MOMENTS SUPREME
Walter and Nita Houk on their wedding day, April 30, 1952
Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Old Man and the Sea
AN OLD MAN in California, who wakes early, is drawing a picture of Hemingway’s boat. He’s working with a sharpened pencil and an old-fashioned clipboard to which he has attached a single sheet of unlined white paper. Morning light is coming in through a window just to his right, filtered and refracted by big coast redwoods that he has watched grow from saplings into majestic trees. He’s very intent. This is Walter Houk’s way, trying to get things right. It’s as if he’s talking out loud to himself but in another way to the twenty-six-year-old incredibly fortunate sapling self that once, in the early 1950s, got invited out for long cruises on Ernest Hemingway’s boat.
“See, the outrigger lines came around like this, amidships, out from the sides, in sort of a catenary curve,” he says. “The whole point of outriggers in the first place is to keep your lines from tangling, so you can have several rods going at once.” But he’s already erasing. “No, I don’t quite have this curve right,” he says. He draws the lines again, extending them out further, in a wider loop. He puts in a whitecap or two. At the end of one of the outrigger lines he draws a mullet—or maybe it’s a cero mackerel or a squid or a needlefish, all of which Pilar’s captain tended to keep in his bait box at the stern. The artist—who actually once was a working artist—labels the little pencil smudge “Bait.”
“Okay,” he says. “Better.”
He’s putting in the flying bridge on the topside. He’s trying to get these angles and cross-hatches exactly right—from memory. “The roof over the cockpit was a little bit curved, like this, so Papa had a flat platform made that he could stand on up there,” he says. “It was made of slats.” He draws the flat, slatted platform over the curved sedan topside. Then a Lilliputian ship’s wheel. Then a passable rendering of a slightly bulky figure standing at that wheel. It’s more or less a stick person, but it’s clear who it is. “I took a photograph of him once up there,” he says. “Well, it wasn’t just any old once, it was his fifty-second birthday. July 21, 1951. My first time on the boat. So of course all my senses were heightened. I guess I’d known him for about seven months. I wrote about it in my journal. We were out most of the day. I remember the sense of being apart from the world—the drift, the serenity. Anyway, I had my cheap old Argus C3 rangefinder with me. I climbed up on the bridge, or maybe I was on the ladder just a little bit below, trying to get the right angle. I said, ‘Papa, would you mind?’ He was standing at the wheel. He’s in a blue tropical shirt and his hair is slicked back from the heat and he’s got that reddish and almost blotchy skin. He really had a fair complexion, you know, and the sun and of course all the booze could make him florid. So I’m framing him in my thirty-five-millimeter camera, catching his right side in profile. The boat is rocking and I’m trying to hold the Argus steady so it won’t blur. Those huge shoulders, that’s what I remember. His beard wasn’t a full white yet—it was kind of scraggly and flecked with white and not fully grown in. It looked itchy underneath. Anyway, my wife, Nita—what I mean to say is, she’s not my wife just yet, but I guess I maybe had an idea she was going to be my wife—was up there, too, just a couple feet away. He said, ‘Okay, Walter.’ I remember how just before I snapped, he took off his glasses and held them in his right hand and sort of broke into a squinty smile and sucked in his stomach. That amused me.”
From Walter Houk’s journal entry of that day: “Around noon we pulled into shallows off the beach of Santa Maria del Mar, into that fantastic green water, clear as glass and cool after the beating sun. We had a swim, lunch, a siesta, another swim and then headed back toward Habana. It was Papa’s birthday and the lure of celebration was drawing him back to the wicked city, I would soon realize.”
Regarding lunch, and not just that first one: “We started with alligator pears. Papa’s name for avocados. He used to pick them fresh from the hillsides of Finca Vigía, or get them in a little bodega at the foot of the hill, on his way in town in the car to the harbor. They were fat and juicy and we’d scoop out the flesh with a spoon or a fork. They’d be seasoned with vinaigrette dressing. We’d toss the seeds over the side. In the seed cavity was your little puddle of vinaigrette. You could practically eat a half avocado in three scoops, you’d get so hungry out there in the salt air. We’d all be gathered around that little folding table in the cockpit, with the cushioned bunks on either side. We’d eat the avocados and wash them down with cold beer. That was the first course, the salad, a side dish, if you will. For a second course, we’d have fresh fish.”
He has looked up again from his artwork, and is gazing out toward the trees, or through them, as if trying to recover a sensation on the back of his tongue.
Regarding the fishing: “Ha. One strike all day. Papa said, ‘Okay, you take it, Walter.’ I didn’t especially want to take it, but I got in the fighting chair. I knew a lot about the sea, since I’d gone to the naval academy, but I knew next to nothing about deep-sea fishing. Total amateur. It wasn’t a big fish, although it seemed like it when he came to the top. It was about a forty-pound dolphinfish, they told me later. The word Hemingway would have said was dorado, not dolphinfish. People would call it mahimahi today. The point is, I lost it. Not a very good performance in front of somebody I would have liked to impress. I didn’t know what I was doing. I jerked the rod upward. I could feel the line go dead.”
