Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  A small, fold-over pamphlet had been mailed to him the previous summer from the Wheeler firm. It was postmarked July 14, 1933, which suggests Hemingway would have received it about three weeks before he left the States on his long journey, first to Europe, then to Africa. He may have had literature from other boat makers, too, since buying a motorized fishing cruiser had so long and lately preoccupied his thinking. (The brochure, with its still readable postmark, is among Hemingway’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.) The founder of the company, Howard E. Wheeler, had Palmer-perfect handwriting, pork-chop sideburns, wild eyebrows, a walrus mustache, and five grown sons working by his side in the family enterprise in Brooklyn. Howard had addressed the mail-out himself to “Mr. Ernest Hemingway, Box 406, Key West, Florida.” There was a one-and-a-half-cent stamp affixed to the document, which described in typical inflated advertising rhetoric the company’s wares. It was a flyer for the 1933 model year, since catalogs for 1934 boats hadn’t yet come off the presses.

  The Wheeler firm designed and built cabin cruisers, sea skiffs, yachts, and motor sailers (a boat combining the features of both a motorboat and a sailboat). The company’s signature model, known throughout the boating industry, was the Playmate, which came in many lengths and sleeping configurations and price arrangements—twin screw, single screw, diesel power, gasoline engine, sedan, twin cabin, stateroom cabin, enclosed bridge. For several years Hemingway had been studying such vessels in the cabin-cruiser style, and by the time he arrived back in America on the Paris, he seems to have known exactly the size of boat he wanted, and he wanted it from Wheeler.

  As in the automotive business, the so-called new models from a boatbuilder, along with their advertising wares, began to appear in the fall of the previous model year. That is, boats for the 1934 season were being readied by the major shipyards in the late summer and all through the autumn of 1933, and this is also when the new catalogs were mailed out to prospective customers and when ads began to show up in the press. The big event every year for showcasing new boats—and for taking orders—was the National Motor Boat Show, held in January at Grand Central Palace in New York. This is when the shipyards from across the country unveiled their beauties in the flesh, seeking to outdo one another with flashy exhibit spaces and giveaway trinkets and walk-through models. Sometimes chastely sexy girls were there to greet buyers on the foredeck. In other words, the New York boat show was just like a big car show, except that the motoring dreams were on water instead of the open road. Since he was in Africa, Hemingway was going to miss by roughly two months the gaudy 1934 show at which the Wheeler firm was one of the starring concerns.

  Many American boat makers in the thirties were just trying to hang on, no matter the impression they were giving to would-be customers. By mid-Depression, some companies were down to a handful of employees. And their new models were often pretty much the old models—using the same hulls from prior years, but with different manufacturing numbers.

  The 1934 Playmates—how Hemingway must have loathed the name—ranged in size from twenty-eight to forty-six feet. The company produced mainly stock boats rather than custom-made craft, although if you were sufficiently well-heeled, the boatyard at the foot of Cropsey Avenue was glad to do custom work, starting either from absolute scratch or, more characteristically, from a stock Wheeler hull and constructing upward to your specifications. Mostly, though, Wheeler was known to yachting enthusiasts as a “production shipyard.” The company had a reputation for good woodwork, inside and out, especially in its cabinetry. Its “brightwork” (what you see on the exterior) was known to be very solid, if not spectacular. Still, when you said “Wheeler,” you tended to think of look-alike boats. To pure yachting snobs, for whom the Depression would have been an inconvenience, that term, “stock boat,” no less than the term “production shipyard,” would have had an odor.

