Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  I’ve deliberately held back the medical specifics of Pauline’s death, so that I could go into them in more detail here, quoting the words of a deceased doctor-writer-son.

  Gigi’s mother died of a rare and undiagnosed tumor in the core of her adrenal gland called a pheochromocytoma. Each of us has two adrenal glands, one just above each of our kidneys. Our adrenal glands produce hormones that give instructions to almost every organ and tissue. If you have an undetected pheochromocytoma, your adrenal glands can produce too much of certain hormones, raising your blood pressure and heart rate. Such a sleeping tumor can explode in times of emotional stress. As Gigi explains in Papa, a tumor like this doesn’t kill by attacking vital organs, but by secreting huge amounts of adrenaline—“which then make the blood pressure rise to incredible heights, often causing a rupture of an artery.” Gigi explains that there are generally two types of the tumor—“the intermittent and the constantly secreting types.” After reading the autopsy report (more on that in a moment), he was pretty sure she’d died of the intermittent type. Something as slight as standing up, or being jostled in a crowd, or a bad dream, could make the tumor “fire off.”

  From Papa: “The tumor had become necrotic or rotten and when it fired off that night, it sent her blood pressure skyrocketing; a medium-sized blood vessel, within or adjacent to the rotten area, had ruptured. Then the tumor stopped discharging adrenaline, her blood pressure dropped from about 300 to 0, and she died of shock on the operating table.”

  But Gigi didn’t know this for almost a decade. He’d thought his mother had died of a heart attack and ruptured artery of an unknown origin. In 1960, after many false starts, Gigi began medical school at the University of Miami. One of the first things he says he did was “to write the hospital where Mother had died and ask them for an autopsy report.” The report showed there was “no blood in the abdominal cavity and the autopsy showed only 500 cc. of blood in the space around her right kidney.” It was as if the patient, dying of shock, had bled out invisibly before the attending surgeon with the calming attitude and residues of Alabama speech.

  Why, nine years after the fact, had Gigi sent for a copy of the autopsy? Well, he was a medical student and would have been medically curious. But it was much more than that; in a way it was everything more than that. About a month and a half after Pauline’s death, no longer a wage-earning aircraft mechanic, but rather an inheritor of fifty thousand dollars (it was true he didn’t actually have his mother’s inheritance in his pocket yet, but he had advances on it from the estate lawyers), Gigi and his much-pregnant wife flew to Havana to meet his father. There was wary distance between father and son, but Jane helped bridge it. Toward the end, Gigi let down his guard.

  From Papa: “Referring to the trouble I’d gotten into on the Coast, I said, ‘It wasn’t so bad, really, papa.’ ”

  “ ‘No? Well, it killed mother.’ ”

  That paragraph goes on: “Whatever his motives were the yellow-green filter came back down over my eyes and this time it didn’t go away for seven years. I didn’t say anything back to him. He’d almost always been right about things, he was so sound, I knew he loved me, it must have been something he just had to say, and I believed him.”

  He claims that the yellow-green filter didn’t go away until after he’d done many unconscionable things—such as going to Africa and slaughtering eighteen elephants in a single month. The yellow-green filter didn’t go away until after a twenty-eight-year-old first-year med student at the University of Miami had written to a Los Angeles hospital and gotten an autopsy and read the specifics of his mother’s case and then done his own research on a ghost of a disease called pheochromocytoma.

  Gigi says in his book that a year before his father committed suicide, he wrote him a letter (I’ve never been able to locate it), confronting him with the facts of the autopsy, as he interpreted them. It wasn’t what he’d done that weekend that had brought about his mother’s death; no, far more likely, it was the brutal conversation at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday night that had caused the somnolent tumor to fire off.

  From Papa: “According to a person who was with him in Havana when he received my letter, he raged at first and then walked around the house in silence for the rest of the day.” Next paragraph: “About three months later his first noticeable symptoms of paranoia began, with the worries about the FBI chasing him for income tax evasion.”

