“And end it how?”
“Make it up after the canoe.” And a minute later: “You could just make the canoe and the cold lake and your kid brother—”
But Arnold Samuelson never did make the canoe.
So was he the boy who flew too close to the sun and got melted by his own daring? “Icarus”: that’s the title of an article written by Hemingway essayist Robert Lacy, a handful of years ago in a university journal. It’s one of the few useful, if relatively brief, things ever written about the Maestro. Otherwise it’s just the scattered and often inaccurate mentions in the standard biographical texts, and the handful of critical notices in book review sections after With Hemingway was published.
In truth, the one slim book Arnold Samuelson accomplished in his youth, the bulk of it done under Hemingway’s eye, wasn’t just good; it was fine. It didn’t need to be compared to anything Hemingway had ever written, or that anybody else had ever written. But its author couldn’t see that. As he wrote in that scrambled, undated note to himself: “On the other hand if I can fix it up so that it can be read, who knows, it might be literature.” But he could never fix it up, not to his satisfaction. No wonder, as the decades piled on, he turned increasingly to his silences and hostilities. His rage was directed primarily at himself, at his inability to complete a page of prose—and this, too, has its tragic Hemingway echoes. So many writing dreams ended up dying inside both men. In Papa Hemingway, A. E. Hotchner’s highly controversial book about Hemingway and his last days, Hotchner has Hemingway asking, “What do you think happens to a man going on sixty-two when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself?” On the next page, Hemingway says: “Because—look, it doesn’t matter that I don’t write for a day or a year or ten years as long as the knowledge that I can write is solid inside me. But a day without that knowledge, or not being sure of it, is eternity.” Earlier, Hotchner quotes a dead-voiced Hemingway saying: “I’ve got it all and I know what I want it to be but I can’t get it down.… I can’t.”
The summer after he finished college, before bumming through America, Arnold Samuelson hitched 560 miles from the Twin Cities back to the family farm in White Earth. His sister had been dead eight months. The homestead was abandoned—his bewildered parents, unable to face their grief alone, had packed up and gone to Minneapolis to be with their son the doctor and other family members. Weeds spiked the yard; rooms were furred with dust. The twenty-year-old pitched a tent and lived with his horse, Dude, and his dog, Pup, down in a “coulee” (a kind of steep ravine, by a streambed). The Maestro kept an extensive diary, and reading it now is to see so many of the themes in his life that would later develop in sadder and bolder relief: incipient mood swings, fights with a neighbor, the need to be left alone, even as he yearns for companionship, especially female companionship. At one point, he says: “Alone and incapacitated, I found in myself the sensations a wounded animal must feel when he lies alone in his den.” At another point: “The moon was full in a clear sky spangled with stars and graying northern lights alternating in the north.” At another: “I enjoy solitude in the woods and on the prairie as I can enjoy nothing else. It is supreme.” At another: “He makes many friends and keeps them, while I lose the few friendships that I contrive.” At another: “Parental tyranny I believe is the most despicable tendency, but it is tolerated more than cruelty to animals.” At the end of that summer, back in the city, ready to head out: “My attitude toward life is that it doesn’t seem worth while, when one considers the great proportion of tedium and dissatisfaction as compared with the few ecstatic moments which are too short lived to really compensate for the vast amount of boredom and displeasure we humans endure. One may fairly doubt the worthwhileness of life.”
