Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  There’s a Hemingway letter from early 1936 that’s extraordinary for its fatherly affections and momentary wisdom about family life. It was written when Gigi was newly four, so, yes, in the same time period when he’d first begun stealing to his mother’s closet to put on her nylons—and allowing the tinglings from that to travel upward. By Gigi’s testimony, he wasn’t to get caught at what he was shamefully doing for about another five or six years. He said it happened when he was “nine or ten,” on summer vacation in Cuba, when he and his brothers were visiting their father and his new wife—on whom all three Hemingway sons, though especially the younger two, had their large crushes. (It was almost as if Marty was their big sister and not their stepmother. Gellhorn was nine years younger than Hemingway and from the first had shone on all three boys, but especially the younger two, the beam of her loving attention.) He said his father just walked in on him, stood there frozen, with this look of horror and disgust, turned, and left the room. Who knows if it’s true: Gigi could be a wild distorter and exaggerator and misrememberer and often bald liar about his own history. Wouldn’t he have learned the trade at the master’s knee? If it did happen that way, then the catching must have taken place in either the summer of 1941, when he was nine, going on ten, or in the summer of 1942, when he was ten, going on eleven. By then the dopey little guy with the pudgy fingers and rolls of baby fat (go back to that photograph of him on page 201, taken with his brothers and papa on the docks of Bimini in the summer of ’35, when he was three and a half, with Pilar in the background) had grown into a mop-haired, freckle-faced, pug-nosed, Key West imp working hard on his altar-boy card, so that he could get up early during the school year and serve at daily Mass at Saint Mary Star of the Sea. Going into the fifth grade, the imp still stood barely four-foot-six.

  My own belief is that it happened in June or July of 1941, his fourth-grade summer, for reasons I’ll detail in the next chapter.

  But this earlier Hemingway letter, with its transcendent note, written on a Sunday afternoon, up in the writing loft, two and a half months after Gigi had turned four. It’s a long letter; Pilar and the sea are much in it. It was as if once he’d gotten going, in his bighearted way, the letter writer couldn’t stop. (As he notes toward the end, he went on so long he missed the special Sunday afternoon airmail pickup.) Hemingway is writing to his mother-in-law, Gigi’s maternal grandmother, Mary Pfeiffer, and his chief purpose is to thank her and her husband for their once-again generous Christmas gifts (a fat check and a bunch of new stocks). But soon enough the letter is getting off onto the letter-writer’s kids, onto his loving and decent wife, onto all the family’s amusing, mundane doings. It’s as if a man, lately wounded, has awakened to what’s important in this life, not the lusting after fame, but your own family.

  Hemingway, of course, had been creamed that fall on Green Hills of Africa. Afterward, the sleeplessness and thoughts of suicide had come on hard. He wishes to say here they’re passing off, but it isn’t so. His night terrors will be with him through much of 1936, and indeed are now probably what a clinician would term chronic. In any case he doesn’t nearly name them for the stark things they are, but rather codes and masks them to “Mother” Pfeiffer, whom he likes a lot, as his recent “spell.”

  “Had a spell when I was pretty gloomy, that was why I didn’t write first, and didn’t sleep for about three weeks,” he says. “Took to getting up about two or so in the morning and going out to the little house to work.… Had never had the real old melancholia before and am glad to have had it so I know what people go through. It makes me more tolerant of what happened to my father.”

  As to the kids, and how they’ve unwittingly been rescuing him: “It is only in this last year that I have gotten any sort of understanding or feeling about how anyone can feel about their children or what they can mean to them.”

  He’s been taking them out separately in the boat. The day before he had Pat out. “I was steering and saw him throwing up over the side and heard him, in the midst of it, shouting ‘Papa! Papa!’ I jumped to him to see what was the matter and he said, ‘There’s a sailfish jumping over there. I just saw him while I was throwing up!’ ” The Mouse-man, seven now, has even come up with a little ditty to fortify him against all his puking. It goes: “You put the chowder down. The stomach goes round and round hydeeho hydeehay and it comes out here.”

