Six years from the letters book, in the early summer of 1987, I searched out the three Hemingway sons and wrote about them for The Washington Post, my employer. By then, I think the idea of something on Hemingway between hard covers was actively taking hold, not that I yet recognized it. I remember thinking at a later date, when I did recognize it as a possible book, and one involving Pilar, that if the project actually got launched, I wouldn’t want it to be a story only about Pilar’s owner. And further, I’d want it to be far less a biography than an interpretation, an evocation, with other lives streaming in. I’d worked this way previously, and what was the point of another biography after so many—the good, the bad, the ugly—having marched before?
The material for Hemingway’s Boat has been gathered in three ways. First, from my own interviewing and reporting. Since I come proudly from a journalistic rather than an academic background, the notion of being able to go out and talk to sources, which is to say anybody and everybody who might know something about the central subject, has always provided immediate and stabilizing comfort. Here, given Hemingway’s birth date, I understood there’d not be that kind of ballast. Sure, there would be plenty of people to talk to, from Walloon Lake historians to restorers of vintage boats to old Key West hangers-on, but no one, or almost no one, who’d ever known the man himself. So I am only stating again my gratitude for having stumbled, all but blind, on Walter Houk.
The second way I obtained information was from documents—letters, manuscripts, old Pilar logs, photographs, newsreels, eight-millimeter films, tinny wire recordings converted to audio recordings. There are Hemingway repositories—or repositories of Hemingway-related materials—all over this country. I have written books about civil rights and Vietnam, but the sea of Hemingway documentary materials still seems deluging, no matter my gratitude that they exist. I have been in most of the Hemingway or Hemingway-related archives (and will name some of them as I go along here), but the archive where I have spent the most time in these last seven or so years of research and writing is Firestone Library at Princeton. The university is an hour and ten minutes from my front door; the car knows the way. I doubt I would have been able to complete this project at all were it not for the Carlos Baker papers, properly known as the Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway at the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts. The Baker-Hemingway archive, along with the university’s Scribner’s files (its proper name is the Archive of Charles Scribner’s Sons), became my centripetal research force. Nearly all the letters I quote from or make reference to in this book I have sat and held and read in the chapel-like Dulles Reading Room at Firestone, in most cases a photocopy, but sometimes the original document.
The largest Hemingway archive in the world, of course, is at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston; its Hemingway Room is banked by windows looking out onto wind-whipped Dorchester Bay. I always felt welcome there.
There were other, more specialized kinds of museums and archives I traveled to—those having to do with boats and boatbuilding or big-game fishing—and some of them I will also name in their relevant places.
The third way I gathered material was from so-called secondary sources, which in many ways became primary. I’ve stood on the shoulders of a lot of giants (and some pygmies, too). I am referring to the authors of books, monographs, theses, dissertations, magazine articles, newspaper pieces, studies in scholarly journals. Once again, the amount of Hemingway literature in all its forms and guises felt swamping, and often I knew I had to get out of a library almost as soon as I got into one, no matter if I had just journeyed some distance.
There was also the Hemingway-related material held privately. To cite three über-sources: What would I have done had Arnold Samuelson’s daughter, Dian Darby, in Austin, Texas, not been willing to share what she had of her father’s life with a stranger who came knocking, just as the Maestro had once come knocking at Hemingway’s door? (I have never been able to talk to Dian’s brother, Eric Samuelson.) Same with Wes Wheeler: when he took me down to his chaotic basement in Stamford, Connecticut, I knew I’d hit documentary gold on the proud, defunct shipyard his father and grandfather and uncles had run for decades. And Walter? Yes, there was a sense in which he had all the Hemingway-related paper and miscellany in the world waiting inside 21439 Gaona Street in Woodland Hills, California. But the real thing Walter had waiting, it goes without saying, was his own life. Paper is only paper next to human beings. (I am happy to report Walter has recently given his entire collection of Hemingway materials, including his own writing, to Princeton—it’s there for future Hemingway scholars.)
The two biographies I carried like talismans over the length of the project were those of Baker and Michael Reynolds; the full citations of their books appear in the selected bibliography. Reynolds’s work, rigorous and novelistic (in the way Baker’s is exhaustive and academically straitlaced), is in five volumes; it stretches over something like twenty-five years of scholarship, almost right up until his early death in 2000. I am indebted to his widow, Ann Eubanks Reynolds, also now deceased, who allowed me into her Durham, North Carolina, basement to open boxes and boxes of her husband’s research. I found several key things connected to Pilar.
