doing so now against his better judgment. On the official day of publication, the two most prestigious papers in the city, The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, creamed him.

  On A-1 of the Herald Trib is a pair of three-deck headlines, the head on the left about the British being cool to a peace bid by Mussolini, the one on the right about the cooling of mobster Dutch Schultz. (He’s just been gunned down in New Jersey.) His review’s on page 17. Just as Max has promised, there’s an ad for the book opposite the review: “Published Today. Green Hills of Africa. By Ernest Hemingway. The story of a month’s big-game hunt in Africa told with the movement, beauty and suspense of a fine novel.” Lewis Gannett’s syndicated Books and Things goes down the left side of the page. There’s a line about “the increasingly thin books of Ernest Hemingway,” a writer who seems to be evincing “the tired passion to escape, the sinking into contentment with the odor of mere blood—the farther from home the better.” Shit.

  The Times review is on page 19, alongside the headline “Needlework Art Seen in 2 Exhibits.” The critic is John Chamberlain, who’s not much over thirty, but who looks twenty, a stringbean New Deal liberal. Chamberlain, who’s fairly new to the paper, is the first daily reviewer in Times history. He produces five columns a week, and his alive prose in the staid old girl has become a morning must-read for all the park-bench intellectuals who both wish and don’t wish they had a job to go to. John Chamberlain can’t abide Hemingway’s book:

  Sometimes dispensing with grammar, Mr. Hemingway decimates the fauna of Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo along with Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier and Thoreau. The carnage is frightful.… For all his talk about seeing things “truly,” he is not really interested in the underlying aspects, the fundamental meaning, of the human comedy—or tragedy. His book is all attitude, all Byronic posturing.… It is simply an overextended book about hunting, with a few incidental felicities and a number of literary wisecracks thrown in.

  In the first paragraph, Chamberlain has quoted in full the offending “angleworms” passage, in which the “I” of the story opines: “ ‘Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle.’ ”

  The next day, in the Saturday Review of Literature, Bernard DeVoto, a critic with an even larger reputation, says of Green Hills: “A pretty small book for a big man to write.”

  Some good reviews appeared that weekend, both in New York and across the country. On Sunday, October 27, he got what amounted to a qualified rave in The New York Times Book Review—and that was far more important than any daily review. (He didn’t make the cover, though. He made page 3 . Mark Twain’s notebooks and a Twain critical study got the cover.) But the damage had been done, certainly in Hemingway’s view. The initial press run of 10,550 copies proved sufficient. He would later tell Perkins that the three things that ruined his book were its high pricing, his remarks about the critics, and the company’s failure to push back at the early bad notices with sustained advertising.

  The most wounding review was Edmund Wilson’s, in The New Republic. It was in the issue of December 11, 1935, leading the Winter Book Section. It was lengthy and uncompromising, and seems to mark the moment when Wilson turned on Hemingway more or less for the long haul.

  [S]omething frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situatio
ns which obsess him, are externalized and objectified; and the result is an art which is severe, intense and deeply serious. But as soon as he talks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin. His ideas about life, or rather his sense of what happens and the way in which it happens, is in his stories sunk deep below the surface and is conveyed not by argument or preaching but by directly transmitted emotion: it is turned into something as hard as a crystal and as disturbing as a great lyric. When he expounds this sense of life, however, in his own character of Ernest Hemingway, … he has a way of sounding silly. Perhaps he is beginning to be imposed on by the American publicity legend which has been created about him.

  In the nearly two months since he’d left New York and come back to Key West, Hemingway had been consoling himself with afternoons on Pilar. The natural world itself is always there, the refuge. To read his letters of November and December to Max Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos and Sara Murphy and a handful of others is to gain new feelings about what would overtake Ernest Hemingway, under some mountains, far from salt water, on a Sunday morning a quarter century later.

  On November 20, he wrote to the young Spanish American writer Prudencio de Pereda, whom he’d befriended in the past few years and whom he regretted not being able to get together with in New York. “[T]he thing to do is write and keep on writing,” he said. “Am feeling a little discouraged myself knowing that I’ve written a good book and having to read that it is shit etc. but then I always feel discouraged in the fall along with the trees and everything else.”

  In early December, he’s telling Sara that the mince meat she’d sent was marvelous. He talks of his “late age,” and of how he seemed to be made up of two Hemingways: the one who could stay out all night and drink, and the other with an atavistic midwestern conscience who somehow needed to keep on working and try to get to bed—if not to sleep—by ten o’clock, and hopefully not doing it alone. He and his boy Patrick had been out shooting the day before and “never saw a dove nor snipe nor plover so finally shot 2 buzzard, 1 chicken hawk and a large crane.” He closed, “With very much love much love and love also with love.”