  And the Gig-man? This damn kid can do addition in his head up into the hundreds. He can multiply by fives and tens. “You will say to him ‘What’s 240 and 240 Jew?’ and he will put his head on one side and say ‘I think its about four hundred eighty.’ ” A few days before, when Mousie was in school, he had Gigi in the boat, “and there were some friends down here and we harpooned a porpoise and put the harpoon on a rod and reel so the porpoise was making a monkey out of the man who was trying to catch him and when we would shout suggestions to him in the bow Gregory would repeat these all and add new ones of his own.”

  The letter’s date is January 26, 1936. In less than a year Hemingway was in adultery with Martha Gellhorn. As for the so-called spell of recent melancholia, this is what it was really like: “I felt that gigantic bloody emptiness and nothingness like couldn’t fuck, fight write and was all for death,” Hemingway said in a letter to Dos Passos, three weeks after the one I’ve been quoting. As for the cutest one in the family, who had a way of slinging his head off to the side when you posed him a riddlesome question, who could stand in the bow of his papa’s boat and shout instructions like a good first mate, who may have already entered the thing from which there seemed no turning back, why, they’d recently given him this humongous birthday party in the backyard of 907 Whitehead. That was on November 12. There’d been pony rides and a hired clown and neighbor kids, both black and white, from up and down the street. Not least there’d been a four-layer cake with four candles on it that the Gigster had stood over and whoofed out nifty as you please.

  IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING

  Gigi, Havana, summer 1945

  Doctors did things to you and then it was not your body any more.… The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with, only to remember and not too much remember.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Farewell to Arms

  The 5 foot 7 inch, 189 pound body is white with an overall male body habitus and some female phenotypic features. The gray scalp hair is thin with anterior male pattern balding. The face has sparse mustache and beard stubble. The irides [sic] are brown. The corneas are clear. The conjunctivae are pale and free of petechial hemorrhages. The upper teeth are in good repair with porcelain restorations. The mandible is edentulous. The ears, nose and mouth have no abnormalities. The earlobes are pierced one time each. The neck is symmetrical and free of palpable masses. The torso is symmetrical and of normal configuration. There is slight female breast development, with the left breast larger than the right. The abdomen is flat. The back has a normal contour and the anus is without lesions. The external genitalia are phenotypically female with labia, urethra and vagina. The extremities are symmetric and the joints are not deformed. All digits are present. The fingernails are long and painted pink. The toenails are thick and painted pink. The skin is free of icterus.

  —The first paragraph of Gregory Hemingway’s autopsy report, Case No. 01-2325, Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Department, October 2, 2001, the day after the death. There were four “findings,” including this: “Severe coronary atherosclerosis with 90% stenosis of right coronary artery and 75% stenosis of left anterior descending artery.”

  I’LL WHOOF this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt, which is why they couldn’t forsake each other, no matter how hard they tried. Firstly, they were father and son. But past this, they recognized they were yoked more deeply and darkly than anybody ever knew. Didn’t Hemingway himself signal it on the page? Go back to that passage in Islands in the Stream. “[H]e had a dark side to him that nobody except Thomas Hudson could ever understand. Neither of them though
t about this except that they recognized it in each other and knew it was bad and the man respected it and understood the boy’s having it.”

  “Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten,” Hemingway wrote to the Swedish Academy upon accepting his Nobel Prize in 1954, the ceremony for which he was much too ill to attend.

  In those 1987 Washington Post pieces, “Papa’s Boys,” I had made the same general point I am making here, but I had phrased it as a question and more or less slipped it in at the back of the Gigi portrait. I wrote, equivocally: “There are Freudians afoot—especially in light of so much of the recent Hemingway scholarship, and the publication last year of his novel The Garden of Eden, which is awash in transsexual fantasies—who would raise this question: was the son merely acting out what the father felt?” I was doing what journalists do when they don’t quite have the courage of their convictions—or enough facts. Namely, hedge the bets. Put it off onto others.