In this fifty-thousand-word document, some of it empurpled and other of it poetic, the diarist never mentions the murder of his sister—but its subtext is on almost every page. I now know that it was a deeply fatalistic and prone-to-depression “serious” young man who came knocking at 907 Whitehead in the spring of 1934. They killed my sister, maybe they’ll end up killing me. Such fatalism only gives the instant lie to all those sunny-seeming pictures aboard Pilar. Such fatalism only links him up intimately with the deeply fatalistic and prone-to-depression man into whose good graces he’d improbably stepped, no matter how polar opposite their stories would always be in other ways. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hero Robert Jordan, who has volunteered his services to the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, who has gotten over all wish for personal ambition as well as hope for his own survival, wonders if he can live “as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years.” He is free from his fear and discovers that a full union with another human being is possible. Let come what will come. Here’s another expression of the underground river of Hemingway fatalism: not long after Arnold Samuelson knocked at his door—about three months later, by my calculations—in Cuba, with his boat, remembering Africa, remembering Spain, remembering a car wreck and a fractured arm out West, remembering a forward listening post on the Piave front in World War I when he was a teenager, the mentor wrote: “I did nothing that had not been done to me. I had been shot and I had been crippled and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing or another and I, truly, did not mind that any more.” That determinism comes at the start of chapter 8 in Green Hills of Africa, just ahead of the lengthiest and one of the most stream-of-conscious sentences Ernest Hemingway would ever commit to paper.
Echoes from the shadows. Not long ago, as I was writing this, I found buried in an archive a seven-page letter Samuelson wrote to Hemingway not quite a year after he had given up his job on Pilar. Basically, it’s a guilt-ridden confession about getting a girl pregnant aboard Hemingway’s boat. The impregnating happened after Samuelson and Hemingway had come back from their summer in Havana, perhaps three or four weeks before Samuelson had said good-bye to the Hemingway family and turned down Duval Street to ride the freights north toward home. It had happened late one night at the navy yard. The letter is undated but he wrote it in either late October or early November of 1935. He mailed it from Des Moines, Iowa.
“Dear Ernest,” he began, in his smooth penmanship. “Please read this. I’ve got a confession to make that may not be very important to you, but it means a hell of a lot to me.” He told how he had invited the girl onto the boat. He gave her name, said how young she was. It was clear from the start that she wanted to have sex, and that she had sought him out at the navy yard that night for that purpose. “It was a cold blooded sexual affair and when she was satisfied she left and I did not ask her to come back or tell her to stay away.” A little while later, she came back. “I let her on board. The rubber was irritating, a lousy brand sold downtown, and she asked me to throw it away.” She went home and then some weeks later came back to the boat to tell him she was pregnant. For a long time he couldn’t go to sleep, stumbled through his boat chores.
I felt damned sorry for the girl and gave her my name and told her that my mail would be forwarded from Key West if I went away, and I’d help her all I could with money if she needed any, or in any other way I could. She wasn’t after money or a husband, and she didn’t seem to be worried.… It was the first time I’d ever been involved in that sort of trouble, she was only seventeen and, not knowing a damned thing about what they can do to fellows who knock up young girls, I imagined the worst, I was afraid of having my folks find it out and what bothered me most was the fear there would be a scandal on your boat. The only thing I could give you was absolute loyalty and I hadn’t even given you that. I wanted to tell you about it but I didn’t have the courage. I knew I would have to quit and go up north, and the meantime I couldn’t tell anybody and every day I expected her old man to come down raising hell.… It damned near drove me crazy and I had been thinking about it till my mind was a blank.… I was conscious only of some inevitable force blowing up everything, and I felt like a miserable dog that had suddenly turned and bit the
hand of a master that he loved.… The way all that happened isn’t very clear to me even now, but I have told you the truth as I know it.… You were always frank with me, but I wasn’t big enough to be candid at the time. If this story makes a difference to you and if you ever let me see you again I hope I’ll be able to tell you everything you ought to know, and not try to conceal anything.
He said he’d not heard from the girl since he’d left town.
Yes, he needed to get on his own, to try to make it by himself as a writer. But in a far more crucial and immediate sense, Arnold Samuelson was fleeing Key West in February 1935, and in a cowardly fashion. And yet I am moved by the letter. It’s the honesty, his shame, the bad conscience, the wanting to repair, those not-faint notes of midwestern, boyish innocence, in spite of everything. Call them atavistic Hemingway notes. Lost Hemingway notes. Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.
