Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Hemingway paid for nineteen-year-old Valerie Danby-Smith, whom he’d met in Spain the summer before, to come to Havana to help him on his bullfight article, swelling beyond all control. “How’s it going?” his wife asked one afternoon. “It’s hell. I can’t get it all down,” he answered. “Could you summarize, or digest, or something?” He said, “I don’t see how I can do it.” Again, this is from Mary’s memoir.

  On March 31, he wrote to Charles Scribner Jr.: “We are finally getting some decent weather here and I am going to try to fish two days a week to get some juice back.” But he didn’t fish two days a week and the juice in him was all of the wrong kind. By summer, a magazine article had grown to twelve times the length of what he had initially agreed to write. The goiter-like thing was at something like 120,000 words. “Fishing been lousy due heavy rains from two tropical depressions. Haven’t been in boat since May 19,” he said in a June letter to George Saviers. (Saviers had visited in April to fish and to check on his patient, but there had been only a few afternoons on Pilar.)

  He had to get at least 70,000 words out of the article—and managed 530. At the end of June, Hemingway pleaded with A. E. Hotchner to come down from New York to try to help him with “The Dangerous Summer,” as he’d titled the piece. Hotchner took the first hundred pages of the 688-page manuscript and began to read it in a terrible heat and a kind of terrible panic: so much of it was numbingly repetitious. The following afternoon, he gave Hemingway a list of eight cuts in the first hundred pages. The next morning they conferred in Hemingway’s bedroom. On a lined pad of paper Hemingway had jotted his reasons for rejecting each of the proposed cuts.

  Finally, though, over the next several days, the two got the manuscript down by 54,916 words; Hemingway had caved. The Life editors paid him $90,000 and ran portions in three installments that fall. The issues sold well; the name “Hemingway” was attached.

  Before this, on July 6, he’d written to Scribner that he’d “not had a day off from work nor been out in the boat from May 19 to July 4.” The final sentence of this letter: “The big fish have not come yet but are over-due and I would like to pull on a couple of big ones before I leave.” He didn’t pull on them. There is no record I can find that suggests Ernest Hemingway was ever out on his boat again after May 19, 1960.

  The Hemingways were foreign residents in a nation held in increasingly hostile regard by their own country. Hotchner had helped find a small rented apartment at 1 East Sixty-second Street in Manhattan. Hemingway told his wife he would not consider the idea of leaving the finca for good—Cuba was their home. He was insistent on returning to Spain to write codas and postscripts to the manuscript he’d already surrendered to Life’s editors, and to which they’d already allowed a greater length. Mary refused to accompany him. On July 25, the Hemingways and Valerie Danby-Smith got on the ferry from Havana to Key West. From How It Was:

  We had left at the Finca all its silver, Venetian glassware, eight thousand books, a number of them autographed first editions, and Ernest’s small collection of paintings, one Paul Klee, two Juan Gris, five André Masson, one Braque and several good, lively paintings of bulls by Roberto Domingo. At my bank in Havana we had left reams of unpublished manuscript.

  She might have added to the list Pilar. He would never see his boat again; he would never see Cuba again.

  On August 15, in Spain, he wrote to his wife about his panic of a “complete physical and nervous crack-up.” It was as if she didn’t hear him, not to judge by most of her correspondence. Five weeks later, from Madrid, he told Mary in a letter he needed her “to look after me and help me out and keep from cracking up. Feel terrible and am just going to lie quiet now and try to rest.” Two days later he wrote and said, “Must get out of this and back to you and healthy life in Ketchum and get head in shape to write well.” Mary quotes from these letters in How It Was and says, “I failed totally to evaluate the importance of these successive warning signals.” A couple of weeks earlier she had tried to evoke Pilar:

  I wish I could give you something wonderful and refreshing and renewing—3 weeks of our old-style holidays at Paraiso in an air-mailable capsule—but containing all of it—the changing winds, the long view across the violet satiny water toward the sunset, the gay fun fishing in the mornings and then the welcome shade of Pilar at noon, and the long, cool starlit nights with us kittens sleeping as softly as Cristobal.