  No longer. I’ve come to think of both of them, the one who exploded himself into infinity, the one too long regarded as the genetic blunder of the Hemingway family, as far braver human beings than anyone ever knew. Which is why, in spite of everything, there is uplift in their separate and bound stories.

  It happened, if it did, the first catching, by his father, in the early summer of 1941, and I’ll base my conviction on an important Hemingway letter, written in a kind of code.

  It’s a short letter, misdated, three paragraphs long. Hemingway wrote it to his ex-wife possibly around August 1. He was thanking Pauline for letting him know that the boys, Pat and Gigi, had arrived safely back in the States from a shortened stay in Cuba. Since their divorce, their feelings toward each other had begun to mend. But they were still finding their way. As with any divorced parents of young children, their communication was often taken up with mundane logistical matters, hence the first sentence of this one: “Thanks for the wire about the kids arriving o.k.”

  In the second paragraph: “Giggy is better all the time I think [my itals]. He has the biggest dark side in the family except me and you and I’m not in the family. He keeps it so concealed that you never know about it [my itals] and maybe that way it will back up on him. But maybe too it will disappear [my itals] as nearly all talent does along with youth and all the perishable commodities that shape our ends. (Sic)”

  These hedgings and codings are enough to make me believe Gigi’s father had only recently found him doing something horrid. We will never know for sure. The letter writer can’t say that horror’s name, not even (or especially), to his own former spouse.

  That night in Coconut Grove, I should have pressed Gigi for more details about this moment. Maybe a mind-fogged man wouldn’t have had them. What I do know is he told me his father opened the door of the finca’s master bedroom and came in while he was putting on “Marty’s white nylons.” But almost as soon as he said this, Gigi’s mind went to something else.

  So why don’t I believe it would have happened during the next summer’s vacation at the finca, when he was ten, going on eleven? Two reasons. First, because the summer of 1942 constituted one of the largest triumphs of Gigi’s boyhood; and, second, and as a direct result of the triumph, Hemingway’s correspondence of that summer, as it concerns Gigi, seems unambiguous in its fatherly pride. The codings and shadings are largely absent. (With Hemingway, you have to insert the word “nearly” or “largely.”)*

  In 1942, Hemingway taught his youngest son how to shoot. Next to fishing, shooting was the supreme outdoor Hemingway manly value. Within weeks of learning how to fire a gun, the vest-pocket Hemingway was going up against grown men in live-pigeon shooting competitions at the Club de Cazadores del Cerro, and doing so as if he possessed “built-in radar.” Actually, he was competing against some of the finest marksmen in all of Cuba, including the great Rodrigo Díaz and the almost-as-great Antonio Montalvo. The pint-sizer was using a .410-bore against professionals with 12-gauges. Gigi had never picked up a shotgun until that summer. He just seemed to understand in his veins about shooting. In no time he could place his weight on his back foot and lean forward with just the right bead; could swing and lead the birds, and keep swinging and keep leading after the recoil. He was like that other natural, the one who’d sat down at the iconic tables in the iconic city by the Seine and written an ostensible fish story titled “Big Two-Hearted River.” And wouldn’t that former phenom, watching this phenom, have been trying to convince himself that things were turning out just fine with his youngest, even if something disturbing had happened the summer before?

  Built-in radar: about a decade and a half after Gigi’s first summer with a gun, Hemingway used this image in a deeply bitter story titled “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something.” It’s not a very well-known piece in the Hemingway canon, and wasn’t published in his lifetime. It was probably written in 1955. By then, it would have been too painfully clear to the author of “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something”—or so all the surface evidence would seem to argue—that the “fictional” boy who’d shot with the coolest hand and the built-in radar for the National Live Pigeon Championship of Cuba “had never been any good.” He was just vile. “His vileness came on from a sickness.” The specific sickness isn’t identified.

  Am I confusing fiction with real life? Yes, deliberately, riskily.

