In chapter 19, which Hemingway worked on while awaiting his son’s delivery, and while Winnie Ruth Judd was helping to sell newspapers in America, the word “kill” or “killed” or “killing” occurs seven times in the first three sentences.
Arnold Samuelson was just one of maybe five hundred people, famous and otherwise, who stepped down onto Hemingway’s boat in the twenty-seven years he owned her. In very many of those first photographs aboard Pilar, he appears so uncomplicated and carefree. Photographs lie, or often do. Samuelson couldn’t really have been those things—or, better said, he had to have been so many other things in addition. There must have been deep wells of grief and melancholia inside him, not unlike the nearly lifelong melancholy stuffed down inside the man into whose employ he’d lucked himself. At nineteen, in Minnesota, on a late night in October, Hemingway’s eventual apprentice had to have suffered an acute shock to his central nervous system. Anyone who knows anything about the life of Ernest Hemingway would know of the even greater shock, to both his body and spirit, that he suffered, on July 8, 1918 (it was thirteen days before his nineteenth birthday; he’d quit the Star a few months previous), shortly past midnight, at the Piave front, in a forward listening post near a village called Fossalta, while passing out tobacco and chocolate bars and other canteen supplies to Italian troops under the auspices of the American Red Cross. It was an Austrian trench mortar shell, and when the shrapnel from the canister exploded into his legs and scrotum, it was as if he was wearing rubber boots filling with warm water.
The screened double doorway at 907 Whitehead has just filled with Ernest Hemingway’s bulk. From With Hemingway:
[H]e came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinting with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit. He had a heavy jaw and a full black mustache, and his dark eyes, which were almost closed, looked me over the way a boxer measures his opponent for the knockout punch.
It was obvious he needed no bouncer to keep tramps off his property. He could handle that job himself.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I bummed down from Minneapolis to see you,” I said, very ill at ease.
“What about?”
“I just want to visit.”
You can almost guess what happens next. Far from getting clocked, the nobody seems to have struck some kind of unwitting and almost instant chord. But he’s busy now, Hemingway says—could you come around tomorrow about one thirty? The door-knocker starts to step backward.
“Wait. I’ll drive you downtown.”
Oh, he can walk.
“ ‘I was going down for the mail anyway,’ ” he said, falling into step beside me. “ ‘Wait a minute. I forgot my keys.’ ”
In the Model A Ford roadster (it’s bright yellow, with oaken running boards), there is already talk about writing, advice about writing. Even advice about life. The man at the wheel keeps peppering the nobody with questions. Where would Samuelson like to be let off? How’s he fixed for dough?
We shook hands and I watched him drive off to the post office. He left me with that damned marvelous feeling you can have only once in a lifetime if you are a young man who wants to become a writer and you have just met the man you admire as the greatest writer alive and you know instinctively he is already your friend.
The next day. E.H. is in bedroom slippers and khaki pants, drinking whiskey and going through The New York Times. He’s leading the nobody to a shady spot on the north porch. The hobo takes a seat in a padded wicker chair. He watches the peacocks pluming their tails out by the fence, sticking their heads through the bars, trying to get out. Again, Hemingway offers fatherly-cum-brotherly writing counsel.
“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.”
They go up to the studio. It’s got a tile floor and shuttered windows and its own bathroom and shelves of books. Hemingway takes a seat at a big antique flat-topped desk in the middle of the room. He’s writing on a sheet of paper.
“It’s hard for me to tell, but you seem to be serious,” E.H. said at last. “Seriousness is one thing you’ve got to have. Big-time writing is the most serious business there is, and imaginative writing is the peak of the art. Another thing you’ve got to have is talent. Some people never can write fiction. What would you do if you found out you couldn’t write fiction?”
“I don’t know. How can a man know if he’s got talent?”
“You can’t. Sometimes you can go on writing for years before it shows. If a man’s got it in him, it will come out sometime.”
The sheet Hemingway has been writing on contains a personal reading list—the essential books any serious fiction writer must read, works by Joyce, Flaubert, Stephen Crane, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Henry James. Hemingway hands it over. The bottom of it is signed “Ernest Hemingway.” From a shelf Hemingway pulls down a collection of Crane’s stories and a personal copy of A Farewell to Arms. He hands them over, but says he’d like them back, especially Farewell, since it’s his last copy of that particular edition.
What explains the way Hemingway took to him—was it some vision of his own earlier, Nick Adams, alter-ego, midwestern self? Perhaps. More likely, it was the seriousness that won the hobo the day, without his quite knowing it. Hemingway suggested as much a year later, in Esquire, in “Monologue to the Maestro,” which is a piece far less about Samuelson than it is a treatise on the craft of writing, with Samuelson employed as the organizing principle and gently mocked storytelling foil. Hemingway never identifies Samuelson by his real name, but “Monologue to the Maestro,” published in October 1935, about eight months after he’d departed Pilar and Hemingway’s company, assured the luck-struck boy of his wee place in American literary history.
