Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Editors stop calling, sources dry up, magazines change hands. Walter’s brand of utterly trustworthy, fact-driven copy doesn’t seem to be what editors want anymore. And Nita’s decline? More or less the same slow attrition.

  In the last two years of her life, when Walter’s new job became that of tending her full-time, Nita was seeing six specialists in addition to her internist—almost weekly. Sarcoidosis in her lungs. Insulin-dependent diabetes. A failing heart. Then it was the liquid oxygen tanks standing in a corner of the living room with their long plastic tubes running along the baseboards into the sickroom.

  And Ernest Hemingway? In those first few years after Havana, Walter and Nita would get cards at holidays with brief messages from both Hemingways. But Walter and Nita had their lives. They were raising their children. As the years passed, Nita also grew to feel very possessive of Papa—she’d been there first, hadn’t she? Wasn’t it her Papa truly cared about? Would Hemingway even remember him? Nita had never read many of Papa’s books, nor did she need to. Walter, on the other hand, could now recite Hemingway passages by heart. But in a curious way, a husband and wife, in their loving marriage, found themselves nearly unable to talk about the man or even the country that had so touched their lives. To their kids, yes, they could talk about Hemingway and Cuba, but to them it was ancient history.

  In 1964, three years after the suicide (Walter can’t remember where he was when he got the news, only that he was shocked and yet somehow wasn’t), Nita had gotten a letter from Professor Carlos Baker at Princeton. He was working on his Hemingway biography, and did she have any of Hemingway’s correspondence? In a shoe box in the garage, Nita found three of her old steno notebooks. The pages were soft as lanolin, and the blue and black ink of her shorthand was very faded but she could read the words. She remembered how, in that first week or two, Papa’s dictation had been pretty stilted. Then, stopping, he said, “Daughter, do you mind if I use four-letter words here?” After that, his letters loosened up considerably. She’d always worked sequentially through her notebooks, filling up the pages, one side at a time. She’d get to the end of the book, come back the other way. After she had transcribed a page, she’d draw a big X through the sheet. Here was a letter from October 1949 that she’d taken off the talk machine and put down first in shorthand. Papa was writing to an insurance agent regarding a mink coat he’d just bought for his wife. “Mrs. Hemingway wants to insure a mink coat which she has just purchased from Marshall Field & Co., natural wild mink, 43 inch length, with cuffs three pelts deep for $4,735.00 against all risk (sea, air and land) including theft, any form of damage, etc., good for all countries. The coat is at present in cold storage in a fur cold storage house here in Cuba.” That was Papa, all right, with his beautiful detail. Did Nita know that Operation Mink Coat, as Hemingway called it, had come about as a makeup present to his wife for the terrible things he was saying to her in the spring and summer of ’49 during the writing of Across the River? Mary had come back from Chicago in early October with the coat on her arm. Her husband met her at the airport with frozen daiquiris, and they had downed them in the backseat on the ride to the finca. But the reunion had fouled when Mary discovered that, in her absence, Hemingway had had his teenage whore, Xenophobia, out to the house about three times.

  In that same shoebox in the garage, Nita had found an old, yellowed single sheet of white paper with Hemingway’s signature on it in four forms—for her to use to sign letters if he wasn’t available. There was “Mister Papa,” “Ernest,” “Ernest Hemingway,” and “Ernie.” She’d become a pretty skilled signer.

  She had opened another box of her Cuba things that had survived all the years and moves, and there were some of her old letters to him. This one, for instance, typed on Papa’s portable. It’s February 26, 1950, and the Hemingways are abroad, and she’s been helping to hold down the fort at the finca. He has sent her a list of questions, and she’s answering them in numerical order: “We have had several good rains which have helped considerably. The garden is beautiful and all sorts of vegetables are on hand. The boat is completely rejuvenated and Gregorio told me several weeks ago that everything is in applie-pie order (I mean to say apple-pie).” Next page: “Papa, please don’t forget to send Abercrombie & Fitch a check—they just sent another bill with a gentle reminder.” And a month later, March 28, 1950, catching the travelers up on all the news, and adding a word about Papa’s youngest son, who’s been on a visit: “Will certainly miss Gigi when he leaves. He’s a sweet boy and will have no trouble breaking a few female hearts.”

