Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Mollica, a prolific boating historian, said of Wheeler: “For a boatbuilder to turn out stock boats every year, using the same hull, is a remarkable thing. I have a lot better feeling than some people would about production-yard boats, and that’s because they have been tested and tried. They will last. Look at Pilar.”

  Finally: On November 23, 1933, when a native midwesterner was on the Mediterranean en route for Mombasa, Vincent Astor was writing a letter to the Wheeler shipyard about his custom-built Little Nourmahal—which was then gracing the cover of the current Rudder. Old money versus new; custom versus stock; eastern blue blood versus Oak Park middle blood: while Astor was oozing with noblesse oblige (“I am delighted with her performance, and want you to know that she has proved herself to be a fine sea boat, most comfortable, and ideally suited to my purposes”), EH was raging on his French scow of a liner with its upchucking toilets. In three days he’d be upchucking to Kip Fadiman of The New Yorker. But who really gives a damn nowadays about Vincent Astor? And has his white-hulled beauty gone to firewood? Not so Pilar.

  GONE TO FIREWOOD

  Precede. The wild letter to Wilder is dated May 26, 1929, and I located it in the Wilder papers at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale.

  Chapter. The passage from Islands is on page 359. The Historical Index to The New York Times was helpful, as was a Wheeler file at the Brooklyn Public Library, as were general files at Mystic Seaport; the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia; and the International Game Fishing Association outside Fort Lauderdale.

  What I love about the boom-to-bust Wheeler story is how self-made American it is—family and company. Wes Wheeler told me that in the early days of the company his father and uncles and aunts, along with Ma and Pa Wheeler, all used to live at the family boatyard. When the younger sons finished Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High, they put on aprons and got knee-deep in shavings in the mold loft, even as they took college engineering and drafting classes by night. Chris-Craft may be the Coca-Cola of American boating, but this boat-crafting family went for its Loop-O-Plane ride in Coney Island’s shade. I noted that no one seems to know the total number of Wheelers that were built—in a real sense the company was always too busy just trying to survive to worry about counts for future boating historians. In a presentation he once made before the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Wes Wheeler said his grandfather’s company had produced somewhere between four hundred and five hundred boats during World War II for the army, navy, Coast Guard, and War Shipping Board. Buried in a legal document from the fifties was the following sentence: “Both before and after the incorporation of these companies, petitioners practically designed, built, sold, tested, and delivered to the owners, private of Government, substantially every Wheeler boat, the 2,247th such boat being in construction at the time of trial.” That was written in connection with tax and bankruptcy hearings for the years 1946 and 1947, following the failure of the Sunlounge, and it’s a fact that significantly more Wheelers were built after that. So probably three thousand is a good rounding guess.

  And yet. Although Wheeler’s accomplishment in American boatbuilding can never be denied or discounted, consider nonetheless Chris-Craft’s numbers. The company existed, in its original incarnation, roughly from 1922 to 1960, and in that time it is said to have made over one hundred thousand wooden boats. A Chris-Craft was ever about eye appeal, about what you could see on the outside, all the high-gleam brightwork. Apparently, Hemingway never wanted or needed that. Two years before Hemingway’s death, the chairman of Chris-Craft, Hansen Smith, made the cover of Time. By then, spring of 1959, Hemingway’s boat was a quarter of a century old and still sturdy as a tree, even as the company that had made her was on its final legs, at least in terms of involvement by Wheeler family members.

  Boom to bust: Just recently (as I write), I went by the foot of Cropsey Avenue for yet another look. Alas, the Hopperesque diner sharing the pocked parking lot with the Pathmark Super Center was boarded up and had a chain-link fence around it.

