Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Gellhorn was wrong. While Operation Friendless (Hemingway had named the reconnaissance patrols for one of the cats at the finca) often got polluted in the usual Hemingway manner with far too much alcohol and ego, there were, at base, courageous motivations at work. Hemingway and his boat performed needed—and dangerous—picket duties, keeping watch on uncounted inlets, bays, uninhabited keys. This, the director of the FBI (never mind Gellhorn) could never buy or stomach. The abstemious and paranoid J. Edgar Hoover had little use for Hemingway, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, when he became convinced that Hemingway was either a Communist or a sympathizer—and no question a drunk and womanizer. In the early forties, Hoover had his agents in the American Embassy in Cuba monitoring Hemingway, and indeed Hoover himself, as evidenced from an FBI file on Hemingway that’s nearly as long as your arm, was writing his own paranoid memoranda about Hemingway from his desk in Washington. Hoover’s and the bureau’s paranoia about Hemingway—and Hemingway’s paranoia about Hoover and the bureau—would keep up for the rest of Hemingway’s life, right to the locked doors of Mayo Clinic.

  In the long history of Hemingway’s boorish behavior toward other human beings, the middle and late months of 1950 mark a special moment. The anger just flamed outward, a kind of spectacular shining of his rage, in the weeks and months leading up to the publication of Across the River, and in the weeks and several months immediately following—which was right when a young embassy officer was coming to know him and experiencing him as something wholly opposite.

  If, on the front end, this rage was tied chiefly to his anxieties over the quality of what he’d produced, after so long a publishing absence, then, on the back end, it was linked mostly to his rejection by the critics, which was a rejection unlike anything he’d yet suffered. But the rage was also connected in more general ways with mortality, dropping broader and broader hints, as well as connected to his idealized love for a green-eyed Italian girl whom he knew he’d never have, not sexually, for lots of reasons. He was more than twice Adriana Ivancich’s age, and he wasn’t even half a decade into his own fourth marriage, which, for all its shipwreck, would be the marriage he’d stay in, for better and worse, through much sickness and occasional patches of health, until that morning in Ketchum, when he’d leave behind, for his spouse to be the first to find, running from her bedroom at the sound of it, what you might regard as his last and most splattering expression of anger.

  Some glimpses of these electrified displays, fore and aft.

  On Friday May 5, four months and two days ahead of official publication of Across the River, Hemingway, having lit himself up with frozen double daiquiris at his favorite Havana bar-restaurant, the Floridita, collected a nineteen-year-old whore, whom he’d nicknamed Xenophobia, and brought her down to the boat to have lunch with his wife and her sixty-five-year-old visiting cousin, Bea Gluck, a reserved Chicagoan. Xenophobia was crisp and beautiful, but the trouble was she didn’t like going to bed with her clients—so he liked to say. The occasional client who owned Pilar claimed she wouldn’t have eaten that day if he hadn’t invited her to the boat. That morning, Mary Hemingway and her cousin had gone out for a short cruise in and around the harbor with Gregorio. They’d come back at noon and tied up at the Club Náutico and were waiting for Hemingway to arrive so that the three could sit down to a prearranged lunch on board. He showed up more than an hour late, with the tart on his arm, rocking and reeling down the boards, doing introductions all around. Mary’s cousin had never met a designated whore before and tried to see the humor in it. The next morning, Mary handed her husband a lengthy typed letter. He went back to his own bedroom to read it. “As soon as it is possible for me to move out … I shall move,” she said. Further down: “If there were any sign of remorse after such bouts of behavior on your part, I could believe we might try again and make things better.” In How It Was, quoting her letter, Mary records no apology from Hemingway. “Stick with me, kitten. I hope you will decide to stick with me,” she says he said. She goes on to say that he kept her so busy with beautifying projects at the finca that she sort of plumb forgot she intended to leave him.

  On the same day that his wife handed him the letter, he was banging out several of his own on his old portable Royal. One was to his publisher. He told Scribner he was in the doghouse again, in part because he was dead on his ass from work on the galleys for the new book. Okay, his Italian girl, too. “I miss who I miss so badly that I do not care about anything,” he said. “Loveing two women at same time is about a rough a sport as you can practice.” (In subsequent days, he’d reprise the bit with Xenophobia. To Scribner: “I wouldn’t do it again. But I would do something worse, I hope.”)

