Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  The only review he saw on the day of publication was Time’s, and they, too, spoke of his book as an embarrassment. Hemingway was a subscriber to Time, and his copy nearly always arrived on Thursday, having been published four days earlier in New York. He’d have liked going out on the boat to celebrate the day with a fish or two, but he’d stayed home to see what the bastards would say. In his gut he must have known, since there’d been that earlier talk of a cover story, now quashed. I picture him turning to page 110 and seeing the small blocky head (“On the Ropes”) and reading the sarcasm of the first line (“Hemingway was the champ all right”) and jumping into the second column (“never wins a round”) and then flipping to the end (“a bore who forfeits the reader’s sympathy”), and then tossing the rag down, all of it happening in eye-blinks of time, about as reflexively as some jerk of an amateur angler might jerk from a marlin’s jaw an 8/0 Mustad hook with a Japanese feather squid and strip of pork rind on it.

  Beneath the review was an interview the editors had recently conducted with him via telegram. It was bordered in wavy red lines and immediately drew the eye. They’d asked him in a phone call to keep his replies tight—to about twenty-five bucks worth of international cable tolls. So wasn’t the hero of his book a pretty bitter man? And weren’t the colonel’s personal history and even his characteristics startlingly parallel to the author’s? And might he be willing to concede he may have rushed things a little to get this one out? “We concede nothing, and what we take we hold” was one of his answers, and “Hemingway is bitter about nobody” was another. At the end, the editors included this: “Anything Mary told you over the phone I deny.” Mary Hemingway used to be a reporter for Time. What a double cross.

  He went into town before noon, hoping airmail letters from in-house friends at both The New York Times and Newsweek might be at the post office and he could get them before Friday’s delivery. The letters weren’t there. Nor did any telegrams of support from his publisher arrive that day or the next or the next. Mary Hemingway wasn’t around—she’d recently gone over to the States to help get her aging parents settled into a new residence in Gulfport, Mississippi. Xenophobia had contracted some kind of crud in her chest and was on penicillin—couldn’t even distract himself sexually. Did he wander the finca, take laps in the pool, kick at an underfoot cat or two?

  On Saturday he got up and went to his desk to write to his publisher. Reviews were appearing everywhere in the country (and also in England, where Across the River was being published simultaneously), and some weren’t half bad and a few were damn good—although he knew nothing of them. On the day of publication, both The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune had run prominent, if hedging, notices, and his publisher had done right by him and placed large ads. But the only thing he knew of so far was that dirty double cross in Time.

  “Dear Charlie: When the hell you been, boy?” (He had to have meant “where,” perhaps the smallest index of his distracted fury.)

  Did you read the Time review and take off for the wilds of Jersey to launch your counter-attack from there? Well everybody has their own way of doing things. But isn’t it sort of customary to inform an author about how things go and what people say when a book comes out that he has bet his shirt on and worked his heart out on nor missed a deadline nor failed to keep a promise.… Do you think maybe I am not old enough to be told how my horse broke and what he is doing?

  Eighth paragraph: “I’m going to take a dry martini now and the hell with it.” Next sentence: “Later: Got the Newsweek review which they sent me; also Times daily and Sunday which Juan, the chauffeur bought in town.” He means brought from town. What apparently happened is that he took the martini and in the meantime Juan arrived from town with the airmail packets from New York. The Times Sunday review, which wouldn’t be out until the next day, was a rave from fellow novelist John O’Hara. About a month earlier, he’d been tipped by his friendly inside source at the Times (it was a critic named Harvey Breit) that O’Hara was doing it. The editors had put the review on the cover. “The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel” was the first sentence. That’s about all he needed to see. Newsweek published—on the same day as Time’s review—a long and mostly admiring piece, a kind of feature-cum-review. It was written by the magazine’s book editor, Robert Cantwell, whom Hemingway had known casually from years before, in Europe. No double cross there. “I don’t think you backed the wrong horse: if you backed him,” he told Scribner, when he took up the letter again later that afternoon.