Hemingway tells the reader of how he’d been “both flattered and appalled” at the prospect of someone having come all the way from Minnesota to ask “a few questions about writing.” He writes of how he gave Samuelson his nickname and his dollar-a-day job. He pokes fun at his apprentice’s slow-footedness and general clumsiness, calling him a “calamity” at sea. He speaks of his “incurable tendency toward sea-sickness and a peasant reluctance to take orders.” But Hemingway also says:
He was a tall, very serious young man.… It seemed that all his life he had wanted to be a writer.… He wanted to be a writer and he had good stories to write. He told them very badly but you could see that there was something there if he could get it out. He was so entirely serious about writing that it seemed that seriousness would overcome all obstacles.… I thought, perhaps, that this was modesty until he showed me a piece he had published in one of the Minneapolis papers. It was abominably written. Still, I thought, many other people write badly at the start and this boy is so extremely serious that he must have something; real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
The day after Hemingway loans him a personal copy of A Farewell to Arms, the tramp is at the door again. His intention is to drop off the books (he has read them, or at least read in them, overnight) and to thank Hemingway and then to hop a freight north—he cannot possibly expect any more largesse. Hemingway is down getting the mail and the papers on Duval Street. Pauline asks him to wait. Shortly, Hemingway appears.
“ ‘I’ve got a boat being shipped from New Y
ork. I’ll have to go up to Miami Tuesday and run her down and then I’ll have to have someone on board. There wouldn’t be much work.’ ” Would Samuelson like the job?
“ ‘That would be swell.’ ”
He can work on his writing when he isn’t scrubbing a deck or standing watch. He’d be fishing, serving a seaman’s apprenticeship, learning both craft and trade.
“Of course, I don’t know you very well, but you seem to be the sort of person that can be trusted. Do you drink?”
“Not much. Just a little moonshine when I was a kid.”
“That’s good. The owner is the only person who can get drunk on board a boat.”
There’s something endearing about the dialogue corniness of With Hemingway—in and amid its literate cunning. Much of the voice sounds just like the voice of that former rube of the middle border, living in Paris with his wife and baby boy, who wrote excitedly in 1924 to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with the news of having finished a long fish story set in Michigan and “trying to do the country like Cezanne” and how he “made it all up,” and how “it is swell about the fish, but isn’t writing a hard job though?”
Hemingway drives him downtown to the jail to get his stuff. He advances him ten dollars against future wages. A cot is fixed up for him in the garage. Isabel the cook brings him a meal that comes out on a tray. Is he living in some kind of hobo dream?
A few days later, Friday afternoon, May 11, Hemingway’s boat struts into town, and Arnold Samuelson is at the Key West Navy Yard, along with some of the other greeters, stepping aboard his new home:
I took my shoes off in order not to scratch the varnished deck.… The cockpit was twelve feet wide and sixteen feet long with leather-cushioned bunks on each side; the cabins below … [had] two compartments with bunks to sleep six people.… She was a fine boat, the most valuable property E.H. owned, and I began to think the responsibility of taking care of her might be too big for me, a young fellow who had never been on board a ship before.
If you were born in a sod hut, and were raised on a homesteading wheat farm in the upper Midwest, and had never been to sea, and had ridden horses bareback to school, wouldn’t you think to call the thirty-eight-foot shiny new floating thing that you’d just stepped down into a “ship”?
The crowd goes off. The new hire is there alone. That night “I had a soft bunk with clean sheets and a clean blanket, and the cool salt air came through a screen that kept out the mosquitoes. In the morning, I dove off the stern and had a swim between the piers in the clear green water.” These are Samuelson sentences, but you can instantly hear the Hemingway echoes. It’s how any serious-minded writer learns to write—by imitation.
In the morning, Hemingway’s roadster “with the sun shining through the block of ice on the rear bumper” rattles over the rough planking of the dock. Captain Bra arrives. Pauline and Charles and Lorine Thompson will be aboard. Here’s Archie MacLeish in his big cotton athletic sweater. They’re all handing down chairs and the boxes of beer and the lunch baskets and the mullet bait wrapped in yesterday’s Citizen. The men are aiding the women aboard. Now they’ve cast off and are purring past the town. Hemingway’s at the wheel. “The sea was green and flat over the reef and the boat ran along smoothly”—again, you know where that sentence found its imagistic, economical stroke.
“It’s a bloody marvelous day, isn’t it?” he said to Pauline.
“It’s lovely,” she said.
“How do you feel, Mummy?”
“Fine. I couldn’t feel any better.”
“Are you quite comfortable?”
“This is splendid.”
“You won’t get seasick today, Mummy. It’ll be even better when we get out past the tide rip.”
“Oh, I think this is grand.”
