Archibald MacLeish, to mention only one long-standing if wary friend and fellow athlete, will come on board a handful of times in these first days, only to end up in a row with Pilar’s captain, provoking the captain to say of the poet in a letter to their mutual artist friend Waldo Peirce: “He’s gotten, between ourselves … a goddamned bore. Righteous, fussy, and a bloody bore. Strange mixture of puerility and senility. What the hell do American writers turn into?”
Yes.
The Maestro—that was Arnold Morse Samuelson’s Hemingway-bequeathed nickname, which got shortened soon enough to the Mice. During dead calms on Pilar, the quiet evening drifts of that first (and largely disappointing) summer and fall of the fishing, when most of the marlin trophies had seemed to desert the Stream, or hang at the bottom, the Mice used to take out his battered violin and send Mozart and Beethoven out across the waves, not so well, but with great exuberance.
Arnold Samuelson was the twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer and self-styled Hemingway character who tore from a Minneapolis newspaper Hemingway’s photograph (yes, the one at the rail of the Paris), stuck it in his rucksack, and rode his hitchhiking thumb and the top of boxcars straight into his hero’s life and right onto his new boat. For something like nine months, from late spring of 1934 to late winter of 1935, the Mice got to serve as the night watchman and deckhand and writing acolyte at the master’s knee, making a dollar a day to boot.
For the bulk of the nearly five decades he lived on the earth after stepping off Hemingway’s boat, Samuelson, who’d once so badly wished to make it as a serious fiction writer, lived a socially outcast existence on the edge of a little jackrabbit crossroads in Coke County, Texas, called Robert Lee. Found among his scattered possessions, upon his death, was a three-hundred-page typed nonfiction manuscript about his long-ago time with Hemingway. Most of it he had drafted on Pilar, under Hemingway’s guidance. But every now and then, through the decades, he would take out the fly-specked pages of his memoir and look at them by lamplight, adding, subtracting, rewriting, shifting around sentences and paragraphs, wondering—as he once wrote in a scrambled note to himself that was discovered by his family after his death—if he could turn the work into literature. That’s only one of the sadder ironies—it was literature. He just could never see it.
I can’t really say, even now, why, nearly from the start, I felt myself pulled toward this eclipsed and footnoted and shadowed life, although I suspect the pulling must have had something to do with a daughter’s brief and eloquent preface to her father’s posthumously published and largely ignored work (which came out in 1984, three years after Samuelson was dead), but also something to do with the photographs themselves. You see, there’s something so appealing in that lank, boyish, midwestern face, in that bony frame, in the way bars of Gulf light swath across his back as he sits at Pilar’s stern in her virgin newness, holding one of the deep-sea rods, feet propped against the live-fish box, long-billed swordfisherman’s hat pulled low, nose coated with coconut oil, turning at this instant to share in some joke or inside story with his literary idol, who’s seated right beside him. Who could be so fortunate?
But of course the gypsies have that curse: may your fondest fortune come true.
Other book-length chroniclers of Ernest Hemingway have either ignored Arnold Samuelson’s life altogether or else dealt with it in not much more than a couple of dismissive (and often inaccurate) paragraphs. But might a deeper look at his story reveal important Hemingway truths from oblique angles? “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” is the way Emily Dickinson started a poem. “If you go, it’ll happen,” an old mentor from The Washington Post used to say. So I went, in search of the Maestro.
SHADOW STORY
Ernest and Arnold, summer 1934
He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm.
—JAMES BALDWIN, writing of his father, in Notes of a Native Son
I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.