  In October, back in the States, in the apartment on the Upper East Side, he stood at the door of the kitchen and watched as his wife made supper, as if for the first time. She tried to lure him out to the zoo in Central Park. “Somebody waiting out there,” he said. As soon as she could, Mary got him west; she was praying the Idaho air would renew him. George Saviers met them at the train station in nearby Shoshone. Two men in overcoats came out of a café across the street. “They’re tailing me out here already,” Hemingway said.

  In late November, he was taken by air to Mayo Clinic, where he registered under the name George Saviers. The covering story was that he was being treated for high blood pressure. He was being looked at for everything. The shock treatments began. We now know that his attending Mayo psychiatrist, Howard Rome, talked about him to the FBI. On January 13, 1961, the bureau’s Minneapolis SAC (special agent in charge) wrote a report to Hoover. That declassified document still has its redactions, but it’s clear that Rome was the agent’s source. He told the bureau that his patient was “worried about his registering under an assumed name, and is concerned about an FBI investigation,” and “inasmuch as this worry was interfering with the treatments of Mr. HEMINGWAY, he desired authorization to tell HEMINGWAY that the FBI was not concerned with his registering under an assumed name.” It was as if a doctor was taking orders from men in overcoats.

  Two days later, Hemingway dictated a note to his old high school pal Ray Ohlsen, with whom he’d once canoed to Starved Rock, that he’d be “out of here soon,” and that it was almost worth having gone to Rochester just “to hear from you, kid.”

  He did get out. He went back to Ketchum. Briefly, he seemed better. But the irrational fears returned, and the writer who, a few months prior, couldn’t control his writing now felt incapable of writing one sentence. He was taken back to Mayo in the Piper Comanche, and while there he wrote a letter of 210 words to a heart-diseased child, who was the middle son of his family doctor in Idaho. He convinced his Mayo doctors to release him again. He got home on a Friday night, on the last night of June, and on Sunday morning, before the sun was fully over the mountains, he was dead.

  If you study original Hemingway manuscripts from the thirties through the fifties, you’ll see numbers written above the lines on certain sheets. I first saw Hemingway’s letter to nine-year-old Fritz Saviers many years ago, framed and hung in a hallway at Sun Valley Lodge. I never go to Ketchum that I don’t take time to drive to the lodge and stand in the hallway and read the letter again. Amid so much ruin, still the beauty. There are no numbers written above the letter’s lines, but I have counted the words many times. I say 210, but it’s actually 219 “words,” if you count the return address, and the numerals “15” and “1961” in the date, and even the number “2” written at the top of page 2. I’ve studied the letter with a magnifying glass—the way he made tiny x marks for periods in several places; the way he put that “2” with a not completely closed circle at the top of the second page; the half parenthesis after the “Mister” of “Mister Papa”; the second signature after the postscript, forgoing the Mister. Fritz had a dispensation to call him just Papa, and so I’m thinking that the desperately ill man remembered at the last second.

  A month and a half after Hemingway’s death, in its issue of August 25, 1961, Life ran a photocopy. The story, “Last Words Hemingway Wrote,” told how, on the day before he killed himself, Hemingway put his arm around the nine-year-old and said, “Be a good scout.” Dr. Saviers was about to take his child back to the hospital in Denver. The editors published a picture of the buzz-headed c
hild. He’s holding a .22 rifle, a gift from Mary Hemingway. He’s in a short-sleeve white summer shirt, and his right arm is wrapped in gauze above the elbow. The watch on his other arm is sliding down his forearm—he’s losing weight. Fritz gazes skyward and holds the gun with both hands.

  On a recent trip to Ketchum, I read the letter and then went into town and sat for an hour talking to Fritz’s brother, Pierre Saviers. It was a bright, blue, cold winter day, and the hard-packed snow of the day before squeaked on the sidewalk under my boots. Pierre Saviers is a psychotherapist. George Saviers had three sons, and Pierre, the youngest, is the only one alive. He’s in his late fifties. There was a woven Indian rug on the floor, soothing light, classical music, framed photographs. The therapist sat facing me with his lanky legs crossed. I asked him about the letter.

