Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  I suppose that’s another way of saying he told beautiful lies about the place he put behind him when he was twenty-two.

  But there is another and more personal sense in which Edens were already lost and darkness visible—and not so barely. By Hemingway’s teens, his father was a man starting to go down, yielding to his nerves, his wife, his freezing and polarizing mind. It was evident by Hemingway’s teens that Ed Hemingway had mostly lost the battle of wills to Grace. The marriage had always been grievously mismatched, if nonetheless respectful and loving, at least in the beginning. In 1912, the doctor who ministered to Oak Park’s sick had to go away for his own “rest cure.” His son had worshiped him as a boy—and withdrew from him as a teenager, which is what many teenagers do. But mixed in with this withdrawal, it seems clear, were condescension and pity and a certain anxiety, even amid the love; anxiety that he, too, might turn out in such a way. The Nick Adams stories are full of conflicting filial emotions, none more so than “Fathers and Sons,” which is written from the vantage point of Nick’s own fatherhood. There is such love and gratitude in the story for what his father has bequeathed in terms of the natural world. “His father came back to him in the fall of the year, or in the early spring when there had been jacksnipe on the prairie, or when he saw shocks of corn, or when he saw a lake,” Hemingway says toward the back of the story. But the paragraph concludes coldly, “After he was fifteen he had shared nothing with him.” At the front of the story, Nick thinks: “Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous.… [H]e was both cruel and abused.” His father “had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died.” That is a sentence about Grace as much as about Grace’s husband.

  One manifestation of how badly Ed Hemingway was being taken down by his fraying nerves was his propensity to erupt into red rage and physical violence during Hemingway’s teenage years—and earlier, too. It wasn’t uncommon for the Hemingway children to be razor-strapped and then commanded to get down on their knees and ask God for forgiveness. Children in moralistic, faith-heavy midwestern households of the early and mid-twentieth century were known to be strapped by their parents. But the degree of this corporal punishment, which is what it was often called, by ministers in the Sunday pulpit and by sleeve-rolling fathers reaching for the belt, seems beyond the common and the civilized by any standard. In her family memoir, Hemingway’s sister Marcelline wrote about the beatings—it’s one of her moments of true candor. She calls her father a “strict disciplinarian.” She insists he “was never cruel.” But in the same paragraph she contradicts herself. The behavior she describes sounds like incipient—or even arrived—bipolarism.

  [M]y father had another side to him.… He kept a razor strap in his closet, which he used on us on some occasions.… My father’s dimpled cheeks and charming smile could change in an instant to the stern, taut mouth and piercing look which was his disciplinary self. Sometimes the change from being gay to being stern was so abrupt that we were not prepared for the shock that came, when one minute Daddy would have his arm around one of us or we would be sitting on his lap, laughing and talking, and a minute or so later—because of something we had said or done, or some neglected duty of ours he suddenly thought about—we would be ordered to our rooms and perhaps made to go without supper. Sometimes we were spanked hard, our bodies across his knee. Always after punishment we were told to kneel down and ask God to forgive us.

  In 2002, a now-deceased Oak Park Hemingway scholar named Morris Buske, in a piece titled “Hemingway Faces God,” published excerpts of manuscript passages that Marcelline had omitted from her book. She’d written about the beatings that became “more violent” if you refused to give the doctor “the satisfaction of saying, ‘I’ll be good’ or ‘I’m sorry.’ ” She spoke about her father becoming “so angry that he slapped at me with the strap.” She remembered him standing over her with the strap after he’d earlier discovered she’d been dancing at school. “My father awaited me in the living room, his back to the fireplace. His hands were clenched. His face red. Mother was there too, with a handkerchief in her hand. ‘I have told you I will not have dancing in my home. You are to promise me now that you will never do this wicked thing again.’ ” Marcelline tried to protest that she hadn’t even been dancing with a boy, just with another girl in her class who felt sorry for her because she didn’t know how to dance. “ ‘But you wanted to dance.… I will not have it. No matter what your mother says. You will now get down on your knees and ask God to forgive you.’ I knelt. I repeated the dictated words.… When I rose to my feet I saw my mother sobbing quietly in a corner of the room. She wouldn’t look at my father.”