Beauty. She shines on the back of his eyeball every time he stands up from his writing desk to stretch his aching muscles. It’s mid-July 1934, and he’s had his boat for two months. A few days from now Ernest Hemingway will take Pilar across to Cuba for the remainder of the summer and fall’s marlin season. He intends to be in place for the first quarter of the new moon, by which time the striped marlin will have commenced their yearly run, down from Bimini. No one knows why the big fish always appear off Bimini, on the western edge of the British-held Bahamas, a couple of months before they decide to run in Cuba. But they do. As Captain Harry put it in that recently published story, “One Trip Across” (payment for which has helped pay for Pilar): “They aren’t here until they come. But when they come there’s plenty of them. And they’ve always come. If they don’t come now they’re never coming. The moon is right. There’s a good stream and we’re going to get a good breeze.… The small ones thin out and stop before the big ones come.” Sweet Jesus, though, if this hasn’t been a queer year in the Stream for marlin. Haven’t the big boys taken their own time in getting down? Something like his work in progress, at least some days.
Every part of his fishing machine still has a kind of factory gleam. He’s been keeping her at the sleepy Key West Navy Yard. (Captain Jackson, the commanding officer, who’s been out on the boat as a guest a Sunday or two, is opening the facility to private boats, since nothing much is going on there anyway.) This means she’s at anchor not even ten minutes by foot from his front gate, ten minutes from the second-floor room behind the main house where pages of his new and experimental Africa book are filling up almost daily. The work, which hasn’t yet found its true title (he’ll have to go through the usual list making), is going across with him, of course. The title for now is “The Highlands of Africa.”
Like the sentences that made him famous, the beauty of his boat is of the spare, clean, serviceable kind. She’s been written, you could say, in the deceptively plain American idiom. She’s long, low-slung, sexy, a black hull, a green and canvas-cladding topside, and butternut-colored decks and side panels. Her heat-reflecting green—which is what you’d mainly see if you were looking at her from the air—is not quite turquoise, not quite jade, not quite emerald, but something blending all three. As for her mahogany brightwork—on the decks and cabin sides and transom—well, it’s almost as if you’re gazing at the insides of a lit jack-o’-lantern.
If you stood away from her, at about thirty paces, and gave her a level look, she’d strike you as something tubular. Tied up at the dock, nodding in the wash like a thoroughbred aching to go, she’s apt to put you in mind of one of those classic open-cockpit racing cars at Indy, whose drivers climb in wearing skintight aviator caps and outsize goggles. A large part of the sleekness is owed to the way her curved and raked stern has been cut so low—a whole foot lower, the better for bringing over, on a large wooden roller bar that projects slightly aft of the transom, the thousand-pounders of her master’s deep-sea imagination.
When she’s out on the water, starting to move at a good clip, slicing through whitecaps, with both engines hooked up—the big seventy-five-horse Chrysler, the little four-cylinder Lycoming—she’ll appear a little less submariney. Three years from now, when her flying bridge is constructed over top of the cockpit, she’ll become even more of an upright-looking craft. But even then, her lines will still be quite aesthetic. Like her owner’s prose, there will always be something linear about her.
If she’ll never be a speedboat on the high seas, the lady’s got some surprising wheels. As noted, she can do sixteen knots at top speed, and do it almost without breaking a sweat. It’s true you get a pretty strong vibration at that level. When he cuts off the little engine, the ride goes much smoother, mainly because the big Chrysler beneath the floorboards is rubber mounted. Typically, he has her at about ten knots. This saves on gas. In addition to her three-hundred-gallon-capacity fuel tanks, he can store another one hundred gallons in portable drums in her forward compartment, and carry an extra one hundred gallons of drinking water up there, too. He can troll her all day on ten gallons, using the little guy. The big guy will use up about fifteen gallons in a day’s trolling, but at low speeds Pilar runs quiet as a watch, or at least this is how the captain brags about her.