  The lift couldn’t last. He wrote a letter to Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker. He didn’t date it; he may not have sent it.§ He wrote it aboard Pilar, plowing through a rough sea as he was trying to steer. Was he zonked to his eyeballs? If you study the handwriting—never mind the content—you’ll believe so. It almost looks as if he used an auger instead of a pencil, for the way the words were bored into the page. Some of them were written in cursive, others were printed. He wrote the letter on the pages of an old Warner’s Calendar of Medical History. He had used parts of this calendar to keep a log of his 1939 fishing season. (Had he grabbed the partially filled-in logbook from a desk drawer at home that morning on his way to the boat?) He wrote the letter across four sheets of old dates: September 10, 11, 12, 13; 1939 dates. He probably wrote it in mid- or late September, after some of the earliest reviews had reached Havana. Ross was a friend; the letter was intended for Alfred Kazin, who’d said he’d made such a travesty of himself. Kazin was really only the stand-in—for Time, for Commentary, for the Saturday Review, for every bad notice his eye and fury were coming across.

  Dear Mr. Harold:

  Please excuse my bad orthography in hurricane months. We have had six only one hit here but not badly.

  Please inform Mr. Alfred KAZIM (or KAZIN) or however the poor shit spells it that he can stick (STICK) his review up his ASS repeat ASS and that I will send him the grease (GREASE) Repeat GREASE (any time he preffers).

  It is not dishonorable to fight for your country (OR CUNTRY) but when phonies with names like THAT write the criticism of a TRADE (OVER) that you have ACTUALLY Practised for Better or Much Worse (Much Movement on Ship and Me Steering.)

  Please TELL KAZIN (if that is his real name) TO GO HANG HIMSELF (Will Furnish Worn Out Rope From the Boat STOP Adequate to hang repeat HANG shits, LIARS and MENTAL and Physical and Moral JERKS repeat JERKS. Best always Ernest Hemingway

  In comparison to the rest of the letter, the “Best always” and his signature are almost neatly executed—which would make you think he signed it after he was home, having read it over to his satisfaction.

  Mary Hemingway returned from the Gulf Coast to find that the path of the storm had violently turned. His treatment of her in late September and early October gathered to a kind of crushing greatness. On October 12, five weeks after publication, Mary wrote to Charles Scribner. She said, “At various times in the last several months he has called me, and repeated the names, rolling them around juiceily on his tongue: whore, bitch, liar, moron.” The night before, with half a dozen guests at the dinner table, she had made a rather innocent remark that she didn’t intend to bet on a pigeon-shooting contest that was being planned for the next day on the grounds of the finca. “So Ernest denounced me several times as ‘cobarde’ (coward) but the Spanish is somehow stronger and more insulting in meaning.” She said, “At table his favorite and frequent means of protesting any word, glance, gesture or food he doesn’t like is to put his full, freshly served plate on the floor. The other day he dumped the entire plate of bread and crackers on top of my plate.” She told of the Xenophobia incident in May. She said, “It is more than a year since he actually hit me.” She wondered whether her inability to conceive a child had something to do with his behavior. “He taunts me with this.” She said she feared “the disintegration of a personality.” She said she had decided again she must leave him—did Scribner k
now of any writing jobs in New York? She asked that he not reply directly—“Ernest is inclined to open my mail before I see it.”

  Incidentally, in a letter of his own to Scribner, written on the day before Mary’s letter, Hemingway had put everything on his wife’s menstrual period. “She was quite happy yesterday and the day before,” he said. “About writing to Mary: please lay off any references to problems I may have. I have not been married 29 years and not learned I am a son of a bitch every twenty-eight days or so.” In an earlier letter, he’d told Scribner that his wife was talking to him “like a fishwife before everyone, and I have to keep my temper.” I can believe the fishwife part. It was as if two adults, acting like children, were running to a parent to tell on the other, the parent here being not quite a decade older than Hemingway. Several times in these weeks Scribner wrote to Hemingway and asked that he treat his wife more respectfully. In one of his replies, Hemingway said, “Thanks for the morality lecture.”