If Baker and Reynolds (pride of place always to Baker) are the gold standard, I’ll pay tribute to four other biographers and biographies I regularly consulted, and roughly in this order: Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway Women; Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway; Kenneth S. Lynn’s Hemingway; James R. Mellow’s Hemingway. (Again, for full citations, see the Selected Bibliography.) I should also add Denis Brian’s quirky The True Gen and Mary Hemingway’s How It Was. The first is oral history, the second—well, I am not entirely sure what it is. Memoir, biography, inadvertent confession, score settler: all of that, and then some.
And as long as I’m making lists, and using the word “quirky,” the following books and articles and critical studies and popular essays rose up out of the great sea of Hemingwayana to speak in a particular way—call them my private Hemingway satchel. Baker and Reynolds are again on the list, namely Baker’s Hemingway: The Writer as Artist and Reynolds’s “Ernest Hemingway, 1899–1961, A Brief Biography,” which is what its title indicates: a thirty-five-page piece charting the arc of the life. (It appears in A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway.) The other works, in no particular order: “Hemingway: the Old Lion,” in Malcolm Cowley’s A Second Flowering; “A Quarter-Century Later, the Myth Endures,” by Lance Morrow, in the August 25, 1986, Time magazine; Coffee with Hemingway, by Kirk Curnutt; Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way, by Nelson Algren; “Reading Hemingway Without Guilt,” by Frederick Busch, in the January 12, 1992, New York Times Book Review; Letters from the Lost Generation, edited (and wonderfully annotated) by Linda Patterson Miller; “Hemingway the Painter,” in Alfred Kazin’s An American Procession; “Last Words,” by Joan Didion, in the November 9, 1998, New Yorker; Classes on Ernest Hemingway, by Matthew J. Bruccoli; “Braver Than We Thought,” by E. L. Doctorow, in the May 18, 1986, New York Times Book Review; Ernest Hemingway and His World, by Anthony Burgess; “Punching Papa,” in Norman Mailer’s Cannibals and Christians; “Pressure Under Grace,” by Frederick C. Crews, in the August 13, 1987, New York Review of Books; “For Ernest Hemingway,” in Reynolds Price’s A Common Room. These are the ones I always came back to, when I wasn’t coming back to the writing of the man himself. (Again, see bibliography.)
What follows isn’t meant to be an all-inclusive line-by-line source-noting; rather, a kind of prose-form road map, both essay and citation, not every citation, no, but ones I judge the reader will be curious to know about, and also ones where I am directly indebted to my predecessors. Truth be told, these notes are also a way of telling some side stories I couldn’t fit into the main frame. I use “EH” fairly often; other abbreviations and shorthand will be evident. When citing page numbers for quoted passages from Hemingway’s novels and book-length nonfiction, I refer, unless otherwise specifi
ed, to the original hardcover editions of those works. No page numbers are given for the short stories. For the EH journalism, just title and date and name of publication.
PROLOGUE: AMID SO MUCH RUIN, STILL THE BEAUTY
“In hunting” quote: “On the Blue Water,” Esquire, April 1936. “He can see” quote: “Out in the Stream,” Esquire, August 1934. “Once you are out of” quote: “On the Blue Water.” Conduct being “a question of how the good professional” quote: Time, July 14, 1961. The passage from Holiday appears in “The Great Blue River,” July 1949. The Norman Mailer quote is in “Punching Papa,” collected in Cannibals and Christians. The Edmund Wilson quote is on p. 802 of The Sixties. The Ella Winter quote is from a letter to Carlos Baker, February 10, 1962, and the original document is in the Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. The Algren quote is from Notes from a Sea Diary, page 88 and page 93. EH letter to Sara Murphy is April 27, 1934.
Sanctity, or yearning for it. The first time I began to think seriously about Hemingway and this absurd notion was when I read Reynolds Price’s essay “For Ernest Hemingway,” cited above. (It’s in a 1987 Price collection, but I had discovered it some years before.) Price, a literary hero of mine, used the word “saintliness” and put it in italics. It jolted me. This became a new line of thinking and feeling, its own governing principle. In 2004, perhaps four or five months after I’d begun the book, Linda Patterson Miller, mentioned above, and of whom you’ve read earlier, picked up on the same idea. “I warned you that working with Hemingway would be a spiritual quest—totally life-affirming,” she e-mailed. I could almost hear her laughing—at my turmoil, already considerable.