  “It’s layered,” he said. “My dad would have told Hemingway how congenitally sick Fritz was, that he wouldn’t live long. Fritz couldn’t run and exercise like other kids. He was angry about it. My dad would drive him regularly to the specialists in Denver. My dad had gone to Cornell and Berkeley, but he was a small-town doctor. He had a dying child. There’s no question Hemingway liked and trusted my father, and there’s no question my father knew Hemingway was a sick man beyond any power my father had to help him. Hemingway? He knew he was done. And he knows Fritz is done. But he still wants to save him, even as he wants to save himself. You know about the damsel in distress tied to the railroad tracks? Well, that’s us. You recognize yourself there, and you want to save yourself.”

  He stood up. He was tired of talking about it. He had other things to do. “It’s all layered. The way I see all this is that part of what we do in this life is conscious. And the rest of it is unconscious. Maybe this is the best we can ever say.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the following Essay on Sources, and also in parts of the text, I have tried to name as many of those as I could who aided on this project, and to whom I am very grateful. Here, I’ll express my gratitude to a narrower and simultaneously more arcing group of individuals: those who helped keep Hemingway’s Boat afloat for these last seven or eight years, more than they knew, and even when I wasn’t in touch, and in some cases in ways that don’t even relate to books and book-making.

  The Hemingway Women, as I like to think of them. Almost from the start I was struck by the fact that I seemed to be gaining more from female Hemingway scholars than from their male counterparts. It was the first cue things would not necessarily be as they seemed with the famous misogynist, Ernest Hemingway. There are many such female Hemingway authorities I could name, but the two who’ve become close associates—and I hope friends for life—are Sandra Spanier and Linda Patterson Miller. The best of what these two Penn State university professors have taught me has come by indirection—a chance remark dropped (which must not have been so chance at all), a piece of writing (not necessarily their own) passed on at a timely moment.

  Brewster Chamberlin, to whom I made reference in a footnote. He and his wife, Lynn-Marie, live and work in Key West. Once we lived unaware of each other on the same block on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. We found each other through our separate (then informally joined) research on Hemingway. For the last half-dozen years, Brewster has been compiling and wonderfully annotating and continuously updating what amounts to almost a daybook calendar of Hemingway’s life. No other previous Hemingway chronology comes close to what is now well over 150,000 words of manuscript—and cries out for publication by a major publisher.

  The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. Every time I went back to Hemingway’s hometown, both to do research and to touch a spiritual base with my own Illinois roots, I found myself treated with midwestern kindness by Barbara Ballinger and Ginie Cassin, but most especially by Redd and Mary Jo Griffin. They, and other foundation members, just opened the doors—and drawers. In northern Michigan, members of the Michigan Hemingway Society were similarly welcoming, though none more so than president Michael Federspiel.

  I cannot list all the librarians and staff historians and audiovisual experts at all the archives and museums and research libraries—from local and county institutions to federal and university ones—who gave of their time and help, but these must be named: Susan Wrynn, James B. Hill, Laurie Austin, and Maryrose Grossman at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston; Tom Hambright at the Florida History Room at the Monroe County Public Library in Key West; and Gail M. Morchower of the International Game Fish Association in Dania Beach, Florida. I also feel special gratitude to the entire library staff in manuscripts and archives at Princeton.

  At the university where I am privileged to conduct nonfiction seminars with very smart twenty-two-year-olds, I wish to thank, for their steadying belief, my colleagues Al Filreis and Greg Djanikian, who run such a fertile creative writing program out of a woody two-story Victorian dream set back from the main campus walk and known as Kelly Writers House. I am also deeply indebted to three former students—Jessica Lussenhop, Allison Stadd, and Jessica Yu—who served as intern-apprentices at various points in my writing and research. It isn’t everyday someone gets to go from one world-class institution (The Washington Post) to another (the University of Pennsylvania), but that happened to me.