  And yet it’s also true that the designers and old-school Scandinavian master shipwrights at Wheeler would produce some famed original boats in these years—a sixty-nine-footer, for instance, for a financier named Charles S. Payson, so that he might hydroplane to his office on Wall Street. These craft were known in the yachting world as “streamline commuters” or simply “commuters.” Payson’s custom Wheeler came out the year after Pilar and was christened Saga, with photographs of her in the boating journals, knifing the water with her V-12 Packards, this legend underneath: “Streamlining in Mahogany.” Charlie Payson, known to be impeccable with his money, was married to the former Joan Whitney, and Joan was the sister of Jock Whitney, and Jock and Joan were the only children of Helen Hay Whitney and Payne Whitney, fabulously rich Americans and devotees of the sporting life. In the thirties, Jock Whitney and his spouse, and Charles Payson and his spouse, lived next to each other on Long Island’s Gold Coast. It sounds so tight and clubby and Gatsbyesque, although apparently things were competitive, too, in a sporting way. Saga is said to have come about in the first place out of Payson’s need to outrun Jock Whitney’s mahogany commuter, Aphrodite. The brothers-in-law wished to race toward their money in the city, and whoever got there first could make more.

  If you went past forty-six feet in length for your Wheeler watery dream, you were really talking about a yacht, not a motor cruiser. So technically speaking, Ernest Hemingway never owned a yacht, even though that phrase is often thrown around in connection with the history of his boat. The 1934 Wheeler catalog on the stock thirty-eight-foot cabin cruisers said:

  Do not forget that a WHEELER “38” is practically a 40 footer and with its wide beam, semi Vee bottom form and wide flaring bow this boat provides more comfort, more room, better sea-going qualities, more headroom and runs steadier and smoother than any other boat of its size on the market today. Before considering any boat in this size you owe it to yourself to look over the fine specifications and complete equipment list offered in the new WHEELER PLAYMATES. We offer SEVEN fine arrangements, each with features very far in advance of competitive models and best of all at the VERY LOWEST possible PRICES.… Forward deck is fitted with monkey rails of varnished oak, anchor windglass, chocks, side cleats, etc.… Center of main cabin has large modern galley on starboard side fitted with three burner alcohol stove, large sink, chromium flashed drain board, refrigerator, dish and glass racks and plenty of food and locker space. Port side fitted with a toilet room, which has marine type toilet, large sink, mirror, shelves and other fittings complete.

  The ’34 catalog offered an endorsement from Vincent Astor himself. He’d recently bought a Wheeler thirty-eight. He was the son of Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, robber baron supreme. Vincent Astor could have afforded any kind of yacht or yacht maker he wanted. And he came to Brooklyn for a Wheeler—well, not literally. The hull of his Little Nourmahal was white and she was a little more upright as she churned the water, but still: Astor’s custom Wheeler looked remarkably similar to the production Wheeler that, in about six months, was going to come off the wooden ways at Cropsey Avenue, with her five-character Spanish name lettered neatly in white on her dark stern.

  On March 24, in Paris, four days before boarding an ocean liner with the same name (it’s the day he punches the vase of tulips at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company), Hemingway wrote to Arnold Gingrich at Esquire. Much of the letter was taken up with instructions regarding his next contribution to the magazine, which would be about the safari. “You may also use the photo of me and lion,” he wrote. “But under no circumstances run this picture with the group of pictures or any single picture of live lions. It would be very bad taste and give people the impression that we photographed lions and then shot them.” Further on:

  I hope to hell your finances are on the wax rather than the bloody wane as I am broke (after fashion) and it is a pain in the jaw to be writing stuff for nearly enough money to pay the postage when I could put it in a slightly different form and get 10 times as much for it.

  Cosmop paid 5500 for that story [“One Trip Across”]—thi
nk I told you—I want to buy a boat that costs $7,000 and have only $3500. Once I get the boat am set. But have been within a grand of enough to buy it with twice and both times the money has peed away.

  Must send this now—Bremen boat train leaving.