—JACK KEROUAC, On the Road
Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel …
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Death in the Afternoon
WITH HEMINGWAY: A YEAR IN KEY WEST AND CUBA begins with an importuning knock at the front door of 907 Whitehead Street. The “importuning nobody” (as a Hemingway essayist in an academic journal once wrote of Arnold Samuelson, accurately if a little meanly) has just come through the iron gate and up the walk and past the brown patches in Hemingway’s front yard. He’s swallowing his spit, shifting from one foot to the other, twisting his woolen hobo’s cap like a man trying to get water out of a rag. Keep him here for a moment on Hemingway’s doorstep, with his arm raised, in the dozen or so heartbeats between his knock and the crowding of the other side of the doorway with a sizable shadow. Think of Hemingway coming toward his front door from somewhere inside the house, wondering who the hell this is. Think of the knocker fighting off the urge to do a pivot and hotfoot it to the curb.
When exactly is this knock? The author of With Hemingway places the moment in late April 1934—but he’s incorrect. Samuelson isn’t really good at pinning down dates, and he’s also prone to mangle certain easily checked facts and names. (At other times, he gets the chronologies and smaller facts exactly right.) But that’s okay; he’s far more interested in—and very good at—rendering the texture of experiences, not least his own.
It’s really toward the end of the first week of May, two or three days before the Wednesday news item in the Personal Mention column of the Citizen that Hemingway has departed on the train to Miami the day before to collect his new fishing machine. This would mean it’s either Sunday or Monday, May 6 or 7, 1934. Hemingway himself touched on the moment in a semi-famous piece in Esquire in 1935 titled “Monologue to the Maestro” (more on this later). He said the knock occurred right after he’d gotten back, on May 5, from a quick reconnaissance trip to Cuba. He’d gone over to politically turbulent Havana on the ferry with John Dos Passos to watch the May Day festivities, and to do some casual fishing, and to check personally on the upcoming summer’s marlin prospects, and, not least, to secure the necessary forms and bureaucratic signatures for a good docking site when he’d return with his boat in July. Dos and his wife were leaving within the hour for the north, and Hemingway wished to see them off at the Key West rail depot. There were some letters he needed to get written and in the mail. And goddamn it here was somebody at the door. “[T]he road brings in every son of a bitch I ever knew or who ever read a line I wrote,” Hemingway once said in a letter.
This interrupter—who has written many first lines of would-be novels and stories, all of them, he’s now decided, being bunk and junk—could probably pass for somebody still in his teens. He’s all elbows and big feet and has a former farm boy’s blunt hands. He’s about six foot and weighs maybe 175 dripping wet. He’s got a “porcupine hair-cut” (as Hemingway will say in Esquire the following year). Mostly, he’s got a look about him of extreme earnestness and seriousness.
Last night, as the night before, he lodged at the Key West city jail, where the mosquitoes were big as bombers. On his first night in town, he’d tried sleeping on the rough planking of the turtling dock, lying on his back, against his knapsack and violin case, to ease the pressure on his hip bones. A night cop had shaken him awake and taken him off to the hoosegow, where he promised him he’d be safer and even have a cot, or at least a hammock. He hadn’t mentioned anything about the bugs.
This stranger, who’s been wandering in America for much of the last two years, is down to a squashed loaf of bread and about eight bucks
. Ever since he got out of college in the spring of 1932, he’s been living on not much more than his wits. He’s worked as a cub at a Minnesota newspaper, cut alfalfa in Iowa, slept all night in Los Angeles movie theaters, barbered with a pair of hardware-store shears. He’s hitched and walked and ridden rails in his lace-up lumberjack boots with a fellow college-educated “tramp” (it’s how he generally refers to himself) and together they’ve made it through the Pacific Northwest, down into Texas, across the middle border. He’s awakened in his bedroll to April snowfalls of cherry blossoms in the state of Washington, speared salmon near the Pacific Coast with the bent-back tines of a pitchfork, panned for nuggets in sluicing California streams, decorated his Christmas tree (fetched illicitly from a nearby national forest) with cigarette butts and the tinfoil of gum wrappers, made himself into a half-assed roofer and a not-at-all-bad carpenter. He has set it all down in his notebooks, hoping to convert the base metal of raw sensory American experience into literary gold.