An old man in California has just reflexively jerked upward on an invisible piece of big-game tackle, causing him to erupt in a laugh.
“Hemingway came over and said, ‘Now, here’s what you did wrong, Walter, and here’s what you should try to do next time. Basically, you didn’t slack to him.’ ”
Then: “The whole idea was to be instructional. He was trying to teach me something. People don’t tend to know what a great teacher he was. He was always teaching you something, one way or another. In this case I think he needed to hang back and let me make my mistakes first, then he could come in and show me the right way.”
Walter Houk, who keeps insisting he won’t be around too much longer, has set down his pencil. The words “right way” may have tripped something in him. He’s growing weary and needs to nap. At dinner tonight, stoked with a vodka martini and a glass of wine, he’ll say: “You see, for a long time in my life, I avoided a consideration of all the negatives about Hemingway. It was just so politically correct to dislike the man. I didn’t know what to argue against, or where to start arguing. I didn’t want to be bothered. It wasn’t going to change anything I knew. My whole experience with Ernest Hemingway is the conventional diswisdom. He didn’t wreck my life. It was a hugely positive experience to be around him, for those several years in the fifties, getting to go out on the boat and all the rest. I was half his age. He treated me kindly. He treated my wife, Nita, kindly. It was as if we were sort of the kids around the place, and I think he liked that, because his own kids so often weren’t there, and he missed them. He wanted to help us out with our lives. The vultures have long ago gathered around the Hemingway corpse and rendered their judgment. But their judgment’s wrong; at least it’s incomplete. I don’t think the terrible vile side defines him. It was a facet of his character. He was a great man with great faults. We should not allow the faults to overshadow the accomplishments. He said in a letter once—I think it was to one of his children—that ‘a happy country has no history.’ I’m paraphrasing, but that was his point. You could say a happy man has no biography—who’d want to read it? I think of him as a Beethoven, for the way he changed the language. He’s Gulliver surrounded by the Lilliputians. He threatens all the little academics sitting at their computers. Somehow or other you’ve got to try to help rescue him from all that.”
What kind of blind luck did it take to find Walter P. Houk of 21439 Gaona Street in Woodland Hills, California? Pretty blind is a
ll I can say.
Walter Houk is an authentic living Hemingway witness, with his faculties mainly intact; with his memory, at least his long-term memory, still razor keen—and even now, after seven years of knowing him, talking to him, the thought still has the power to raise on my forearms what Hemingway used to call “the goose-flesh.”
Not counting Hemingway’s surviving middle son, there aren’t two or three people left on the earth who can authentically say, as Walter Houk can, that, yes, they used to get invited out on Hemingway’s boat; that, yes, they once took swims in Hemingway’s soapy-soft pool (it was fed by rain collected in a cistern, and it was so refreshing you almost felt you were paddling in mountain lake); that, yes, they got to borrow books from Hemingway’s personal library; that, yes, they got to attend lubricated, rollicking, multicourse dinners with Ernest and Mary Hemingway at their favorite Havana Chinese restaurant (El Pacífico, about ten blocks behind the Capitolio, next door to a nudie stage revue and porno theater called the Shanghai; the funky eatery sat beneath a canvas awning on the rooftop of a seven- or eight-story building, to which you ascended via the world’s slowest and smallest iron-cage elevator, passing on the way a bordello and opium den and cacophonous Chinese orchestra, but never mind, because once you were on the roof, in the open night air, the view was amazing, and so was the food, starting with the shark-fin soup and the first bottle of Tavel rosé, Papa’s favorite).
But there’s no one else on the earth who can claim, as Walter Houk can, that Ernest Hemingway, in a pinstriped suit and clean white shirt and shined shoes (he even put on socks), stood up for him and his wife on their wedding day. He not only stood up, he gave the bride away and signed his name to the official documents. Later, on that same, indelible, swamp-hot April afternoon, both Hemingways, Mary and Ernest, hosted on the west terrace of their hilltop home in the village of San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, a champagne brunch–reception before the just-marrieds drove off in a rain squall of rice for the start of their four-day honeymoon to a place down the Cuban coast called Casa Happiness. To borrow a line from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, doesn’t attention have to be paid?
Appreciating the uncelebrated life of Walter Houk has helped me to appreciate all over again and in new ways the myth-swallowed life of Ernest Hemingway. It’s as if he’s single-handedly brought him back around—the goodness, in and amid all the squalor. In astronomy there’s a technique known as “averted vision.” The idea is that sometimes you can see the essence of a thing more clearly if you’re not looking at it directly. It’s as if what you’re really after is sitting at the periphery rather than at the center of your gaze. Something of this same hope and principle was at work in telling Arnold Samuelson’s story. But the Maestro’s life was a mirror opposite.
Walter Houk is in his mid-eighties, as I write. He is a small, trim, learned, meticulous, and sometimes fussy and nitpicky man, a widower, an accomplished former journalist, a failed painter, an ex-outdoorsman and naturalist, an ex–Foreign Service officer, a once-and-long-ago midshipman, who lives alone, has long lived alone, quietly, unobtrusively, a little sadly, in a comfortable house, on an ordinary street, in a tucked-away corner of greater Los Angeles. That house, which is kept as tidy as the officers’ quarters on a submarine, is full of old Hemingway photographs, nautical charts, unpublished book-length Houk manuscripts, Esso highway maps of Cuba in the 1950s, Havana bar menus, Christmas cards with Hemingway’s greeting on them—and a lot more. Entering his house is like walking into a hidden Hemingway museum.