  In about nine more months, Hemingway was dead.

  Several pages earlier, Gigi recounts something else his father had said, as he and his wife were at the doorstep of the finca, heading for the airport, at the end of that visit after Pauline’s death: “I remember papa remarking, ‘Well, don’t take any wooden trust funds.’ I could see the humor and I smiled as we were parting.” Then Gigi writes, “I never saw my father again.”

  But he did see his father again, at least once, at a critical juncture when Hemingway was trying with everything in him to help his hospitalized son. Despite how he seeks to portray their relationship in the years after Pauline’s death, the letter trail proves they were in touch far more often than they were not. There were periods of silence and of rage, no question. But their mutual need to be connected, at least until toward the end of Hemingway’s life, when he’d lost touch with nearly everyone and anything around him, trumped everything.

  As for what Hemingway had said—“No? Well, it killed mother”—that got said, at least the first time, in a phone conversation immediately after Pauline’s death. There’s a letter of Gigi’s documenting this. Why did he alter the facts? Perhaps because he wished to enhance the storytelling tension. He rearranged the truth from real life just as his father had been doing for his whole writing life. And no matter how devastating it had to have been to hear those words on the phone right after Pauline died, it wasn’t devastating enough to keep Gigi from traveling to Cuba a short while later to see his father. To me, it’s one more proof of how large the parental approval needs were—like any child’s. And who is to say, for that matter, that his father didn’t repeat some version of it in Havana.

  So is Gigi’s beautiful book built on a tissue of lies? No, it is a memoir, with a memoir’s faults, and then some. The essence of the story is all there, but it’s clear how he elided and omitted and rearranged and misremembered to suit his purposes. One of the reasons I’ve been able to become a sadder but wiser man about all this is because I’ve closely read John Hemingway’s Strange Tribe (published, as noted earlier, in 2007), to which high tribute must be paid for correcting the record. Straightening out a record from what Gigi wrote in Papa—John was able to draw on and quote at length from previously unpublished letters between Hemingway and his son—is just one of the contributions Gigi’s eldest son has made in a memoir-cum-family biography that is a deep act of honoring: loving someone for who they are.

  Dr. Thomas himself apparently ordered Gigi’s autopsy on the day after the death. But St. Vincent’s no longer has any records of Pauline’s death. Nor does any California government repository have a copy of the autopsy. Nor does any Hemingway family member, at least that I am aware of, possess a copy. What exists as documentary evidence of Pauline’s death is the one-page death certificate. What happened to Gigi’s copy? Who could say? Metaphorically, if not quite literally, he was a man who lived most of his life in the five decades after Pauline’s death from the trunk of his car.

  But back to the first sentence of Papa: “I never got over a sense of responsibility for my father’s death and the recollection of it sometimes made me act in strange ways.” Like the best of openings, it’s a sentence conveying so much more than it tells. What Gigi is really telling us is that he never got over a sense of responsibility for both his parents’ deaths. No matter the terrible cruelty of his father’s words, no matter the seemingly exculpatory thing he later found in an autopsy report, he had to know, in some deep necrotic pocket of himself, that his father was exactly right; that by going into that movie theater in women’s clothes, he h
ad set off—call it fired off—the chain reaction of sorrowful events. And the double guilt over two deaths would end up pursuing him right to pod 377 of cell 3C2 on Monday, October 1, 2001, when a shamed child, former doctor, with his surgically altered genitals, with his pink-painted toenails, scheduled for a hearing later that morning on indecent exposure charges, was awakened by a corrections officer, rose, and five minutes later pitched down dead on his face.

  In Islands in the Stream, late in the story, Thomas Hudson is dreaming on the sand in a cove. He’ll get up shortly and go back to his armed fishing cruiser. He’ll steer through the night. He’ll run the boat in a “heavy beam sea” and it’ll come to him that steering her like this, trying to roll her as little as possible between the waves, is like riding a horse downhill. “It is all downhill and sometimes it is across the side of a hill. The sea is many hills and in here it is a broken country like the badlands.”