  The letter of the twenty-fourth had a postscript: “Please acknowlege pictures to Scribners and mark letter PLEASE HOLD. Will be there in about a week or 8 days.” He had addressed the envelope: “Arnold gingritch Esq.” (Inside, in the greeting, he had used the same spelling and lowercase g.) Hemingway’s spelling, not least the spelling of people’s names, was often erratic, and sometimes had a kind of deliberate facetiousness about it, but it seemed to take him a particularly long while to get this one down, even though Gingrich had been his acquaintance for a little more than a year. It would be a good while before Gingrich, like so many others, would begin to register his public contempt for Hemingway. Years later, for Playboy, he’d write a biting memoir called “Horsing Them in with Hemingway.” By then Gingrich was not only a legendary American magazine editor, he was a world-class fly-fisherman. He was also the fourth husband of Jane Mason, a lifelong, high-maintenance, oval-faced American beauty who, for a time, back in the early thirties, when she was still youthful and blond and high-strung and high-sexed and wed to an old Yale clubman and high executive of Pan American Airways in Cuba, was Hemingway’s wild-assed drinking partner and fishing companion and, probably, his lover. (No one’s ever been able to establish this as an indisputable fact, although many Hemingway chroniclers have assumed it for fact.) “Ernest was a meat fisherman,” Gingrich would write in “Horsing Them in with Hemingway.” For a true sportsman, that’s about the unkindest cut of all. By then, the famous editor seemed to take special delight in the posthumous decline of Hemingway’s literary fortunes.

  But not in 1933 and 1934 and 1935, when his magazine was trying to get traction and badly needed Hemingway’s name on its covers. Gingrich, a native midwesterner still in his late twenties, of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, a collector of first editions, had met Hemingway at a rare-book shop in New York City called The House of Books in January 1933. Ever since, the young editor had been doing whatever he possibly could do to stay on Hemingway’s good side and to get him to write for the magazine. The first issue of Esquire, on stands in late August 1933, with that fishing contribution by Hemingway, had sold one hundred thousand copies at fifty cents apiece. All told through the years, he’d publish twenty-five essays and six stories in Gingrich’s magazine—“letters,” he and the editor decided to call his fishing and hunting reports. After Hemingway’s suicide, Gingrich wrote in his editor’s column:

  It is not too much to say that, at the very earliest point, he was [Esquire’s] principal asset.… We were going around New York with a checkbook, calling on writers and artists all and sundry, trying to make them believe that we were actually going to come out with a luxury magazine, “devoted to the art of living and the new leisure,” at the very moment when the banks had just reopened.… [O]ur gentlemen’s agreement with Hemingway was that we would pay him twice as much as we paid anybody else, and that, while we hoped to pay more, if and as the magazine succeeded, we were still honor-bound to preserve that ratio. Such was the stature of the man that even then (Spring of ’33), nobody objected.

  Gingrich was exaggerating—or more likely remembering wrong—when he said he had paid Hemingway twice as much as anybody else in the beginning, although it’s true that F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, all of whom were early and famous contributors, had to get in line behind both Hemingway’s pay and ego. Gingrich had also promised not to tamper with so much as a comma of Hemingway’s copy.

  In the letter mailed from France on the twenty-fourth, a hook had been set. I want to buy a boat that costs $7,000 and have only $3500. Once I get the boat am set. On April 3, 1934, the big-boned 210-pounder in suit and tie popping quotes at Pier 57 beside the small and zebra-suited woman couldn’t know for certain his hook-setting had worked. Couldn’t know that the magazine editor in Illinois had fairly hopped to it and already mailed him, in care of Scribners, a nine-page, handwritten, semi-sycophantic letter that began: “The enclosed, or attached, represents a couple of blood vessels. You’ll have to scratch another $500 somehow, and then we all stand up and call you skipper.” (A week later, after he was home in Key West, Hemingway wrote to Gingrich and said, “Thanks for raising the 3G.… You were a good guy to send the money.”) Hemingway wouldn’t know his hook-setting had worked until he’d opened an envelope at his publishing house. The letter and the check, written on April 2 in Chicago and posted the next day via air mail, were there waiting, on either April 4 or April 5, in Max Perkins’s office, when the biggest horse in the Scribners stable went to visit his editor at 597 Fifth Avenue. And immediately afterward, a jubilant man, suppressing his demons, with dough in hand, spouse on arm, glorying in his life, in his luck, in the new possibilities of the physical world, taxied to Brooklyn, to buy his boat.