  That same year, 1964, when Nita had first heard from Professor Baker, she had also gotten a letter from Mary Hemingway, who was living at 27 East Sixty-fifth Street in New York. “We’re letting Pilar rot away in Cuba because I know Papa couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else being her ‘commander,’ ” Mary had said.

  In the late eighties, when it was clear that his wife was dying, Walter gently suggested they should try to produce a joint memoir of their time in Cuba, with Hemingway at the center. Nita nodded. Walter wrote the text, interpolating long Nita passages set off by quotation marks. In the way that she had found several of her old steno books, he rooted around and found some of his old Havana diaries. But the pages were badly disintegrating, so he retyped selected portions without editing or otherwise polishing them. The manuscript that emerged, from both memory and documents, was modest in size and titled “Havana and Hemingway: A Mid-Century Memoir.” Walter sent it to a dozen publishers. He was dreaming of getting it into print before Nita died. Every publisher sent it back with notes to the effect of, we don’t really do regional stuff, or, sorry, it’s a little too narrow for our needs. I’ve read this manuscript, and what seems closer to the truth is that there just wasn’t enough Hemingway dirt.

  After Nita died, Walter tended to stay in more and more. He’d never joined clubs or attended churches. Widows and matchmaking friends of widows were calling up, but he wasn’t interested. He liked going to the Saturday morning organic farmers’ market down in Calabasas. Avoiding the freeways, he’d cruise at forty miles an hour in his spotless 1984 Honda Accord, which he otherwise kept in his locked and spotless garage. He took his walks. He obsessively cleaned the house. He organized his old travel slides. He created a rack by the front door where he lined up dozens of old Sunsets and in-flights with his pieces in them. More than once, giving fits to neighbors, he got up on his roof via a stepladder and started whacking away at tree branches with a pruner. From a neighbor, who tended to look after him, he got a cast-off Ping-Pong table and brought it to the basement and cut down the legs and spread out huge nautical maps. He wanted to begin charting Thomas Hudson’s submarine pursuits in Islands in the Stream. With his exquisitely sharpened pencil, he’d bend over the maps for hours, with the deeply annotated text beside him. On the maps he’d enter his calculations: “Soundings in Fathoms. Soundings in Meters.” This work eventually led to a nearly book-length manuscript, “A Sailor Looks at Hemingway’s Islands,” which got into academic print. Other manuscripts—about growing up in Los Angeles, for instance—got drafted and put into neat red binders with clear plastic covers. Walter didn’t bother to send them out. He was writing these manuscripts for himself, or his children.

  They came to visit, though not all that often. Who can ever know from the outside all the tensions that root up inside families as they seek to nourish and wound each other? The core explanation here seems to be that Paul Houk and Tina Houk feel they were emotionally deprived of a dad when they grew up. Walter was too involved with his career, and, in another way, with his spouse. There were and are other issues, too. All of it is sad, and none of it is nefarious. One night, on the way back from dinner, Walter said softly, almost from nowhere: “I’m inclined to say I wasn’t very good at parenting. Nita was so much better. You don’t get another chance at that. It’s not coming back.” After a while: “I just wasn’t made for the twenty-first century.”

  In these widowed years,
Walter had ventured out once to a Hemingway conference, in Colorado Springs. By chance he’d found himself seated at a dinner next to the editor of North Dakota Quarterly. It was as if Robert Lewis (that was the editor’s name) understood completely about Walter. “Why don’t you try contributing something to one of our special Hemingway issues?” he asked. This offer turned into the 1998 memoir piece, “On the Gulf Stream Aboard Hemingway’s Pilar,” the one I accidentally pulled down from a library shelf in Philadelphia six years after its publication. Several other NDQ pieces followed, including the long one about Hemingway’s islands. In modest ways, Walter, the breathing witness, had begun to feel himself “drawn in,” as he likes to say, to the scholarly Hemingway universe.

  One afternoon Walter and I were on a walk in the neighborhood when we ran into a friendly girl from Cleveland with a big dog. Determined to check my hunches, I asked, “Did you know Walter was once an intimate of Ernest Hemingway?” I thought she was going to hyperventilate. “But, Walter, you never told me this!” she cried. Although he pretended otherwise, I think Walter was pleased.