  In “Fathers and Sons,” Hemingway writes of Nick coming home from a day’s fishing and getting whipped for lying. “Afterward he had sat inside the woodshed with the door open, his shotgun loaded and cocked, looking across at his father sitting on the screen porch reading the paper, and thought, ‘I can blow him to hell. I can kill him.’ Finally he felt his anger go out of him.”

  You read that and you know why Hemingway couldn’t whip his own children—all three Hemingway sons told me that. Once, when Jack Hemingway was about ten or eleven and was visiting his father and stepmother and half brothers in Key West, he did something horrible. Maybe he had filled the mosquito sprayer with tooth powder and sprayed one of his brothers. Maybe he’d spit at the maid because she had a land crab in her hat and was trying to terrify the bejesus out of them. He had to have a whipping—Pauline had said so. His father led him into the bathroom and sat him on the hopper and took down his own pants and proceeded to give himself whacks with a hairbrush. He motioned for the boy to fake some loud crying and pleading. “When we come out,” he whispered, “Mother will know you were punished.”

  Hemingway’s letter in Esquire in 1935, “Remembering Shooting-Flying: A Key West Letter,” is the one where he speaks of needing to move farther out and it making no difference what they do after you are gone. He remembers Oak Park and the gone prairie and the illegal pheasant he shot at the Evans game farm along the Des Plaines and of how “I came by there five years ago and where I shot that pheasant there was a hot dog place and filling station and the north prairie … was all a subdivision of mean houses, and in the town, the house where I was born was gone and they had cut down the oak trees and built an apartment house close out against the street. So I was glad I went away from there as soon as I did.”

  He doesn’t say so, but he is talking about the last time he ever saw Oak Park, at least that we know of. It was in December 1928, at his father’s funeral. It wasn’t true that they’d torn down the house where he was born. It’s a wholly forgivable Hemingway lie, built on deeper truths, about loss, about fathers and sons.

  Fathers and sons. In the fall of 1939, the father of Jack, Patrick, and Gregory Hemingway came out for the first time to the new mountain resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, and caught some feisty rainbows and cutthroats in the Lower Cottonwoods section of the Big Wood River. The next fall he came out again, arranging for his boys to join him and his bride-to-be, Marty Gellhorn. He drove across the country with his friend Toby Bruce but shipped all his fly-fishing gear ahead of him on Railway Express in an old metal footlocker. Almost every piece of trout tackle he owned was in that trunk. Some of it went back to Michigan. Peering inside the footlocker when you were a kid was like looking into King Tut’s tomb. There were Hardy reels and silk leaders and any size hook and just boxes and boxes of flies—Royal Coachmen, McGintys, pale evening duns, yellow woodcocks, gold-ribbed hare’s ears. One of his rod cases had his name written on it in tiny black script: “Ernest Hemingway. Hardy Brothers Ltd., Alnwick, England.” The custom-made rod itself was a thing of wonder: a three-piece traveling rod, with a soft cork handle and green silk wrappings on its thin-wire British guides. It weighed three ounces. You lifted it out of its chamois-soft cloth rod sack, and jointed it up, and held
it in front of you, and felt it quivering to your heartbeat. It was an indescribable thrill when your papa had picked you, over your brothers, to be the first one to get to open the King Tut trunk when that year’s family vacation had finally commenced.

  When Hemingway got out to Idaho that year, fall of 1940, the people at the depot told him the footlocker had been lost. Railway Express couldn’t find it.

  Jack Hemingway recounted this story. He was sixty-three, and his coarse mustache was straw yellow, like the bristles of an old shaving brush. He talked of many things, not all of them sad. But at the memory of the lost footlocker, his voice caught. “I think it just broke his spirit for trout,” he said. “He was stricken. He never really fished streams much after that.”