  Several weeks later, while Pilar was still being outfitted and altered to her owner’s wishes, some official documents were filled out and signed and sent to the Department of Commerce, in its Bureau of Navigation, in Washington, DC: the master carpenter’s certificate, the certificate of admeasurement, the application for registration. If you went to the right archive, you could pore over the originals of these papers, like this document, certificate No. 1261, dated April 23, 1934, with its unconscious poetry of form:

  I, E. Lawrence Wheeler, master carpenter

  of Wheeler Shipyard, Inc., do certify that

  the gas screw yacht

  called the “Pilar”

  was built by the Wheeler Shipyard, Inc.

  during the year 1934

  at Brooklyn, N.Y.

  State of New York

  of wood

  for Mr. Ernest Hemingway, P.O. Box 406, Key West, Florida

  Six days afterward, in its Sunday sports pages, in a roundup of boating news, The New York Times ran a twelve-line item: “Back from writing about picadors in Spain and ambulance drivers in Italy, Ernest Hemingway, who has gone to his home at Key West, has taken up motorboating and last week bought a 42-foot cruiser at the Wheeler shipyard in Brooklyn. White paint is now being burned off to comply with Hemingway’s preference for a black hull and the boat will be shipped to a Southern port for delivery at Key West.” The twelve lines contained only four or five errors of fact, which, considering the oceans of misinformation already attending this coveted life, wasn’t half bad.

  He’d dreamed of having his own seagoing boat for about as long as he’d been an ocean fisherman and had fished from other people’s boats—which is to say for about six years. Hemingway first saw Key West in the first week of April 1928, and in a sense this is a way of demarcating the beginning of his serious saltwater life, which eventually superseded all other kinds of fishing he’d ever done or would do again. From boyhood on, he’d been a passionate fisherman, and from infancy on—literally—he’d been around steamers and launches and rowboats and other small craft plying the summer waters of Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. When he was eleven, his mother had taken him on a nearly monthlong trip by rail and steamer to Cape Cod and Nantucket Island, where he experienced the ocean for the first time and where he fished for sea bass and mackerel. But up until the Key West years, roughly 1928 to 1939, his fishing obsessions had been primarily of a freshwater and landlocked kind. Wild trout taken in waded streams on delicate equipment, using worms or hand-tied flies—these had seized Hemingway’s angling imagination until his late twenties. Even after he owned Pilar, he still liked going for trout, in the big mountain streams of the West, but more and more that kind of fishing and those kinds of fish, no matter their wildness and fragile beauty, became too small for his imagination. He needed expanses of water where you couldn’t see the other side. He needed fish whose size was theoretically illimitable and which could be triumphed over and brought into shore and str
ung upside down for documenting with cameras. He needed an environment far less sheltered than a trout stream could afford, an environment where there was implicit danger. As for boats themselves: when you look through Hemingway’s letters in the half-dozen years before he got Pilar, it’s instructive to see how often the noun “boat” comes up. Boats and fishing and salt water, not to say other kinds of fluids: it’s as if these overlapping dreams and preoccupations and pastimes frame Hemingway’s correspondence in his early Key West years, the more so when he is in some kind of pain and seeks escape.

  For instance, there’s the letter—profane, funny, bigoted, homophobic, anxious, watery—he wrote to Thornton Wilder in late May 1929, roughly two months after his mother had mailed the suicide weapon, roughly five years before he boated his first broadbill aboard Pilar. Hemingway had lately arrived in Paris with his wife and children and one sister. The first serial installment of A Farewell to Arms had appeared in Scribner’s Magazine. Wilder had written to say how much he liked it. Hemingway was obsessively reworking the ending of the novel—which would come out in the fall—and he was also reading page proofs for the next magazine excerpt. Wilder, two years older, was the bigger literary name. Like Hemingway with the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, he’d become a suddenly famous man with the publication, in 1927, of his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (for which he won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes). He was an unlikely celebrity—reserved, schoolteacherish. As a closeted homosexual, he was also an unlikely Hemingway friend.

  Hemingway typed the letter and added in things by hand.

  Damned good to hear from you.… I’m awfully glad if you like the book but hate to have you read it in chunks and possibly bowdlerized.… Were in America about 14 months and at no time encountered anyone who had read anything of mine but by judicious use of your name acquired quite a reputation as a literary gent.