She’s got a twelve-foot beam and a three-and-a-half-foot draft. Her cockpit is both an open-air and enclosed sedan-like structure on the back third of the boat. Seven or eight people can fit into this space without feeling suffocated. It’s the vessel’s nerve center and the place where you’ll most often see him, port side, at the helm, unless he’s taking a nap or fighting a fish astern from his high-rigged and slat-back swivel fishing chair. Several of the cockpit windows are screened, and others have roll-down canvas curtains, providing a tent-like, house-like, feeling. (The curtains can also be swung out—awnings on his summer porch.) The middle window in the cockpit on the port side swings inward and can be latched to the wainscotted overhead (there aren’t any “roofs” at sea; rather overheads) with a hook-and-eye screw, in the same way a screen door latches to a doorjamb. So the ventilation throughout is generally superb, even on the fiercest Gulf Stream days, when “the sun gives you something to remember him by,” which is how the owner put it in his latest Esquire dispatch, out on stands that very week.
There’s a bell in the cockpit, and he loves to clang it loudly with a loop of cord.
Her name, his favorite Spanish feminine name, is painted in handsome lettering at the center of her stern, along with the name of her home port. Like this:
PILAR
KEY WEST
FLA
The name appears again, in smaller font, below the cockpit window, out of which her master, standing at the wheel, can often be seen leaning and waving to folks on shore as he’s easing off. (“Pilar” is lettered in the same place on the starboard side, too.)
One of Arnold Samuelson’s jobs every morning is to swab the dew off the green cladding on the top of the cockpit. In these two months of his employment, the Maestro, the Mice, has been learning to sleep in a sway, a different kind of hobo’s lullaby.
She’s got no ship-to-shore radio. Basically what she’s got is a lighted binnacle holding a compass, a wheel, various engine controls. The throttles for the two engines look like handlebars on a bicycle. There’s a dashboard with gauges and switches for monitoring such things as oil levels and engine temperatures, and for turning on the bilge pumps and running lights. (The port-side running light is red, the starboard green—any seaman knows this.) But, really, this whole cockpit lash-up seems almost as elementary as what you’d encounter on the dash of a Ford tractor. And yet everything’s here to navigate in and around and through the shoals of surprise, if you just keep your nautical wits.
Consider the helm: again, elegant simplicity. Many parts of Pilar will get replaced over the next three decades, but never her wheel. It’s made of wood, with six tapered knobs, built on three shafts, each shaft running to a hub. Set into the wood, flush with it, is a circular plate bearing the manufacturer’s name in raised brass lettering: “Wheeler Shi
pyard, Brooklyn, New York.”
Inside the cockpit, on either side, are two long cushioned bunks, for general lounging, as well as for seating at meals. At the factory, they’ve custom built the starboard-side bunk to be a foot wider than the one on the other side, the better to accommodate the bulk of Pilar’s master when he’s taking a siesta or using it as his nighttime bed. At mealtime, a table gets put in place and secured on two outer legs from its stowed position a few feet behind the wheel. Presto, a stable space for four diners, maybe more if they’re willing to get elbow to elbow. Presto, a cockpit becomes an open-air dining salon, with two banquettes, with the food and the wine brought up from the galley below. When Mrs. Hemingway’s aboard, a tablecloth gets spread, and real dishes and silverware will get put out—well, not always. Sometimes things go grungy.
Forward of the cockpit, on a lower deck level, is the main sleeping compartment. You step into it through a varnished half door. (The in-between space is referred to in the catalog literature as the “companionway.”) There are upper and lower berths down here, a tight toilet, a cubbyhole galley. Also down here, forward of the main sleeping compartment, is a smaller compartment, which gets used for storage as well as bunking. On a boat you never have enough storage room. Belowdecks is its own little universe.
On the topside, in the middle of Pilar’s long snout, is a hinged hatch cover, which serves as an air scoop for the main sleeping compartment. At the bow is another hinged hatch and a small sliding doorway, which provides access to the two interior compartments as well as to the bow and which also helps with air flow. Everything about her design feels artful, tidy, crafted, efficient, thought out.
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