  Incidentally again, E. B. White of The New Yorker had just finished—and the magazine had set immediately in type, to go in that week’s issue—his hilarious little ditty titled “Across the Street and into the Grill,” mentioned previously. It began:

  This is my last and best and true and only meal, thought Mr. Pirnie as he descended at noon and swung east on the beat-up sidewalk of Forty-fifth Street. Just ahead of him was the girl from the reception desk. I am a little fleshed up around the rook of the elbow, thought Pirnie, but I commute good.…

  What a stinking trade it is, he thought. But after what I’ve done to other assistant treasurers, I can’t hate anybody. Sixteen deads, and I don’t know how many possibles.

  If that public mockery had to press hard on a nerve when Hemingway read it in the magazine a few days later (he was a subscriber), it should be noted here, although not as any kind of excuse, that something had been literally and badly pressing on one of his nerves, making his right leg swell up and go ice-cold. His Havana doctor determined that old encysted shrapnel dating from 1918 had been knocked loose by the July 1 headfirst fall into the hooks and clamps holding the gaffs.

  No amount of rage from Hemingway and no amount of vituperation from his critics were having any apparent karmic effect on the sales of Across the River. The book had torn through its first printing before September was out, and the publisher had ordered another twenty-five thousand. At the moment of his wife’s October 12 letter to Scribner, the novel that had been dedicated “To Mary with Love” was landing at number one on The New York Times Book Review best-seller list.

  The day following her letter, the weather was too stormy for fishing. Hemingway couldn’t go out on his boat. He said he was going to take a car trip down the island with his driver, Juan. He had no idea how long he’d be gone or where he was staying. He packed books, medications, glasses, land clothes. His wife went to her desk and wrote a quick poem called “For the Road.” She handed it to him and kissed him and then stood with the servants on the terrace and waved as the two men pulled off down the drive. She went down to the pool and did about a half mile of laps in the nude and came up and took lunch. By midafternoon, there he was, back in front of her, “well-filled with frozen daiquiris.” This story is in How It Was. Apparently there were no brutalities on October 13. But a few days after, according to entries in her journals as well as what’s in the memoir, Hemingway turned to her and said, “You camp-follower and scavenger.” A couple of days further on, he said, “You have the face of Torquemada.” (She went to a dictionary to look up Torquemada: Dominican monk in the Spanish Inquisition who tortured thousands of Jews and suspected witches.) She walked into her rose garden and sat under a lychee tree to cry and conduct a self-interview about why she didn’t have the guts to leave him. From How It Was: “Wild Mary: ‘What about your pride? Haven’t you any pride? You’re too craven.’ Mild Mary: ‘My pride? It’s wounded. It stings.’ ” Shouldn’t she have known what he could do when the demons were on him? He’d shoot at anything. In early 1945, in Paris, at the Hôtel Ritz, about nine months after they’d first met, he had put into a toilet bowl, and begun firing away at it, a photograph of Mary’s Australian journalist husband, Noel Monks, from whom she was separated but not divorced. That display flooded their room.

  On October 28—now seven weeks since the critics have been firing away—an Italian cargo-passenger ship named the Luciano Manara arrives in Havana Harbor, and Adriana Ivancich and her widowed mother, Dora, are aboard. They’ve come to Cuba for what’ll turn out to be a three-month visit. Adriana’s older brother, Gianfranco, has been living in Cuba for more than a year, and this fact lends propriety and moral plausibility to the visit—which had been hatched, the previous spring, in Venice, near the end of a second consecutive lengthy Hemingway stay in Europe. More obsessed than ever with the girl whom he’d known at that point for roughly a year and a quarter, Hemingway had told his wife that he wanted to invite Adriana and her mother to Havana, and to stay with them. Mary, feeling helpless to stop it, had nonetheless demanded that if it was going to happen, the invitation should be a joint one—for the sake of propriety. “You’re right, my kitten. You fix it up then,” Hemingway had told her. A couple of weeks after the invite, Hemingway had had a reunion with Adriana in Paris. This was mid-March 1950. Hemingway and his wife were about to sail for America. On the day before the Hemingways caught the boat train to Le Havre, Hemingway and Adriana had gone for a walk along the boulevard Saint-Germain. They’d stopped at a sidewalk table and sat under a striped umbrella at the Les Deux Magots. Florid-faced, Hemingway had made a fumbling declaration of his love. In a roundabout way, he’d even brought up the subject of marriage. “I love you in my heart and I cannot do anything about it,” he said. “But you have Mary,” Adriana had said, feeling paralyzed. “Ah, yes, Mary. She is nice of course, and solid and courageous,” he’d answered. Two days later, Hemingway and his wife were on the Île de France, and five days later, at noon on March 27, they were easing into New York Harbor. They spent ten days in New York and had then entrained for Florida and ferried onward to Cuba, arriving home on April 8. Within two days, he had written to his love: “I missed you every minute of all the time since Havre.” A few days later: “I do not, and cannot, ever love anyone as I love you.” Such letters had kept up through the summer. Sometimes he had addressed her as “Adriana Hemingway.” Sometimes he had signed himself “Ernest Ivancich.”