  It was certainly true he’d been exhausting himself on the galleys. They’d just come at the top of that week. He’d started in on them by first light on Monday, May 1, and by that Saturday he’d finished number seventy-seven, out of a total of eighty-eight. His plan was to make all the corrections, to write his inserts (three pages of inserts got written on Saturday and Sunday) and then to get the package back in the mail to New York early in the next week so that the typesetters at Scribner’s could send first-pass page proofs to Cuba by early summer.

  The galleys had been waiting, along with the stack of other mail, on Sunday night, when he and Mary had come in from a three-day weekend on Pilar. Since February, a paler version of the novel had been appearing in installments in Cosmopolitan, but this was the one for keeps. He’d even slept well that Sunday, although some of that must have been owed to how bushed he was from fighting a big marlin the day before. He described it to Charlie Scribner on Monday afternoon. “Am tired from yesterday. Fought two marlin, one big, and the second one whipped the shit out of me. He threw the hook when he jumped and it caught just under his fin and he could then (being foul hooked) keep his mouth shut and pull sideways like a nine foot sea anchor. He could also sound, run and do anything he wished. He never had it better except when he was a free fish.” As for his wife, quite beautiful and browning up with the sun, well, “truly I do not mean to be a shit about Venice and all.” He meant Adriana.

  He’d also spoken in his Monday letter about something else, which goes a long way in explaining his need to humiliate his browning wife at week’s end: Lillian Ross’s lengthy profile of him in The New Yorker. It, too, had been waiting, along with the galleys and the rest of the mail, when he and Mary had walked into the house on Sunday night. The piece wasn’t a surprise in that sense—the author had sent it to Hemingway ahead of time to check it for factual error. And yet to see the story in its published light in arguably the best literary magazine in America had to have been a different experience, its own small shock. Hemingway liked Ross a lot—she was another “daughter”—and he would keep up a correspondence and friendship with her for years. All the same he had to have known she’d made him out—he’d made himself out—to sound like a horse’s ass, not to say a drugstore Indian in a Hollywood B movie. (“Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers.”)

  The previous November, Ross, who was one of the magazine’s star reporters, still in her twenties, had followed Hemingway around Manhattan for two days. The Hemingways were en route to Europe and had stopped over at the Sherry-Netherland hotel with fourteen suitcases. The manuscript of his novel, now on its “jamming” back end, was in his battered and travel-stickered old briefcase—sort of spilling out of it, in fact. Ross goes shopping with Hemingway at Abercrombie & Fitch. She’s in his hotel suite when room service arrives with caviar and champagne, and then here comes the Kraut. That’s Marlene Dietrich. “The Kraut’s the best that ever came into the ring,” Hemingway tells the reporter, who is gimlet-eyeing it all. One of his tics is the way her subject raises his fist to his face, like a fighter, and rocks in silent laughter.

  So much has been written over the last
six decades about Ross’s profile, a precursor to what we think of as New Journalism. It ran on May 13, 1950, and is titled “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” which is what Hemingway keeps saying aloud in the story—but to whom, and why, it isn’t wholly clear. Horse’s ass—yes. Hemingway used that term in his letter to Charlie Scribner of May 1. Four days later, the horse’s ass, beat from the galleys, wishing to even the score for some public embarrassment he has just suffered in The New Yorker, parades a prostitute in front of his wife.

  Three days later (the finished galleys are either in the mail or about to be), Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin is the target. McCarthy is in his moment of fame as the great Red-baiter of America. Hemingway dictates the letter, and his young secretary, Nita Jensen, types it. “[Y]ou are a shit, Senator, and would knock you on your ass the best day you ever lived,” he says. Some of his sentences don’t quite track. “[I]f we can take off the part of the uniform you take when you go outside, and fornicate yourself.” He signs it twice. (This letter may never have been sent.)