  STATES OF RAPTURE

  Precede. In 1991, Michael Reynolds published Hemingway: An Annotated Chronology, the first serious attempt by a scholar to calendar EH’s life. He cited Wednesday April 4, 1934, as the date EH went to Brooklyn to buy his boat, and so many behind him have followed that lead. But here’s why I am convinced the date is wrong: Gingrich wrote to EH, with the $3,000 check enclosed, on Monday the second. The airmail letter wasn’t officially on its way until the following morning—the postmark on the envelope says “APR 3, 11 AM.” So before noon on Tuesday (about six hours before EH was entertaining the press at the rail of the Paris), the letter was somewhere between Chicago and New York. It’s possible it could have landed at Scribner’s by the next day, and that EH was there when it did and opened it and seized on its contents and went straightaway to Brooklyn with his wife. It seems far more likely, though, that it took a minimum of two days for the letter to get into EH’s hands. Even that sounds fast, but it’s a fact that mail in the 1930s traveled with surprising speed. (Hemingway often received mail in Key West from New York in two days—this can be tracked through his own replies.) EH and his wife couldn’t have gone to Brooklyn any later than Thursday the fifth, because we know (from coverage in The Key West Citizen, for one thing) that Pauline arrived home in Key West by rail at midday on Saturday the seventh. This means she had to have left New York on Thursday night. (It was always “two nights out” to Key West from New York, as the rail advertisements put it.) So assuming Pauline went with her husband to Brooklyn—and I know of no evidence to the contrary—it could only have happened on Wednesday or Thursday. I say Thursday, April 5, 1934.

  And as long as I am disagreeing with esteemed predecessors, I’ll point out that Baker, on page 259 of his bio, got three-in-a-row small and yet not-so-small facts wrong as regards the acquiring of Pilar. She wasn’t diesel-powered, and she didn’t have twin screws (but rather double screws), and the down payment wasn’t $3,300. (In Selected Letters, on page 405, he corrects that figure.)

  Chapter. Both the purchase order and bill of sale are in the Pilar papers at JFK. EH letter to Balmer: August 3, 1934. Alfred Kazin’s defense of Fitzgerald is in an essay titled “Retrospect, 1932: The Twenties and the Great American Thing,” in his An American Procession. Edmund Wilson’s quote is on page 301–page 303 of The Thirties. Matthew Bruccoli’s surmise about Fitzgerald and the notebook entry re “the authority of failure” is in his Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship. EH letter to MacLeish re “have to shoot myself” is September 26, 1936. “The Art of the Short Story” is in the spring 1981 Paris Review.

  The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia—in its Ewell Sale Stewart Library—has a lush, if small, Hemingway file, and going there marked the first time I ever had the thrill of holding an original handwritten EH letter. In a glassine folder there’s a tiny, elegant business card, manila-colored, not much larger than a Band-Aid. The card says, in caps, “Mr. Ernest Hemingway.” Below that, in italics: “Key West, Florida.” Re the original telegrams from EH in the library: holding them marked the first time I ever felt the palpable truth of Malcolm Cowley’s remark about “cabelese” (as he spelled it) being an exercise for EH in “omitting everything that can be taken for granted.” (Cowley says this in his A Second Flowering.)

  To construct EH’s trip home, I went to the New York Public Library and found old Havana Special timetables, as well as photographs of that kind of lost American travel.

  Re Tender Is the Night: If there’s a way to think about Fitzgerald heroically as well as tragically, in April 1934, when EH held every emotional advantage, there might also be a way to read the descriptions of the main character in Tender and form a mental image not of Gerald Murphy—upon whom Dick Diver is unquestionably modeled—but of EH. I’m not suggesting FSF deliberately painted EH into the shadows of his novel; I’m only saying I have been put in mind of EH when I read passages from that poetic and great and uneven
book. “Did you hear I’d gone into a process of deterioration?” Diver says to the young American socialite, Rosemary Hoyt, whom he’s falling for, as he is “in love with every pretty woman he saw now.” “Oh, no,” Rosemary responds. But the doctor is insistent. “It is true. The changes came a long way back—but at first it didn’t show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks.”