I’m certain I’d have no chance to do what Walter has so often urged me to do—namely, to try to help rescue Hemingway from his seemingly set-in-stone image of immortal writer and immortal bitch of a human being—had I not accidentally pulled down from a high shelf in a university library on the East Coast about eight years ago the wrong volume of an academic quarterly. The volume I’d been searching for contained some obscure reference to Pilar that probably would have helped me in my understanding only minimally, if at all. The one I inadvertently pulled down had a twenty-one-page article in it titled “On the Gulf Stream Aboard Hemingway’s Pilar.” I stood there and stared at the title. What was it doing in an academic journal? Was the man who wrote it still alive? (The article in question was six years old.) Within an hour I had Walter’s address and phone number, although I didn’t muster the nerve to call until the next day. “I don’t see why not,” he said in that hearty voice that belies its age, the more so if you’re first encountering it on a telephone. “That is, if you want to bother to come all this way.”
It wouldn’t be accurate to suggest that Walter Houk is an unknown figure in the scholarly Hemingway universe. He has published a handful of Hemingway-related pieces, contributed to online Hemingway chats and websites, spoken at an international Hemingway conference. But what I am suggesting is that so much of that scholarly Hemingway universe, as it stands, as I’ve encountered it, doesn’t really seem to get it about Walter, namely, that he is still here just as he was once there. I’ve mentioned his name now and again to respected Hemingway scholars and critics, and the response has tended to run along these lines: “Oh, Houk. Rose-colored glasses.” There are the exceptions, of course. But the general view seems to be that his testimony, which is breathing testimony, must somehow be tainted, even invalid, because he insists on viewing Hemingway in such a human light.
Up above I described him as a somewhat sad man. In fact, there is a great sadness about him, a kind of nimbus of sadness, which has little to do with the reality of someone facing his sooner-than-later extinction. Indeed, Walter has often said that it’s not the dying itself he fears so much as the process, and that he would just as happily get it over with. (But I wonder, for all his infirmities, how many other octogenarians in California or anywhere else could find the will to get out of bed in darkness and lace on tennis shoes and get the walking stick that sits on the canvas deck chair by the front door and then go for about a mile and a half on up-and-down surfaces. Until just recently, this was Walter’s almost daily regimen.)
No, the sadness that suffuses this man’s life, not to say this man’s spic-and-span sixties-modern California home, has to do with the absence of his wife. Nita’s been gone since Christmas Eve, 1991—“at seven past noon and a part of my life ended” is the way he once put it. She died a hard death, and he was there through all of it, taking her out even toward the end to neighborhood parks in her wheelchair, tending to her meals and liquid oxygen tanks at home, which is where she tried to stay, until the last four or five days, when things were clear. Then it was just waiting in a chair beside her bed at the hospital until her vital signs flatlined in digital green on the overhead monitors. “She didn’t say good-bye,” Walter told me. “She just went to sleep.” It was many things that killed her, but mostly it was a combination of virulent diabetes and lungs that were so eaten up with scar tissue that she could hardly breathe.
Nita had her own deep relationship with Ernest Hemingway. In fact, she knew Hemingway before Walter did. In fact, she’s why Walter knew Hemingway at all: she got there ahead of him, and pulled him in, after she and Walter were sweethearts. Nita’s real name was Juanita, although no one really called her that, certainly not Hemingway, who was fond of calling her “daughter” and Miss Nita. She used to take his dictation and transcribe some of his less poisonous letters off a wire recording spool that Hemingway called his “talk machine.” (The truly awful ones he saved for his own typewriter.) From mid-1949 to about February 1952, Juanita Jensen worked part-time for Hemingway while she held her regular clerical government job at the American Embassy in Havana—which is where her future husband also worked, as a high-ranking diplomatic officer.
It’s not uncommon for the still-grieving spouse to set a place for his wife at Saturday dinner—and always on their wedding anniversary. He’ll make her a martini.
Perhaps you have a sense of him as a talkative person. The opposite is true. He possesses the knack of reticence. Be
cause he’s comfortable with the flat spaces between conversations, he can make other people at ease with them, too. Some of the inclination to silence comes from his long-ago training and experience as a seaman. There’s a passage in The Old Man and the Sea, which Walter admires, where Hemingway writes, in the mind of the aged Santiago, who has now gone his famous eighty-four days in the Stream without taking a fish: “When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it was necessary. They talked at night or when they were storm-bound by bad weather. It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man had always considered it so and respected it. But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy.”
Walter and Nita were married for almost forty years. They raised two children. Walter’s son, Paul, and his daughter, Tina, late-middle-aged now, have long been on their own with their own lives and, in truth, are somewhat distant from their father. There are no Houk grandchildren. It’s the loneliness for Nita that seems to supersede everything.
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