  On July 23, two days after Walter had been on Pilar for the first time, he wrote in his journal: “I climbed aboard Pilar Saturday (July 21) for the long-awaited fishing trip.”

  In the previous seventeen days, Walter and Nita had been guests at the finca three times—on two Sundays and on the Fourth of July. Those were lubricated times, punctuated by cooling swims in the pool, and by the boisterous mood of the head of the house, but they weren’t anything like an outing on Pilar. The sailor-diplomat was just dying to be on Pilar. The day before he got his wish, Hemingway had written to Charlie Scribner. He’d been distinctly nonboisterous; mortality seemed the underlying note. He’d talked about the Sea book, and its various parts, semi-complete. (He still thought of it as a four-part story, with the Santiago tale a kind of coda to the whole.) He’d said he wanted Scribner to know what was in his publishing mind “in case of my death.” Several paragraphs down: “My chances of living to complete the book are excellent according to my doctor. However, I have worked so hard in the last six months that I know I need a rest.” It had been a searing July, with the temperature above ninety almost every day, and he now had a case of permanent prickly heat. At the end of the letter he’d spoken of not being able to “get away from the book.” But he’d also noted that he’d been able to put 250 pounds of dolphin and kingfish into the Deepfreeze. In his postscript: “Tomorrow is my birthday and I am going fishing.” He hadn’t told Charlie of the two “kids” he was taking fishing.

  It was relatively cool that Saturday morning as the small boating party, in a gently rolling sea, and with a line of thin cirrus clouds on the horizon, stood down the channel past the Morro Castle. Mary wasn’t aboard—she was once again up in the States. Rains had come in the night before, sending sheets of fresh water across the top of the waves. The man at the wheel, who’d just made fifty-two, told Walter and Nita that he was going to take her out farther than usual, because that’s where the fish would be. (They weren’t.) Gregorio rigged the baits. Soon they were in deep blue water, with the drifts of sargasso coming by. Walter’s words about that day, from that first piece in North Dakota Quarterly: “Out here and sufficient to ourselves, large questions of world destiny, high art or philosophy were less absorbing than the need to watch a squadron of flying fish planing above the water. Those in-transit butterflies flitting above the billowing surface, expending as much energy in vertical as in forward movement, fixed our attention.”

  As they were purring through the channel, with the Morro Castle in the background, Walter climbed up to the flying bridge with his Argus and asked Hemingway if he could make a picture—the one you’ve already seen. Walter’s girlfriend was on the bridge, too, in a red-checkered sunsuit and a white tennis hat.

  There were several swims in the turquoise cove at Santa María del Mar, where they lay at anchor for three hours, and that wonderful lunch of alligator pears and fresh fish washed down with wine and beer at the folded-down table in the shade of the cockpit, and the naps, and long periods of semi-wakefulness, and just gazing out over foamy blue hills of ocean with very little being said by anyone. At length, they pulled in the anchors and glided back toward “the wicked city,” as Walter wrote in his diary entry. From that diary: “It hit with a bang that evening in the Floridita, when we were suddenly surrounded by mobs of people saluting him. A large part of the mob was Marita, Marchesa de San Felice, of the Italian Embassy, abandoned and wild. Quantities of champagne and caviar flowed—enough, in fact, that taken on top of the three double-sized daiquiris I had just had, I didn’t stay to see the party over.” Walter has a memory of Hemingway stumbling toward his station wagon, the Italian diplomat’s wife on his arm.

  The next day, Sunday, Hemingway rang up Walter very early at his apartment in Vedado. He was ready to go out on the boat again. Still hungover, Walter picked up Nita at her boardinghouse and drove to the waterfront. This time the Marchesa was on board and her presence more or less ruined the mood, at least for Walter.