  Re The Snows and the riddle of the “Dark Lady,” as I’ll call her: yes, a lot more to tell, and here would be a bit of it: the Whitney family personal papers are held privately within the family and are not for looking into by pesky journalists. And yet, several years ago, when I asked about the possibility of any correspondence between EH and Helen Hay Whitney, Kate Whitney, who is Jock Whitney’s adopted daughter, was very gracious and seemed faintly amused by the prospect of it all. (We spoke on the phone on the day she turned seventy—I got the idea she’d lived long enough to be amused by such things.) She said she’d never heard about her grandmother inviting EH to tea, but that the idea was plausible enough on its face. “Not all the stories are recalled,” she said. She told me she’d do a quick check among her father’s personal papers. She called back a few hours later to say there was nothing there. As for the papers of HHW herself? Off-limits to researchers. But Kate Whitney did say: “Look, if we had a framed Hemingway letter that was once hanging on a wall somewhere, I think we’d tend to know about it.” HHW died in 1944, at age sixty-eight, in a New York City hospital her family had financed almost single-handedly. I’m wondering if Kate Whitney’s rich old eccentric granny didn’t choose to take with her to heaven any correspondence between herself and EH, having read Esquire eight years before and recognizing herself, unhappily.

  I believe Baker knew her identity, and I further believe, even if I cannot prove it, that the identity was confirmed for him by Buck Lanham, as well as one or two others, and yet for one reason or another, the biographer decided not to name the name. Baker’s endnotes relate how EH, during the war, had told the story to Lanham. Wouldn’t the spoken accounts, in wartime, have been lubricated by alcohol and thus a tad more indiscreet than the later written ones? According to Baker’s notes, Lanham and another World War II officer wrote to Baker in the course of his research to tell him what they could remember of EH and the Dark Lady story. On p. 611, Baker writes of Lanham’s memory of the telling: “He [EH] explained that ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ was based in part on his imagination of what would have happened had he accepted the woman’s offer.” Baker cites a particular correspondence: “Lanham to author, June 1963.” I felt sure HHW’s name would be in that letter, but when I went to look, the letter wasn’t there. There are folders of letters at Princeton between Lanham and Baker, all arranged in chronological order; this one’s missing. In 2005, when I queried the curator of manuscripts, Don Skemer, about what might have happened to it, he graciously responded, in part, in an e-mail: “I’ve heard it said that not all of Carlos Baker’s files came to the Library. Carlos Baker’s daughter—or at least one particular daughter—is supposed to have retained some files. Acting on this rumor, early in my 15 years as Curator of Manuscripts, I telephoned his daughter and asked if she had any related files. But she said most definitely that she had none—that what she had at home was personal, not part of her father’s files, and that she wouldn’t let anybody see anything.” That daughter is deceased.

  PART TWO. WHEN SHE WAS NEW, 1934–1935

  “If I Had a Boat” is the lead track on Lovett’s second album, Pontiac.

  HOME

  Precede. “The rooms on the northeast corner” passage is from “Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter,” in Esquire’s inaugural issue, autumn 1933.

  Chapter. The April fishing log is in the Pilar papers at JFK. EH letter to Waldo Peirce is circa May 26, 1934. (He didn’t date.) If the item in The Key West Citizen is to be trusted (and I do trust it), then EH departed for Miami to collect his boat on Tuesday afternoon, May 8. (In the mid-Depression, rail service between Miami and the Keys was down to two runs a day.) The May 9 item doesn’t say Pauline and Bra Saunders were with him, but they were. (It’s referenced in various letters of Pauline’s and EH’s.) On April 30, EH had said in a handwritten postscript at the end of a long typed letter to Max Perkins: “get the boat May 9—Then I can work in the morning and go out in the boat in the pm.” This supports the May 8 departure timeline. The three must have slept over at a Miami hotel and gone excitedly on Wednesday morning to collect the boat—EH the most excited. We know from various sources that Pilar and company arrived back in Key West late on Friday afternoon. It’s a fairly easy two-day cruise from Miami to Key West—roughly 130 nautical miles. The actual “driving time” would have been about thirteen hours, based on a steady-as-she-goes ten knots. My guess is EH and Bra and the Wheeler rep spent Wednesday getting the boat in the water, checking out her equipment, running her around Miami a bit—and then on the tenth began steering her south. Pauline, meanwhile, rode the train home ahead of them, and late on Friday was waiting at the navy yard with her children and friends when Pilar tooted round the bend. The reason I am going into this at all is because it’s one more example of the way Hemingway researchers disagree on dates. These struggles for timelines are almost always compounded by the contradicting testimony of witnesses—in this instance, Les Hemingway and Arnold Samuelson, both of whose memoirs have been crucial to my own research, but neither of which can be really trusted for its chronology.