  This was in the late eighties. Our paths didn’t cross again. But some years later I heard the following story about Jack himself: Not long before he died, at seventy-seven, of a sudden complication from open-heart surgery, the former Mr. Bumby and his second wife were visiting Hemingway places in northern Michigan. They drove into Horton Bay and parked their rental car. Jack went into the general store, shyly introduced himself, bought some postcards with his father’s photograph on them, and then walked the half mile or so down the road to the creek. He’d never seen it before. He walked into the meadow on the north side of the road, where the stream passes underneath the road, through a corrugated culvert. There’s a small nature preserve on that side of the stream. It’s a little swampy in there, squishy on your street shoes. The water is fairly deep and is cut with mossy banks and moves with a kind of deceptive listlessness. Jack creaked down onto all fours. A grasshopper appeared in front of him. He reached over and imprisoned it gently between his first two knuckles. He stood up, walked back out of the meadow, came up into the light, crossed to the other side of the road, then edged down the steep bank to the south side of the creek, where the water, very much alive again, comes sluicing out of the culvert on its way into Lake Charlevoix. Jack got down on all fours again and leaned out over a rock worn smooth by all the water that had been rushing over it for who knows how long. The hopper was in his knuckles. He waited. He set it on the riffled surface. In an instant, a trout came up and took it.

  This was in early September 2000. Three months later Jack was dead.

  *And of course this doesn’t even speak to all the prep and travel time at the front end. For instance, there would have been days in Oak Park devoted to the packing of trunks, certainly among the females in the family. And it’s known that Ed Hemingway used to spend hours by late-night lamplight making lists of things to purchase by mail order from the Montgomery Ward catalog. Ward’s, or Monkey Ward’s, as practically everybody in Chicago called it, even sold staple groceries. The paid-for larders of flour, sugar, bacon, cocoa, coffee, hardtack, and candy would arrive by rail at Petoskey. A son, who’d grow to be brilliant at his own planning and list-making in advance of extended journeys, had to have been watching. On the great day of travel, teamsters would have appeared at Kenilworth Avenue to deliver the steamer trunks the eight miles to the river. I don’t know it for sure, but I think of the family—with each member lugging his or her own suitcase and knapsack, his or her own canoe paddle or fly rod or badminton racquet—taking the “L” into Chicago. The L was the city’s elevated rapid transit. Oh, maybe they went by horse-drawn taxi. But all of it must have felt so epic. And the doctor’s authority in all the small matters of leaving must have been enormous, just as his son’s eventual authority in all the small matters of getting ready to command Pilar somewhere—over to Havana, up to Bimini, out to the Tortugas—would be enormous.

  †The earlier book, published in 1952, is Ernest Hemingway. Along with Carlos Baker at Princeton and Charles Fenton of Yale, Young was one of the earliest academic critics to write penetratingly—and in this case psychoanalytically—about Hemingway. He’s considered a founding father in modern Hemingway studies. Hemingway had great distaste for what Young was purported to be doing, and at first had tried to stop his book, but in the end gave him permission to quote in full from his works. “[D]o you know it can be as damageing to a man while he is in the middle of his work to tell him that he is suffering from a neurosis as to tell him he has cancer?” Hemingway wrote in early 1952. Two months later he wrote to Young again: “I am very sorry, kid, if you are up the creek financially. I can let you have $200. if you need it.…” Young’s study was much about what came popularly to be known as “the wound theory,” which is to say the traumatizing effects of Hemingway’s experiences in World War I. The wound theory “explained” Hemingway. Later in his life, Young would say, with a certain rueful humility, “All theses distort the work in some degree.”

  PART FOUR

  OLD MEN

  AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA:

  ERNEST/GIGI/WALTER HOUK,

  1949–1952 AND AFTER

  … all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

  —ISAK DINESEN, author of Out of Africa, in a 1957 interview

  We stand at the prow again of a small ship

  anchored late at night in the tiny port

  looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

  is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

  To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

  comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

  all the years of sorrow that are to come.

  —JACK GILBERT, “A Brief for the Defense”

  On October 2, 1951, at 6:10 p.m., a man in Cuba unable to sleep or work wrote a four-paragraph letter to his publisher in New York. His handwriting was shaky. Thirty-six hours earlier, at three o’clock in the morning, West Coast time, his ex-wife had died of shock on an operating table in Los Angeles. A few hours before she died, this man had had a screaming argument with her on the telephone. The argument was over the conduct of their son, a troubled, gifted boy. The newest trouble was that Gigi Hemingway—then nineteen, newly married, due to become a father in two more months, living on the West Coast and working in an airplane factory (he’d dropped out of college)—had just been arrested for entering the women’s restroom of a movie theater in drag. It was the first such arrest, though hardly the first such expression of a compulsion that Pauline and Ernest Hemingway’s son seemed unable to control. The news about the dressing up in women’s clothes was a shock only in the sense that a public space had been involved, and that the police had come.