  So here they were, at the finca, this strange quartet: the Venetian mother and widow, whose aristocratic family had fallen on hard financial times; the not-quite-twenty-one-year-old daughter; the forty-two-year-old rebuked wife; the fifty-one-year-old rejected novelist (in his own mind)—all breathing the same coolish autumn air on a hill outside the city where, when the day was clear, you could look down through the mangoes and poincianas from the west terrace and see the Capitolio and also the glint of the blue harbor, although not quite an aging, elegant, faithful fishing boat nodding in it.

  One night, there was a planned outing in town for dinner and a film. Mary chose a dark dress. “Your hangman’s suit. Your executioner’s suit,” her husband told her. But she loved that dark dress and until that moment felt he’d been fond of it, too. “You’ve sabotaged it,” he said, meaning the outing.

  One night he shot out a lamp. One night he said, almost from nowhere, “You slut.” One night, after Mary had brought her typewriter out to the living room, he came in, picked it up, and slammed it to the floor. Later that evening he took exception to some “incautious” word she’d used and threw wine in her face. She ducked and most of it went staining down the white plaster wall behind her. These stories are in How It Was.

  As is this one: Mary went looking for some business papers she kept in a drawer beneath the window seat in an anteroom just off the master bedroom. She kept personal letters in there, too, including copies of hers to him, as well as originals of his to her. The personal letters were gone. “I’ve put them in the bank,” he said.

  A photogra
ph. He’s in one of the matching and deep-cushioned floral-print armchairs in the finca’s long living room. He’s wearing a tux and French cuffs with cuff links. He’s got his legs crossed—you can see a bit of his hairy shin. He looks a little like a dressed-up Einstein—with a haircut. There’s a floor lamp shading him—its scalloped and crinkly shade is decorated with toreadors. At his elbow, positioned between the two easy chairs, is a table holding maybe a dozen bottles of liquor. Adriana, in evening wear, a shawl around her shoulders, is right there, too, kneeling, with her chin on her clasped hands, which are in turn resting on the arm of the easy chair. She’s sleek-skinned, Mediterranean, aquiline, bejeweled. She’s not looking at him so much as past him, as if taking in something he has just said, tête-à-tête. Have the four just come from a candlelit dinner in the dining room? Was this the evening they’d gone into the Vedado district of the city to hear Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin? Where is Mary? Seething, on the far other side of the room?

  In mid-November, the foursome was out on Pilar. They were down at Puerto Escondido. More than a year before, in the summer of 1949, he’d taken his old Royal typewriter to Puerto Escondido and had worked furiously and contentedly for six days aboard Pilar on Across the River, averaging better than a thousand words a day. But now, with the real Renata aboard, the weather at Puerto Escondido began to seethe. Hemingway said later that Pilar took the wind at “maybe a touch over 95 in the gusts,” and that the thing had “hit like a cleaver. We still had the hurricane months gear on board and had four anchors out and two lines made fast to the shore.” They saw an Italian freighter smashed up on the rocks like a toy. Pilar got coated with a rime of sea salt, but otherwise came through fine. Hemingway evacuated his guests and wife to shore, where they caught a train back to Havana. He and Gregorio brought the boat home and caught another load of good fish for the freezer. He described the fury of it all in several letters.