  Fifty-three years from that birthday weekend, on my second visit to Woodland Hills, Walter and I decided more or less on the spur to go on a picnic in a little park close to his home. At Gelson’s Market on Mulholland Highway, we bought Santa Fe chicken sandwiches, which the clerk put into pre-molded plastic containers. Walter had brought a small cooler from home with Cokes in it. He’d packed carefully into a wicker picnic basket real silverware and glasses and cloth napkins. The park was very hot. Some kids off a school bus, on an outing, were making too much noise up on a hill. We looked for shade and, unable to find any, took a cement table in the middle of a brown field. We spread out our lunch. Nearby was a trash barrel being picked at by large green flies. Walter said he used to bring Nita here in her wheelchair. Mangy-looking squirrels came close; Walter eyed them in disgust. He fell quiet. We ate the sandwiches. We weren’t dining on alligator pears on Ernest Hemingway’s boat with a marlin leaping off the stern; no, we were at this ugly picnic table in this too-hot park in greater Los Angeles.

  I said something about his need not to talk. “Well, I guess it’s my way,” he said, “or at least my way now. But it also comes out of the tradition of sailing ships—spending three months at sea, and you’ve said it all to your mate. And you save the talk for the tense moments of instruction—if a line breaks and you need a rope and have to act fast. It becomes a matter of luck almost. A superstition. That’s how the connection is made. If you talk too much, you divert attention from other things that may need attention.”

  Suddenly, I said, with no idea I was going to say it: “Fuck all those critics who wouldn’t accept him after 1930.” I added quickly I was sorry for my profanity.

  “It’s a good Anglo-Saxon word. Why not?”

  At length we packed up and went back to Gaona Street.

  This was in 2004. I now know so much more about this proud, lonely old man, with his disposition to silences and emotional containment. The secrets have come out, or many of them. I’ve heard him talk of his regrets, most of which have to do with family. Not too long ago, as I write, I got an e-mail from Walter that made me sad. He said he could no longer afford to “overlook accumulating indications. Am trying not to make this just the old codger wailing gloom-and-doom for the next decade or so. Mortality just now seems not as fearsome as the scrambling of the mind. I think. I don’t speak of this because no one knows how to respond except to say nonsense, you’ll live to be 105 and I don’t need that. Or pity.”

  Too many times, on visits to Walter’s, I’ve found myself exclaiming, “You knew the man.” And he’ll shrug and say something like, “I arrived at my own conclusions. I didn’t know about this Hemingway industry. I was a young man in Havana in love with a young woman and it just happened.” He’ll invariably add: “I know what I know.”

  On a recent visit, he talked about being depressed. He said he was afraid of what he might do at the end—“you know, breaking down or so
mething.” He said he’d begun to feel almost panicky.

  “Do you ever think about suicide, Walter?” I wanted to stuff the words back in.

  “Of course. Often there doesn’t seem very much point to hanging around. I’ve fantasized going out in one great burst—right through that plate glass behind you, after the tenth martini.” The glass window and sliding door to which he was pointing led out onto the deck and to the live oak. He erupted into a laugh. “Don’t worry, I don’t think I would. Too much of a mess.”

  Three weeks before he took Walter for his first cruise on Pilar, Hemingway’s mother died in Memphis at age seventy-nine. Grace Hemingway was an old, bewildered woman who’d lost her mind and was often found wandering around her daughter Sunny’s house in the middle of the night. They’d stuck her in a convalescent home, and when the staff there could no longer abide her, she’d ended up for several weeks in the mental ward of a county hospital. Although Hemingway had paid the costs, and had arranged for the church bells in the village below his house to toll on the day of the burial, he’d not attended the funeral. In a letter at the end of August, Hemingway made an accounting of the amount of recent death and dying: his mother; his father-in-law’s losing battle with prostate cancer; his first grandson (Bumby’s child), dead five hours after delivery; four of the finca’s dogs poisoned by thieves; four cats lost or killed but in any case missing.

  If July had been hot, August was hotter yet. Writing to Charlie Scribner on September 9, he talked of how there were just no damned fish in the Stream. It had to be the heat. Ordinarily he’d be out on the boat today, a Sunday, but, shit, why not stay home and save some gas and bait? Later in this letter, circling back to some of those who’d died, including Max Perkins, four years before: “But I have been so conditioned about it that I think of death now like a possible blow-out on a tire on a transcontinental motor trip. It is only something that has to be figured in.”