  SHADOW STORY

  Precede. The “If you go” dictum, which I’ve tried to live by, belongs to the late Shirley Povich of The Washington Post.

  Chapter. I couldn’t have done it had Dian Darby not taken a leap of faith and offered family letters, journals, diaries, photographs, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, tapes. Even more, she gave so much of her personal time. Several others in the extended Samuelson family also helped, notably Sunny Worel, in St. Paul, Minnesota, who has a library background and thus a natural archival sense; she made available Arnold’s journal from the summer of 1932. I am also indebted to the residents of Robert Lee—only two are named in the text, but a dozen or more people on my three visits added little bits.

  The epigraph from Death in the Afternoon is on page 506. “Road brings in every son of a bitch” quote is in EH letter to Thomas Shevlin, April 4, 1939. The passage about Pinky is on page 228 of Death. Fitzgerald’s remark about a writer not writing is quoted in Andrew Turnbull’s bio, Scott Fitzgerald. “Just start with the canoe” passage is on page 77 of Islands. Robert Lacy’s “Icarus” essay is in the Fall 2003 North Dakota Quarterly. EH’s desperation to Hotchner is quoted by Hotchner on page 285, page 297 , page 298 of the updated 1983 Quill edition of his Papa Hemingway. “As full a life in seventy hours” quote is on page 166 of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “I did nothing” passage is on page 148 of Green Hills.

  Would the Maestro have ridden a rail to EH’s door had someone offered him a crystal ball about the rest of his life? I’d bet yes. In a letter I quoted from in the text, written on April 28, 1936, little more than a year after he’d left EH and Pilar’s company, the lost boy, already sounding lost, said: “It is Sunday morning and it makes me drowsy listening to the church music on the radio.” That strangely moves me, like all of his life.

  HIGH SUMMER

  Precede. I suppose it’s fair to say that these several pages represent what I’ve learned, physically, about Pilar after some seven years of riding her in my head as metaphor and motif and storytelling structure. Would that I could have had one real ride on her and felt her under me in a wholly different way.

  As I noted in an earlier part of the text, the handwritten manuscript of Green Hills resides at the University of Virginia—at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. “I saw the faces” passage is on page 211 of A Farewell to Arms. “Loosening” letter is to Arnold Gingrich, June 21, 1934.

  Chapter. Reading EH’s back-to-back Saturday and Sunday letters to Gingrich of July 14–15, 19
34, gave the idea of how to construct the chapter. For instance, the reason I know Bumby came in with the mail while he was writing the Saturday letter is because EH said so in the letter.

  For the start, that is, the ride over, Samuelson’s memoir was crucial, along with his February 1935 Motor Boating piece, “Marlin Fishing with Rod and Reel.” The clearance and manifest papers are in the Pilar papers at JFK. EH letter to MacLeish with “Why don’t you come down here sometime” is April 4, 1943. “My right arm broken off short” passage is on page 148 of Green Hills. MacLeish’s letter to Baker re the terns is January 31, 1965, and his earlier one re “most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creatures” is August 9, 1963. “Completely happy” passage is on page 55 of Green Hills. “Cool in the shade” passage is on page 107 –page 108.

  Timelines (again): Although the clearance and manifest papers are dated July 18, suggesting that as the date of departure, I am convinced he didn’t go until the following day. Why? Because of an old wire I came upon in the Hemingway archives at JFK. On Tuesday evening, the seventeenth, at 8:36 p.m., EH cabled his Havana boatman, Carlos, at his home at 21 Vives in Havana: LLEGAREMOS JUEVES TARDE. We will arrive late on Thursday. Which is to say, the nineteenth. (Gutiérrez had lately moved from 31 Zapata, and for some reason Hemingway seemed to be very fond of that address—he even put it in the Esquire piece of the year before, when Carlos’s name came up.) What I think happened is that EH went down to the customhouse on Wednesday and filled out the departure papers, in order to be ready for the next day’s early going. This tracks with events on the Havana side. It also tracks with the A-1 story in the Havana Post on July 21 that EH and Pilar “entered Havana Bay Thursday night.” It also tracks with a front-page story in the Citizen on the eighteenth that Hemingway “will leave tomorrow on his cabin cruiser Pilar for Havana waters.”