  These, too—former students, a friend I have known since first grade, my oldest pal in journalism, Penn colleagues, former Washington Post colleagues, a couple of fellow authors, four siblings, and so forth—I would like to acknowledge here, in no particular order, for their support and friendship: Mike Woyahn, Bill Gildea, John Moody, Wendy Steiner, Jennifer Conway, Jim English, Nancy Bentley, Tim Corrigan, Loretta Williams, Elizabeth Anderson, Ann Marie Pitts, Stephanie Palmer, Mingo Reynolds, Gabe Oppenheim, Elaine Wong, Josh Pollick, Jenna Statfeld, Caroline Rothstein, Tom Rankin, Hiram Rogers, Bob Hansman, Douglas Brinkley, David Maraniss, David VonDrehle, Shelby Coffey, Wil Haygood, Mary-Jo Adams, Bobbye Pratt, Claudia Pennington, Dink Bruce, Charlie Clements, Gigi Wizowaty, James Godsil, Kirk Curnutt, James Meredith, Scott Schwar, Robert Coles, Sunita Nasta, Robert Fry, Elaine Chiang, Richard Toof, Kathy Milton, Marty Hendrickson, Eric Hendrickson, Mark Hendrickson, and Jeannie Snider.

  With particular thanks: my longtime agents, Kathy Robbins and David Halpern, wise counselors who let me do the work but were ever there at crucial moments of decision.

  Also with particular thanks, for all his computer and moral help, whenever I needed it, my Penn colleague and friend Brian Kirk.

  At Alfred A. Knopf, I owe my deep respect and gratitude to several floors of gifted book people, but especially to Sonny Mehta, Anke Steinecke, Carol Devine Carson, Peter Andersen, Paul Bogaards, Nicholas Latimer, Michelle Somers, Ellen Feldman, Patricia Flynn, Jenny Pouech, Joey McGarvey, and, rising above them all, my editor, Jonathan Segal. In a business of revolving doors, ours is a relationship, both professional and personal, spanning thirty-two years. Jon waited for this book far longer than he should have; I think I knew before I wrote my first sentence I would dedicate the book to him.

  And, finally, my family: Ceil, John, Matt and his dear Jennie. More than any of the above, they were the true sustainers. Over and over, my spouse listened to all the fears as the bedroom lights were going out. As for my now-grown sons, I am prouder than I dare say that they’ve followed me, each in his way, into the world of working in media. The future is all theirs.

  ESSAY ON SOURCES

  [T]he best way out is always through.

  —ROBERT FROST

  I’ve long believed books find their writers, more than writers find their books, and sometimes the finding can be a half-alert thing winding on for years. The origins of this book go back at least through three decades and four intervening books. I’ve told in the text how I met Les Hemingway on the way over to Bimini in a Grumman Goose seaplane in the winter of 1980—perhaps this was the original seeding moment, or splashing one. (My spouse was with me, and all I knew then was that I was trying to write my first book, a seminary memoir.) If we
didn’t go out in a Bimini boat with Hemingway’s little brother that weekend, if the name “Pilar” didn’t surface (I don’t remember), boats and water and fishing were everywhere around us. Indeed, outsize black-and-white images of Pilar and her master were on the walls of the bar and in the iron-gated museum room of the Compleat Angler, that perfect, small, funky hotel, in the center of that perfect, small, funky island, that is, alas, no more—the Angler, that is. Before dawn on January 13, 2006, the twelve-room inn burned to the ground.

  A year following that 1980 encounter with a living Hemingway, I purchased at a discount bookstore in a strip mall on Rockville Pike in suburban Washington, DC, a copy of the just-published Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, edited by Carlos Baker. This couldn’t have been accidental—all that Les had told me, including incredible-sounding stories about his nephew Gigi, was still jouncing around inside. I still have my beat-up brown copy of Baker’s 948-page book—the Princeton scholar had brought into print the door-stopper letters volume twelve years after he’d brought into print his door-stopping Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, which I’ve now run out of ways to describe, in terms of its being first and being essential. Reading the letters book, was I making dim connections to the idea that Hemingway’s boat might serve as some sort of structural frame and organizing principle for my own Hemingway book? I don’t know, but I will say it seems almost impossible to read the letters book—at least from about page 404 onward—without registering the name Pilar. At page 404 he’s had her just days and is raving her beauties to Arnold Gingrich—I’ve quoted from this letter in the text.