Some of it, in fact, has already been penned into long-winded journalistic travel accounts and mailed back to the Minneapolis Tribune, where he’d worked on and off through college—running copy down to the printers, subbing for the beat reporters, filling in on “late cops.” (It’s an old newspaper expression, meaning that you hang around police headquarters to sop up whatever local crimes get logged onto that night’s blotter.) The Trib, which didn’t give him a full-time job after college, has published his road stories in an occasional Sunday series, headlining them “Letters from a Forgotten Boy.” So far, he’s done nine pieces, and the editors have paid him a total of fifteen bucks. He knows they’re just Depression filler, nothing like the serious writing he feels called to do.
College was the University of Minnesota. He’d concentrated in journalism, hated it all the way through, refused formal graduation and a degree—a life of contrariness was already showing itself. On June 20, 1932, in a little hard-backed, marbleized notebook, the adventurer-to-be had set down the first journal entry of his newly escaped life: “Never have I spent my days in greater tedium. Graduation exercises took place without my participation. The fee is $10. The money will take me farther bumming than will the diploma. The only ambition that was predominant during the windup of school was to get out of town, never to view the interior of a university of any kind again.” He was already on the road when he recorded that. His older brother Sam—a Twin Cities doctor, who’d removed his tonsils free of charge as a kind of graduation gift and then shoved a few bucks in his pocket—had dropped him off on the outskirts of Minneapolis. There were a lot of hitchhikers that day, but none able to score rides in the way he scored them: by taking out his violin and turning his back to the oncoming traffic and starting to saw away. For instance, there was that farmer named Morica Rashin, from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, whose curiosity got the best of him—he slowed up, put it in reverse, backed up, and apparently said something like, Get in, bub.
This stranger—who was raised in a frontier-like place called White Earth, North Dakota, youngest child of severely religious immigrant Norwegians—has been spending eighteen-hour days of late at his writing. This past winter, having returned to Minneapolis, where much of his family now was, he’d toiled from the moment he got up until long past dark, forgetting sometimes even to eat, falling into bed exhausted only to wake up again and go over to the desk and pick up the sheets and see how truly bad his cooled-off prose was. So far he’s written something like two unpublished novels and twenty short stories, and in the worst of his despair, about three weeks ago, he’d come across Ernest Hemingway’s story in Cosmopolitan, “One Trip Across.” It was the most convincing piece of literature he’d ever read. There wasn’t a fifty-cent word in it. He felt himself right there, on Harry Morgan’s charter boat, in the glow of the binnacle light, off Havana, when the whole smuggling plot turns foul. That scene where Harry, a decent guy driven to desperate acts because of money, gets Mr. Sing down on his knees and then uses his thumbs to crack open the guy’s talk box from behind—hell, he could hear that crack coming straight out of the ink on the printed page. And so an educated tramp in a rented room in unthawed Minnesota had begun to think, dream, that if he could just have a conversation with Ernest Hemingway about the craft of fiction, even if it lasted five minutes, he might yet have a fighting chance with his own bad stuff. Which basically explains why and how he’s come to be fidgeting here on Hemingway’s doorstep in this moist morning heat; why and how he’s made his own trip, not across but down, something like eighteen hundred miles, on his luck and spit, to the dividing line between the east of his youth and the west of his future.
A few days ago, on the roof of a middle boxcar, his rags turning sooty with coal smoke, but feeling kingly and free as air, he’d looked down over the side and saw the sun lighting the clear shallows of the ocean floor. Schools of fish were sunning themselves. He’d watched their dark shadows. He’d wondered if they were sharks. He was on his rackety perch forty feet above the Atlantic and the Gulf, and the trainmen weren’t after him with their headache sticks. After eighty miles or so, as he would later write in his memoir, “I could see a patch of land floating on the water up ahead. It looked bigger than the other keys and there were buildings on it, far off but coming closer.” He’d made it to Hemingway’s town.
How does he know Hemingway’s even in town? He doesn’t. What he’s going on is a photograph from a newspaper along with the accompanying story that quoted the subject of the piece as saying he was on his way home to Florida to start a season of intensive writing. It’s enough.