PART ONE. GETTING HER
Wagner’s quote is in a 2002 monograph, Blanchard Built, published by the center.
AMERICAN LIGHT
Precede. Grace Hemingway’s “I will take care of it for you” is in her letter of March 24, 1929. The Lance Morrow quote is in his August 25, 1986, Time essay. Nearly all of Hemingway’s major biographers have written of this wavery fable, as I like to think of it. On the key question, that is, of Grace’s intent, judgment seems divided. But I believe something chilling had to be going on between mother and son. Grace had gone twice to the coroner to try to retrieve the .32. On February 24, in a ten-page letter of gratitude to her son for his financial support in the wake of her husband’s death, a letter with much seeming forced gaiety in it, she said she had “secured” the weapon. “Do you want me to send it down to you. Les wants you to leave it to him, when you are through with it—but you have first choice.” When you are through with it. First choice. As I say, loaded, at least to my ears—and eerily premonitory of two suicides. In May 1965, writer Dawn Powell told Baker what she knew of the runny cake and the mailed gun. Baker then wrote to Dos Passos, citing Powell’s account. Dos supplied his own inaccuracies—in blue ink over top of Baker’s letter. We’ll never know the truth of the matter.
Chapter. Going to the New York Public Library to read the April 4, 1934, newspaper accounts of EH’s arrival on the Paris of the day before gave me the idea for how to frame the chapter. Interestingly, of the city’s big dailies, the New York Daily News, circulation 1.5 million, skipped Hemingway—they went with Hepburn. She kept moving up in the various editions, and in the four-star final made page 3. I tried in vain to find out whether she and EH had met on board, or even at the publicity rail. But the bigger mystery is how the shipboard reporters would have missed Dietrich. Her story re meeting Hemingway, written twenty-one years later, ghosted or not, is in the February 3, 1955, New York Herald Tribune.
E. B. White’s parody is in the April 14, 1934, New Yorker. Re cost of the safari: the figure has ranged over the years from $25,000 to $33,000; I’m going with a round-off. Mark Stevens’s quote is in a February 7, 2000, essay in New York magazine. “It is awfully easy to be hardboiled” quote is on page 34 of The Sun Also Rises. “I sat in a corner” passage is on page 76 of A Moveable Feast. EH quote about remembering when and where he wrote A Farewell to Arms is dated June 30, 1948, and is in the introduction to an illustrated 1948 edition of the novel. “I was always embarrassed” passage is on page 184–page 185. Max Eastman’s review is in the June 7, 1933, New Republic. MacLeish’s “I have always suspected” quote is in his letter to Baker, August 9, 1963. “Before these rich” passage is on page 209–page 210 of Feast. “We had tried” is on page 86 of Green Hills of Africa; “What did you get?” passages are on page 291 and page 293 .
Re EH and Frank Lloyd Wright: Oak Park historians say there’s no evidence the egomaniacal architect and future egomaniacal author ever met or talked in their overlapping years in that manicured place of broad lawns and reputedly narrow minds. (There’s also no evidence Hemingway ever said that, even though you hear the claim all the time.) But it would be accurate—albeit fanciful—to go this far: had he wished to, Wright, from a high stool in his octagonal drafting room, in, say, 1906 or ’07 or ’08, could have looked out his window, catty-corner across Chicago Avenue, and observed the elementary-school children of Oliver Wendell Holmes School at their noon play, one of whom could have been one of his own children, and another of whom could certainly have been Ernest Hemingway. It’s not literary or architectural scholarship—just fun—to squint and picture a roughly forty-year-old visionary gazing out on a fairly typical-seeming schoolboy named Hemingway, still in single digits, whose family name Wright may or may not have known. (I’m pretty sure he did: EH’s mother and Wright’s wife Kitty were casual friends who came together to paint, to talk books and the suffrage movement at Oak Park’s Nineteenth Century Club.)