And right from the first, the master seems to be paying special attention to his pupil, pointing out markers, explaining why the colors are different on the water: “ ‘That’s the edge of the stream, that darker water. See that glossy path? That’s made by the current flowing against the tide from the reef. It’s filled with patches of seaweed.’ ”
That afternoon, hundreds of dolphins appear. Hemingway, almost frantic, is throwing out teasers and bait to try to keep them close to the boat. “When there was no mullet left, he threw out pieces of newspaper wiped in fish slime and they struck at the floating papers.” But as quickly as the dolphins come, they are gone. This is the first recorded day of fishing in Pilar’s history: Saturday, May 12, 1934, documented by a writer whom virtually nobody in America has ever heard of.
One more recording. It’s high summer; Pilar and crew have come to Cuba. Things are still very new for a landlubber, but in another way not so. Pauline has ridden over on the ferry from Key West to join her husband for a brief stay. The day before, with his wife aboard, Hemingway had reeled in a shark—a “big shark, yellow and ugly-looking in the water, uglier than anything else in the sea, giving you the same feeling you have when you see a snake on land.” When the thing got close, Hemingway had instructed Samuelson to bring him his pistol. “I got the automatic out of its holster in the rubber bag, handed it to E.H. and held his rod while he shot his initials into the top of the shark’s head.” The shark was thrashing wildly. When they gaffed and pulled it aboard, blood was everywhere. The hook was so far down the fish’s throat that it had to be cut out of its side. They threw the dead animal overboard and then dipped bucket after bucket into the sea to wash away the blood and guts on the decks.
This was yesterday, after Ernest and Pauline had attended Sunday Mass and the deckhand had gone for a walk by himself. Today is not a good day for marlin fishing. It’s cloudy and dark, the current is weak, the sea too becalmed. Harsh sunlight’s generally best when you’re hunting marlin, that and a stiff breeze out of the east or northeast to oil up the sea. The fishing party, small today, has given up on getting a trophy fish and has reeled in most of the baits. A couple of rods with feather jigs on them are still out, but those are for tarpon or whatever else small might come along. Suddenly—
We looked ahead and saw that the sea had become black with the backs of an incredible herd of rolling porpoises traveling against the current. From the boat to the shore, a mile away, the water was covered with them and they were rolling as far as we could see on the other side toward the stream. The school was at least two miles wide and there seemed to be no end to the run ahead. There were thousands of porpoises everywhere in sight, and those we saw at any one time coming up for air and rolling with a slow, wheel-like motion were only a few of the number near the surface. They were passing under the boat four layers deep, everywhere side by side as thick as a herd of stampeding cattle, and we were in the middle of that great stampede, moving against it, wedging through and over them untouched.… They were jumping higher and higher, their big round bodies and flat horizontal tails making long graceful curves over the water.… I danced on the deck in a delirious ecstasy, yelling in a high-pitched voice whenever I saw a porpoise and seeing them all the time.
“Yi! Yi! Yi! Three of them at a time! Lookit! Oh, boy! Oh boy! Wow! Eeeeyi! Yi!”
When his rapture is over, the Maestro asks his teacher, “How many would you say there were?”
“Maybe ten thousand” is the answer. “They were spread out two miles wide and at least six miles long and you saw how thick they were.”
The student says, “Do you think we’ll ever see anything like that again?”
The answer, “No, and it may be nobody ever will.”
The porpoise ecstasy comes in the middle of With Hemingway. About ninety pages later, in the last chapter, back in Key West, in the late winter of 1935, the luck-struck boy, about to turn twenty-three, is getting set to say good-bye. The February issue of Motor Boating magazine is out, and he has a story in it—his first-ever piece in a national magazine. It’s a journalistic account of some of the events of the summer and fall. He’s written the story on the boat, with his mentor’s guidance and person
al edits, even as he’s worked on his other and more serious fiction writing. Hemingway seems almost as proud of the piece as if it were his own. Those crisply printed words on the smooth paper bearing your name at the top of the first page—do you ever really get complacent about such a feeling?
“Well, Maestro,” he said. “Now you are a writer. Why don’t you stick around and go with us to Bimini next summer? You might get something for the Saturday Evening Post.”
But the protégé knows in his bones he must move on. On his last morning, he’s putting away the blankets, locking the boat, gathering his things. He goes up to the house to find Hemingway. Hemingway leads him up to the workshop. They sit facing each other, just as they had ten months previous. Hemingway tells him that he must find a way to keep up his courage, his moral courage. He’s too inclined to get discouraged. There’ll be so many times up ahead when he’ll feel incapable of writing a single word. In terms of his fiction efforts, which Hemingway has been looking over as the months have passed, well, frankly, he has to tell him that he may be as far behind right now as he was in journalism when he first showed up. But for crissakes, don’t get downhearted, E.H. says. Just keep going. And, listen, try not ever to worry about the writing when you’re not actually doing it, because that’ll only tire you out and make you impotent. either man can know that they’ll never see each other again.
We went down to say goodbye to Pauline and when I went through the iron gate they waved, standing together by one of the palm trees beside the house. I waved back and I felt a sore lump in my throat growing bigger as I struck off on Duval Street toward the highway.
It’s page 181. A book, as we will posthumously know it, is over. Except that a man’s actual life has forty-six and a half years remaining to it.
Hemingway's Boat Page 13