  No one can say for sure what terrible words passed between Gigi’s parents on the telephone that Sunday night. (It was a little after 9:00 p.m., so just past midnight in Havana.) The gist of it from the Havana side of the staticky connection seems to have been: It’s all your fault, you bitch, see how you’ve brought him up, you’re corrupt and he’s corrupt. According to Pauline’s sister, Jinny, who is said to have been in the room in LA that evening with Pauline, but who can hardly be thought of as an impartial witness, Pauline was soon “shouting into the phone and sobbing uncontrollably”—those are words from Gregory Hemingway’s memoir, Papa. Pauline was trying to defend herself against someone so very wicked with words. The conversation broke off. Pauline went to bed.

  Sometime after midnight she awoke with severe abdominal pain. The pain got worse. They got her to St. Vincent’s Hospital. Doctors worked furiously, bewilderingly. Her blood pressure crashed from 300 to zero. Three hours later Pauline was dead, at age fifty-six. “Hemorrhage into adrenal,” the attending surgeon would pen into box 19 of the single-page certificate of death. Pauline’s ex-husband found out by cable from his former sister-in-law at about noon that day, his time. All the rest of that day and into the next he is said to have stalked around Finca Vigía, evincing an exterior toughness. His present wife, his fourth, told him he was behaving appallingly. So of course they fought and of course the wicked words flew, almost impossible to defend against when the one attacking was Ernest Hemingway. According to Mary Hemingway, her husband followed her into
her bathroom and spit in her face.

  So now it was Tuesday evening, October 2, thirty-six hours after the death, and the sleepless, unable-to-work Hemingway, still in recoil, was writing to Charles Scribner, with whom he’d become very close, the more so in the four years since Max Perkins’s death. In fact, this was the second letter he wrote to Scribner that day, which only suggests the level of his anxiety, the level of his denials.

  Bad storms had been through—the letter writer had spent a lot of that day watching the barometer. His phone had gone out.

  He not only put down the date, which he often forgot to do on his letters, he also set down the exact time. His mind had to have been very concentrated.

  “Dear Charlie,” he said. “The glass is lower; now 29.30 but the sky looks as though the storm were going away. It is a very strange storm. But this has been the strangest year for weather that I have ever known. I certainly would like to see the glass start to rise.”

  Three paragraphs down: “The wave of remembering has finally risen so that it has broken over the jetty that I built to protect the open roadstead of my heart and I have the full sorrow of Pauline’s death with all the harbour scum of what caused it. I loved her very much for many years and the hell with her faults.”

  No, it wasn’t him, of course not, it was his harbor scum of a son. It almost sounds obscene to say it, but the sea metaphor is so perfectly Hemingway when all the emotions are sounding at their deepest levels: the wave of remembering, the roadstead of his heart, the jetties getting breached.

  There’s a lot more to tell here, not just about Hemingway, always, of course, about Hemingway, but about Gigi, and about the price Gigi paid until the day he died, which came fifty years to the day of his mother’s death, early on the morning of October 1, 2001, in a third-floor cell of a women’s detention center on the edge of downtown Miami, about a mile from beautiful Biscayne Bay. The inmate, who’d been in jail for five days on charges of showing his sexual organs in public and resisting an officer without violence, was trying to get a bulky leg into a pair of too-tight underpants, which were women’s panties, when he just fell over dead. He was six weeks from his seventieth birthday. This was the two-sentence lead that went out on the AP wire once the death was made public: “Gregory Hemingway, the youngest son of macho novelist Ernest Hemingway, died a transsexual by the name of Gloria in a cell at a women’s jail, authorities said. He was sixty-nine.” Weren’t all the savage ironies instantly clear?