Re the retyped letter of EH to Fadiman, and the loss of the original: After his October 28, 1933, New Yorker review of Winner Take Nothing, Fadiman’s editorial assistant, Miss Bert Hunt, bet her boss he’d hear from Hemingway. Fadiman said he doubted it. Hunt said she’d put a hundred bucks on it, but that the bet would have to run six months, in case EH was on the high seas or in a jungle somewhere. When the letter came in, Hunt grinned and collected her hundred. After Fadiman had read it and yukked, he had wanted to toss it, but his assistant, recognizing its worth to future scholars, remembered that she stuck the letter in a folder marked “Important Letters to Keep.” Just to be on the safe side, she typed out a duplicate copy for herself. Twenty-five years later, Fadiman confessed to Hunt he’d sure like to have that old Hemingway letter. She was then retired in Palm Beach. Apparently she couldn’t find the original, but retrieved the copy she’d typed out and squirreled away. These details are in a Hunt letter to Baker of March 25, 1962, eight months after the suicide. A few years ago, I decided to try out the story on Fadiman’s daughter, Anne Fadiman, herself a respected author. She said the way her father always told it was that he just threw out the letter. In any case, all praise to the faithful and posterity-minded Miss Hunt.
Re EH and Ned Calmer: I decided to expand on Baker’s account on page 257–page 258 of his bio, and did so by using two letters from Calmer to Baker and by conducting my own research. As I say in the text, I think the story is emblematic of the contradictory man with softness for those who are ill too early in life, women and children, especially.
THAT BOAT
Precede. The passage from Green Hills is on page 49. The boat descriptions are from 1934 Wheeler catalog copy.
Chapter. “Horsing Them in with Hemingway” appeared in the September 1965 Playboy and is collected in The Well-Tempered Angler. Gingrich’s words for EH after the suicide are in the October 1961 Playboy. The master carpenter’s certificate is in the Pilar papers at JFK.
To write this chapter, but even more the one that follows, I talked to boating and fishing historians, read books and magazines devoted to wooden boats and big-game fishing, went to maritime museums and libraries (and also to one latter-day shipyard specializing in vintage boats), but mostly I went to Wes Wheeler’s Connecticut basement. He had ancient issu
es of the Rudder, dozens of old Wheeler catalogs, photographs, record books, family albums, court transcripts, bankruptcy notices. He’s a walking Wheeler encyclopedia, and fine company to boot. On what he knows: the reason I know that Howard E. Wheeler himself had addressed the 1933 fold-over pamphlet to EH is because his grandson—Wes—instantly recognized the handwriting.
I am also more generally in the debt of four wooden boat authorities: Dick Wagner, Dana Hewson, Llewellyn Howland, and Anthony Mollica Jr.
Wagner gave me a personal tour of his Seattle center a few years ago and talked offhandedly for three hours about the mystique of wooden boats.
Hewson is vice president for watercraft preservation and programs at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut—more about his crucial help at the end of these notes.
Howland, around boats his entire life, who once wrote a piece in Wooden Boat magazine titled, “Why People Own the Boats They Do,” said that the three finest American boatbuilders of the golden age of boating—commonly understood as the first half of the twentieth century—were Herreshoff in Rhode Island, Lawley and Sons in South Boston, and Henry B. Nevins on Long Island. But those shipyards, in the main, were custom builders, producing lavish yachts for high society. To compare their silk-stocking wares to the humbler (and perhaps far sturdier) wares of a Brooklyn production yard seems an apples-and-oranges argument. When I asked Howland if he didn’t think a Wheeler was the right boat, right maker, for Hemingway, he said: “A Wheeler was a good bargain at good workmanship. You see, pleasure boats and sportfishing boats of the kind Hemingway got from Wheeler are to real yachting as Miller High Life is to Chivas Regal. Okay, Howard Wheeler built an adequately competent boat, a good boat, at a good price. I’m not saying it was the wrong choice at all for Hemingway. It apparently fit the man. It’s what he needed and wanted.” We spread out some pictures of Pilar, from that first season of the fishing, with her master’s catches strung up on the dock beside her. “The phallic nature of the thing,” Howland howled. “It’s pathetic.” Later, though, he said, softening: “Every day on a fishing boat it’s a little theater. There’s blood. It’s a self-enclosed world. It’s womb-like. Time is different. Time begins at dawn and ends at sunset. Here is a perfect time on a boat: you’ve had a long, hard day, you’ve caught your fish, and now you’re purring home, toward your mooring.”
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