  That’s later. Right now the captain of the cruiser is on the beach, asleep, dreaming of his former wife and three dead sons. They’re alive. The war is over. Young Tom’s mother is sleeping on top of him, as she used to like to do. Hudson, who’ll never complete another canvas, can hear himself speaking to his ex-wife.

  “You,” he says. “Who’s going to make love to who?”

  “Both of us,” she responds. “Unless you want it differently.”

  After a couple more exchanges: “Should I be you or you be me?” He answers, “You have first choice.”

  “I’ll be you.”

  “I can’t be you. But I can try.”

  There is an earlier section of the Islands manuscript that Hemingway marked for setting aside. Hudson’s first wife has cut off his hair, to match her own, so that “we’ll be just that same.”

  “Now kiss me and be my girl,” she says. He answers, “I didn’t know you wanted a girl.” She says, “Yes I do. Now and right away and my girl is you.” He protests, “I don’t know how to be a girl.”

  The notion of not knowing how to be a girl: toward the end of A Farewell to Arms, Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henry, about to have their baby, are talking of cutting their hair to the same length. One can be blond, the other dark. This is Catherine’s idea. “Then we’d both be alike. Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too,” she says.

  “You are. We’re the same one.”

  “I know it. At night we are.”

  “The nights are grand.”

  “I want us to be all mixed up.”

  Mixed up? In late 1953, when he and his wife were in the fifth month of their safari to East Africa, Hemingway wrote in Mary Hemingway’s diary:

  She has always wanted to be a boy and thinks as a boy without ever losing any femininity.… She loves me to be her girls, which I love to be.… In return she makes me awards and at night we do every sort of thing which pleases her and which pleases me.… Mary has never had one lesbian impulse but has always wanted to be a boy. Since I have never cared for any man and dislike any tactile contact with men except the normal Spanish abrazo or embrace which precedes a departure or welcomes a return from a voyage or a more or less dangerous mission or attack, I loved feeling the embrace of Mary which came to me as something quite new and outside all tribal law. On the night of December 19th we worked out these things and I have never been happier. EH 20/12/53.

  Something quite new and outside all tribal law. In The Garden of Eden, or rather in the drastically cut-down published version of about seventy thousand words and thirty short chapters that appeared in 1986, after a decade of innuendo and psychosexual speculation, there’s a passage at the start where something role-changing occurs in bed between the newlyweds honeymooning in the south of France. David has shut his eyes. He can feel the slender weight of his spouse on top of him. “He lay there and felt something and then her hand holding him and searching lower and he helped with his hands and then lay back in the dark and did not think at all and only felt the weight and the strangeness inside and she said, ‘Now you can’t tell who is who can you?’ ”

  He answers, “No.”

  “You are changing,” she tells him. “Oh you are. You are. Yes you are and you’re my girl Catherine. Will you change and be my girl and let me take you?”

  He answers. “You’re Catherine.”

  She answers, “No. I’m Peter. You’re my wonderful Catherine. You’re my beautiful lovely Catherine. You were so good to change. Oh thank you, Catherine, so much.”

  The sentence that follows is the most significant in the whole passage: “Please understand.” Couldn’t it be a son’s cry, from real life? Or a father’s?

  In light of these passages—and there are others—it might reasonably be asked: How did we, meaning the world, read Hemingway’s work so wrong, for so long? How did we read the man himself so wrong, for so long? Well, he misdirected us with the mask. The mask wasn’t false, a lie, a fraud, as so many detractors have wished to say. The hypermasculinity and outdoor athleticism were one large and authentic slice of him. But beneath the mask was all the rest, which is why his work endures, why his best work will always have its tuning-fork “tremulousness,” as it’s been called. And, incidentally, where did this beautiful nervousness come from in the first place? No one will ever answer that definitively. Maybe everything goes back to the foot and feet of Grace Hemingway in Oak Park, and maybe it doesn’t. “Pressure under Grace” is a too-clever phrase that was the headline on a rather brilliant piece some years ago in The New York Review of Books, by a critic named Frederick C. Crews. He was reviewing Kenneth S. Lynn’s psychoanalytic (and often ridiculous) biography of Hemingway. All the essay lacked, no less than did Lynn’s nearly six-hundred-page text, was a sense of compassion—for how much someone suffered in his life.