  That boy, called Stevie, son of a man called Papa, “never took a shot out of range nor let a driven bird come too close.” His father would watch him with the “heel of his right foot lifted gently as all of him leaned behind the two loads in the chambers.”

  “Ready,” he said in that low, hoarse voice that did not belong to a small boy.

  “Ready,” answered the trapper.

  “Pull,” said the hoarse voice from whichever of the five traps the grey racing pigeon came out, and at whatever angle his wings drove him in full, low flight above the green grass toward the white, low fence, the load of the first barrel swung into him and the load from the second barrel drove through the first.

  “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something” is centrally about plagiarism, committed by a somewhat older schoolboy, the same one who’d shot so magically against adults. Part of the story’s brilliance, though, is the way Hemingway collapses time and connects two events that happened in real life. Hemingway altered these events only minimally, which is one reason why, aesthetically speaking, it’s a lesser story.

  On June 26, 1942, with America seven months into world war, the three Hemingway sons flew together to Cuba on a Pan Am Clipper from Miami to visit their father. They arrived in time to celebrate Patrick’s fourteenth birthday, two days hence. Jack, eighteen, who’d joined the Marine Corps Reserve, could stay for only ten days. He’d just finished his freshman year at Dartmouth and was scheduled to take summer classes, in the hope of earning a college degree in two and a half years before shipping off to Quantico, Virginia, for officer’s training. The plan was for Gigi and Patrick to remain at the finca for the remainder of the summer. Actually, Gigi, going into sixth grade, ended up staying into the fall, while Patrick, who was about to enter his freshman year of high school at a Catholic prep school in Connecticut, had to get ready to go north by mid-September. Among other pleasures of that summer, in addition to the pleasures (if occasional puking) aboard their father’s boat, two largely unsupervised kids, away from their mother’s more puritanically Catholic eye, were able to sleep as late as they pleased; to take made-to-order breakfasts on trays brought to their bed by servants; to drink all the Cuban beer (and Bloody Marys for the next morning’s hangovers) they could suffer; to ride to the cockfights and the jai alai fronton in the back of their father’s chauffer-driven car. (When they got there, they’d wager with their papa’s money.)†

  There was also baseball. Two summers before, their father had built them a ma
keshift diamond just inside the finca’s front gate, where the slope of the hillside wasn’t so steep. The “diamond” was really a home plate and two bases set about seventy feet apart. The kids from the village came up again to play ball, sans shoes. Sometimes Papa pitched. He declined to run the bases. That summer, the team’s sponsor and player-manager went into town and not only bought another round of balls, bats, and gloves but, this time, real uniforms (including cleats) with a team name stitched in royal blue across the flannel fronts of the shirts: Estrellas de Gigi, Gigi’s Stars. That’s because Gigi was the natural of the lot. The caps of the Estrellas de Gigi were emblazoned with a star, in the way of the Cuban national flag. There’s an old sepia snapshot of Gigi, circa 1942, taken with his ball-playing pals. Their arms are slung around one another. They could be in an “Our Gang” movie.

  But the shooting of that summer was best, at least for Gigi. The Club de Cazadores del Cerro (Cerro Hunters Club for English speakers) had been going since 1909. Its grounds were spacious and country-club colonial. In its early days, male members used to shoot in ties and shirts and suspenders and boater hats, while their ladies watched from rockers and sipped drinks on the clubhouse veranda. In Hemingway’s time, the Cerro catered to American industrial magnates and Cuba’s intellectual bourgeoisie. It offered trap, skeet, rifle, live pigeons. Hemingway, who could show up in shorts and penny loafers, shot there for years.

  On Sunday, July 26, 1942, three Hemingways competed for the national championship. That morning, the Havana Post ran a small story: “Cuba’s 1942 competitive shooting season will be formally closed at the Cerro Hunters Club with holding of the National Live Pigeon Championship, third and last of the big three title shoots.… One of the largest fields to enter a 1942 shoot is expected to participate in today’s live bird competition, to start at 9:30 a.m.”