  Two days later, he’s typing a letter to Charlie Scribner on a piece of plain white paper. There’s concern on his publisher’s part whether some of the “fictional” things he’s said in the new book about his third wife are actionable. Listen, Charlie, Miss Martha would be well advised not to try to pick a fight with me, he writes—I hit too hard. She’s a phony who tried to run in the social register, he says, who neglected to tell him before they got married that her insides were gone for childbearing, who lied about the fact of her Jewish blood. Let’s drop it there, Charlie, he says, before I get really serious. “I would fix her up for posterity, or whatever they call the place, like a trussed pig on a wheel-barrow in China.” He ends: “Better stop writing this.” He means before he really gets worked up. He signs it in a smeared hand, “Yours always Ernest,” and writes beside his signature, “Broken pencil lead.” Was he jamming down so hard that he snapped the pencil itself?

  Seven weeks later, no page proofs, goddamn it. He’s out on the boat. Through May and June he’s soothed himself with short vacations on Pilar. He and his wife and one of his Havana hangers-on, Roberto Herrera, intend to stay out again for a couple of days. Late in the day, they put in behind the reef at Rincón, east of Bacuranao. He’s climbing the ladder to the flying bridge to relieve Gregorio at the wheel. Just then Gregorio swings the boat broadside to enter the channel. The captain, with one leg over the guardrail, pitches backward and headfirst into the hooks and clamps securing the gaffs. “Yodo y vendas,” Gregorio is yelling. Iodine and bandages. Mary is trying to stanch the wound with rolls of toilet paper. Hemingway is going woozy. The deck slats are turning red and sticky. While Mary gobs, he’s thinking about Adriana. They get the boat turned around and headed home. They have him wrapped in a cashmere blanket on the long cushion on the starboard side in the cockpit. At the wharf, they load him into a taxi. Back at the finca, his doctor closes the wound while the rebounding patient drinks a gin and tonic in a leather desk chair. It wasn’t an S.I.W., he’ll tell friends in coming days, you know, a self-inflicted wound.

  Some of these details are in How It Was. What isn’t in Mary’s memoir is something Walter Houk’s wife told her husband not long before she died. One morning, possibly a week after Hemingway’s non-S.I.W., Hemingway’s young secretary went into his bedroom with a stack of dictated letters ready to be signed. “Oh, daughter,” he said, taking off his belt and sliding his khaki shorts to the knees. “Forgive me for exposing myself, but I wanted you to see what happened to me. Look here at my right thigh.” His thigh was a mass of red scabs. He told Nita how he’d pitched into the clamps, which had not only opened his head to the bone and severed an artery but had done a serious job on his leg, too. Nita put the letters down and backed out of the room. A little later, she encountered Mary in another part of the house. Mary had overheard the exchange in the bedroom. Nita: Terrible, isn’t it? Mary, venomously: “He was drunk.” A man in a reeling state trying to take over the wheel of his boat with his wife and others aboard might be thought of as acting out some rage, yes.

  July 9. A Saturday. Like a fool, he’s waited all morning for proofs to come. No chance they’ll be here now till Monday. Pilar is in temporary dry dock and he can’t even go fishing. Thirty-two years ago yesterday, they blew him up at Fossalta. In commemoration he went into town last night and rounded up Xenophobia and another fond whore, much older, whom he calls Leopoldina. He’s writing these things this morning to Scribner, who’s been hospitalized with heart problems. He’s typing on finca stationery. It’s a long letter, and he won’t finish till tomorrow. You gotta take care of your ticker, Charlie, he says, because we get only one of those in this life. Soon enough Charlie’s ticker problems are off the page. He’s on to Henry James, and by the way, “fuck all male old women anyway.” Just once he’d have liked to see him on a mean bucking bronc or trying to hit a ball out of the infield. “What did he do when he was a boy do you suppose. Just jerk himself off into Fame and now Fortune like T.S. Eliot.” His mind goes to the general subject of sports and his own kids. Jack’s a hell of an athlete and can play anything except baseball. Patrick’s a terrible athlete, at least of the kind that involves hand-eye coordination, but such a fine kid. Gigi, well, he can play any damn thing, ride any damn thing, shoot any damn thing. Course, the girls are after the Gig-man now. “But I wish there had never been a divorce and loss of control and discipline (not harsh as I rebelled against when I was a boy) but just sound control.” Much further down (it’s Sunday, and he’s finishing): “You know that on today July 10th 1950 I have still not received the original duplicate page proofs. I would shoot on that anywhere any time.” The salesmen won’t do their job, he says, the critics will have their own time with it, there won’t be any copies in the stores. “I would never go with any other publishing house; but Jesus Christ I would like to put yours in order.” Don’t let your lousy people fuck my book—this is the refrain. “Sometimes I get discouraged, Charlie. Today is one of the days.” He signs it “Ernest,” postscripting, “How do you like it now, Gentlemen?”