  Hemingway was working on the semi-secret and cross-gendering manuscript of The Garden of Eden in the period, the early and mid-fifties, when his bitched baby son, with all his recklessness and irresponsibility and manic behavior, was disappointing and embarrassing and worrying and angering him most. “Please understand.” Could you think of not just that sentence, but a passage like that, a whole book like that, as a father’s testament of sympathy, support, love, for his child?

  One more thought: If Hemingway’s therapeutic release from all the things he felt inside was in his writing, where was Gigi’s? Could you say he was writing out his novel with his life, that it was what he had?

  WHAT HE HAD

  Gigi in the fighting chair, Paraíso Key, July 1945. His brother Pat is behind him.

  She changes from a girl into a boy and back to a girl carelessly and happily.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Garden of Eden

  AT 8:55 A.M. on February 11, 1952, Pilar eased out of Havana Harbor and turned westward with fifteen hundred pounds of ice and newly laid Philippine mahogany planking on her outsides and insides. Running to port as she chucked against the sea, with Hemingway at the helm, was Mary Hemingway’s launch, Tin Kid, manned by Felipe, the skilled but unlikable joven. Another joven was tending to his duties that Monday at the American Embassy; in thirty-four days he’d be proposing marriage to Miss Nita. Still another joven, Gigi, in whose head had to have been echo-chambering five words (no matter when exactly they’d been uttered), was back in LA, following a recent visit to his father’s home in the wake of his mother’s death.

  The plan was for Hemingway to spend a couple of weeks recharging the batteries down at Paraíso Key—this is how he put it in letters. “All I have is over-work and over-worry,” he’d say in a letter ten days later, after the battery-charging had been aborted.

  There weren’t any mosquitoes on that first night, at Bahía Honda. The next morning, coming past Punta Gobernadora Light, Mary Hemingway watched a loggerhead turtle devour a Portuguese man-of-war. She and her husband marveled at three dolphins—they guessed them to be papa, mama, child—sunning on their backs in a kind of dolphinesque dog paddle. That evening, having made it to their private vacation island, they had a supper of soup, wa
tched the moon roll up, drank moderately, read, turned in at nine. They woke with the sun. “Papa sweet and happy,” Mary entered in her diary. As she wrote in How It Was, the source of many of these details:

  We were living in a world of twenty shades of blue, wind from some seventy different directions, sunlight and moonlight ever changing on the water, sounds varying from the gentlest slurp of finger-sized wavelets against the hull to banging thunder of heavy seas against the outer reefs, the fishy smell of the beach at low tide and the lung-scouring cleanliness of the north wind to the sophisticated tastes of Gregorio’s simple, exquisite food. We were caught in a web of endearments to our senses.

  In the next paragraph, she tells of how her husband seldom invited her to his own (and larger) bed belowdecks during their extended cruises—“and I thought I understood why. In our mutual sensory delights we were smoothly interlocking parts of a single entity, the big cogwheel and the smaller cogwheel, I felt, with no need for asserting togetherness. Maybe we were androgynous.” Maybe so.

  Six days out, the outside world broke in—with news of the death of Charlie Scribner. He’d died of a heart attack on the day they had left Havana. But it wasn’t until Saturday the sixteenth, when Mary and Gregorio went with the skiff, after a morning’s fishing, to buy ice and gas in a village called La Mulata, that they found out. Mary had telephoned the finca to see if things were okay with the staff and the property. René the houseboy read her the telegram. Mary and Gregorio motored back to Pilar before dark with the supplies and bad news. “We’ll have to leave here,” her husband said. But he’d heard on the shortwave a norther was coming, so they remained for a few more days.