There’s one more fact, a pretty sad one, you need to know about Arnold Morse Samuelson’s life just now. On October 16, 1931, Samuelson’s older sister—she was twenty-four and her name was Hedvig, though everybody called her Sammy—was murdered, along with another woman, in her lounging pajamas in a female love triangle gone wrong. It happened in Arizona. Sammy was shot in the head at close range, and her hacked-apart body was stuffed into a trunk and a suitcase and shipped to Los Angeles.
The little brother, in his last year of college, was working for his keep in a Twin Cities fire department barn, and he was also moonlighting for the Tribune. He was in a corner of the newsroom, hunched over a story, when the first late-night dispatches began to come in. “News Wires Tell Student Reporter His Sister’s Slain” was a headline the next day, followed by this subhead: “You’ll Want Pictures, I Suppose, He Says to City Editor As He Stifles Grief.” From its first moment, the tabloids and even America’s mainstream press couldn’t get enough of the story.
Minot was the closest North Dakota city to the Samuelson farm. The day after the bodies were found, the Minot Daily News sent a reporter out to White Earth to try to speak to Sammy Samuelson’s parents. The reporter’s paper had already published its first story, with “Mutilated Bodies” in the headline. The reporter knew that pieces of Sammy had been put into one of the trunks and other pieces of her into the suitcase—but he couldn’t bring himself to say that to seventy-one-year-old Anders Samuelson and fifty-nine-year-old Marie Samuelson. It was the family pastor, from the next town over, who’d delivered the news to the parents that their daughter was dead, but he, too, couldn’t say the worst: “A representative of the News, calling at the Samuelson home in company with the Stanley minister, was pressed for further details, but the parents still are unaware that their daughter’s body had been dismembered and mutilated by the slayer.”
The person eventually convicted of this double homicide was a soft-spoken, five-foot-two, blue-eyed, one-hundred-pound woman named Winnie Ruth Judd. All around the slaying have swirled unproven tales of adultery, abortion rings, narcotics, lesbianism.
If you understood your vocation as that of a serious writer, and if one of the hacked-apart bodies in a foul-smelling metal trunk and leaky suitcase that got opened and peered into on a train platform in LA by railway dicks holding handkerchiefs to their noses, if this corpse turned out to be your own sibling, wouldn’t you
have to face it in a piece of writing, fiction or otherwise, if not now, someday?
On October 16, 1931, Ernest Hemingway and his much-pregnant wife were newly arrived in Kansas City by train, where they planned to wait out the birth of their second son. (Gregory Hancock Hemingway was born, by cesarean, on November 12, 1931.) Fourteen Octobers before, in 1917, an unknown and impecunious Ernest Hemingway, newly graduated from Oak Park High, had come to this city and signed on as a reporting cub at The Kansas City Star. He’d worked at the paper for seven months, a crucial apprenticeship to the writer he’d become. His old paper, which Hemingway would almost certainly have been reading as Pauline’s time neared, put the murder on page 1 on October 20. The following day, the Star devoted four columns to it on page 3.
Thoughts not only of birth but death as well would have been much on Hemingway’s mind, for the thirty-two-year-old author was just then working on the final chapters of his documentary-like bullfight book, Death in the Afternoon. There were two chapters left to write, plus a glossary and some back matter, but before going ahead, he wanted to tighten what he’d already written. Near the end of chapter 18 in the finished work, Hemingway writes of making the mistake of telling his three-year-old son Patrick about the gory death of a small bullfighter that he’d recently witnessed in the ring.
“I don’t like it that he’s dead,” the boy said.
The next day he said, “I can’t stop thinking about that man who was killed because he was so small.”
“Don’t think about it,” I said, wishing for the thousandth time in my life that I could wipe out words that I’d said. “It’s silly to think about that.”
“I don’t try to think about it, but I wish you hadn’t told me because every time I shut my eyes I see it.”
“Think about Pinky,” I said. Pinky is a horse in Wyoming.
Hemingway's Boat Page 12