  Ten days later, July 19, the same laments and rage: “My dear Charlie: Your fucking page proofs (first series) turned up yesterday. That ought to be almost a record.” Eight paragraphs down: “The hell with it all.” Next paragraph: “There is nothing for me to do now. The horse is under the starter’s orders.” I am a bad boy, Charlie, and not proud of it. “You are older than me and I should be respectful.” Toward the end: “We are going fishing today.” He and Mary will leave in an hour. At least he’s got Pilar.

  On August 3, a hurricane passes through—the finca was on its eastern edge. Another storm is due in four days. He’s scared for the boat. “Send me any reviews you have,” he writes. “They won’t bother my nerves.”

  On August 9, he writes again to Scribner, the first part of it by hand. He can’t sleep, he says. He logs in the time at the top: “0415.” He’s still waiting to receive the first finished copy. “It’s all sorts of things wake you. This morning it was bad cramps in the left leg and bad nightmares. Detailed nightmare in which gigi had killed seven people and then himself. Waiting now for the morning papers to see it isn’t true.” Sorry about my bad handwriting, Charlie, he says—no clipboards are handy, they’re on the boat. “Maybe I can get some sleep now it is daylight.” He doesn’t finish the letter until afternoon. “Book didn’t come.” Shit on hope.

  But finished copies do come, within two days. Even in the fourth decade of writing books, there is the wild thrill to tear open the lid and pull the first one from the box. That afternoon he signs a copy for Marty Gellhorn and dictates a letter, which his secretary neatly types: “Quite a few people came into Venice from the country to see you when you were in that town. The summing up was; ‘She must have been quite beautiful then. So you can’t really blame Ernesto for having married her.’ They also read your articles and found them without style nor much talent; but conscientiously and honestly written
.” Nine days later he writes to his old army pal, Buck Lanham. “Am scheduled to be on the cover of Time.” Six days later, another letter to Buck: “Believe the reviews will be mixed. Cover stories are off.” It’s August 26, 1950, twelve days before publication. His fucked horse is in the gate. He has so little idea—or maybe he does.

  Here’s what the Saturday Review of Literature was putting on the presses. (Their review would come out on Saturday.) “It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and it throws a doubtful light on the future. It is so dreadful, in fact, that it begins to have its own morbid fascination and is almost impossible as they say, to put down.” Here’s what Commentary was getting set to run. (They were a monthly, so it would be a few weeks.) “The first thing to be said about this novel is that it is so egregiously bad as to render all comment on it positively embarrassing to anyone who esteems Hemingway as one of the more considerable prose-artists of our time.” Here’s what The New Yorker had in the can. (It was by Alfred Kazin, it was called “The Indignant Flesh,” and it, too, would come out that weekend.) “[I]t is hard to say what one feels most in reading this book—pity, embarrassment that so fine and honest a writer can make such a travesty of himself, or amazement that a man can render so marvelously the beauty of the natural world and yet be so vulgar.… [I]t is held together by blind anger … a rage that is deflected into one of the most confused and vituperatively revealing self-portrayals by an American I have ever seen.” Even so lowly and obscure a publication as The Yale Review (certainly lowly and obscure in Hemingway’s eye) would chirp in with the E word, although not immediately: “In spite of some good writing, it is an embarrassing book to read.” Embarrassing? When was the last time the chicken-shitters used that word to describe his stuff? You mean because he had written such sentences as “ ‘Oh you. Would you ever like to run for Queen of Heaven?’ ” (The dying soldier is tête-à-tête with Renata in the bar of the Gritti Palace.) Or: “They stood there and kissed each other true.”? Or: “The Martinis were icy cold and true Montgomerys, and, after touching the edges, they felt them glow happily all through their upper bodies”? Or: “ ‘I love you and I love you and I love you’ ”?