What he didn’t tell was how, before it had come lashing, Adriana had cut her finger on a fin of a fish, and of how he’d bent over her to suck out the blood, and of how Mary, sickened at the sight, had turned her face and gone to another part of the boat. All of them arrived back at the finca for a belated and relatively quiet Thanksgiving dinner. Not quite three weeks later, into the lee of these becalmed gales, knowing next to nothing of them, not then, came an alert and highly educated young Foreign Service officer with important duties at his nation’s embassy. His girlfriend, whom he’d been dating since October, brought him out about an hour before dark on that Thursday afternoon.
“I know what I know. I don’t think I had blinders on. I would have been reacting closely to everything. I know how warm he was. I know how we just seemed to hit it off from the first—what’s wrong with that? I never really saw the kind of behavior all these books love to describe, and if I had witnessed some of it for myself, then I might have carried across the years a wholly different feeling,” I’ve heard an old man in California say. Sometimes, though, and more often lately than formerly, I’ve heard sentiments like those being expressed less with a conviction and defiance than with a small, weary note of apology seeming to be tucked inside them—which has made me feel almost dirty, as if I’ve flown across the country once more to goad Walter Houk into saying things he not only doesn’t wish to say but is incapable of saying.
*Hemingway, who fancied himself an aficionado of baseball almost as much as he regarded himself as the American expert of the bull ring, often referred to the Yankee Clipper in these years as “the great DiMaggio,” and indeed the phrase appears just that way, with the “great” lowercased, several times in The Old Man and the Sea—which wasn’t quite written yet, not now, in the early fall of 1950, except maybe in the author’s mind. “I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing,” the old man tells the boy at his side. “They say his father was a fisherman.” As for the game itself, Hemingway was always peppering his correspondence with baseball metaphors, such as this one, to a New York critic who was in his pocket, and written two months before Across the River came out: “Naturally being a writer, the pitch is my own works: high and inside and see whether you can turn his fucking cap around. Ok he is spooked but he is mean. I give him the nothing ball, with the same motion, and he gets a little piece of it in his anger and desire to knock it out of the ball park, and he is OUT to short.”
†But to explain it a bit more, at least the way they worked on Hemingway’s boat: the lines controlled by the riggers were connected to the two rods held in the stern sockets. At a strike, the line that had just been hit would snap free from a clothespin breakaway catch at the tip of the outrigger. The rod in the stern socket—or, rather, the fisherman trying to jerk free from his reveries and grab hold of that rod and reel—would try to take up the slack in the belly of the line, hopefully before the fish could spit the hook.
‡He lived until January 13, 2002. He made almost 105. Four decades after Hemingway was gone, there he was, the old man of Cojimar, with his rheumy eyes and mottled skin that looked scaly as the hide of a defanged rattler, sitting daily in his rocker outside his small pastel house, smoking a cigar and allowing the Hemingway shrine-goers to snap his picture—for maybe ten bucks, collected by a nephew. Cojimar is the little seaside village about seven miles east of Havana where Hemingway used to moor Pilar when he wasn’t stabling her in town, at the Club Náutico, at the foot of the San Francisco wharf.
§So far as I know, this letter has never seen print until now, and it wouldn’t be seeing print now were it not for the diligence and generosity of a Key West writer and Hemingway researcher named Brewster Chamberlin, who uncovered it and provided me a copy.
Walter Houk’s gray-painted wood and stucco house in the foothills of the inland slope of the Santa Monica Mountains is shaded by eucalyptus trees and river birches and seventy-foot-high coast redwoods and, most immensely, a two-hundred-year-old live oak that comes right up through the deck. That California live oak in the back of Walter’s home always puts me in mind of the immense ceiba that used to shade the front of Ernest Hemingway’s home and which came right up through the front steps and part of the Finca’s foundation. A ceiba is a silk-floss tree, native of Brazil and Argentina, with greenish bark and with spring and summer blossoms that range in color from white to pale pink to deep pink. (Hemingway’s used to swoon into pink in mid-February.)
In 1985, Martha Gellhorn traveled back to Cuba for the first time in four decades. Afterward she wrote a lyric piece, laced with bitterness and regret. The story was published in Granta magazine in January 1987 and was titled “Cuba Revisited.” The opening: “The first morning in Havana, I stood by the sea-wall on the Malecon, feeling weepy with homesickness for this city. Like the exile returned; and ridiculous. I left Cuba forty-one years ago, never missed it and barely remembered it. A long amnesia, forgetting the light, the color of the sea and sky, the people, the charm of the place.”
She wrote of the village that was right below her old home, and of how she really had known nothing of it in the years she lived there, except that San Francisco de Paula had a post office and many ragged children, at whom she would wave when she rode into town in the car. “I did not say to myself: it isn’t my country, what can I do? I didn’t think about Cuba at all. Everything I cared about with passion was happening in Europe. I listened to the radio, bought American newspapers in Havana, waited anxiously for letters from abroad. I wrote books, and the minute I could break free, I went back to the real world, the world at war.”
She wrote about how she used to swim in the sea, wearing motorcycle goggles—“masks and snorkels had not been invented.” She must have been so fetching.
She managed in the piece to pull off the feat of not uttering the despised Ernest Hemingway’s name until the last pages. She collected Gregorio Fuentes from his little house in Cojimar and went out with him to the finca, which was now the Museo Hemingway, property of the state. Gregorio was almost eighty-eight. They rode up the long driveway flanked by its huge royal palms and hibiscus and jacaranda trees—she remembered nothing so grand when she’d lived there. They came around the curve. There was the “pleasant old one-story affair,” a limestone villa with its six airy rooms, only now the house was standing “glaring white and naked.” When she lived at the finca, she had it painted a dusty and pale pink, to pick up the colors of the ceiba’s blossoms. “It looks like a sanatorium,” she said to Gregorio. And then, her shock. Why, yes, no wonder it’s so naked-looking. “What did they do to the ceiba?” she asked. Gregorio told her the roots were pushing up the floor; the tree had to go. “They should have pulled down the house instead,” she replied, which must have meant more than it literally said.
From the piece:
Forty-six years ago [it was in the spring of 1939], I found this house through an advertisement and rented it, for one hundred dollars a month, indifferent to its sloppiness, because of the giant ceiba growing from the wide front steps. Any house with such a tree was perfect in my eyes. Besides, the terrace beyond the steps was covered by a trellis roof of brilliant bougainvillea. Flowering vines climbed up the wall behind the ceiba; orchids grew from its trunk.
I once asked Walter when we were standing beneath his live oak how far away the ocean was. “Oh, I suppose about ten miles, as the crow would fly, if you got up high and rode the ridges, and then came swooping down the other side,” he said.
For many years now, this old eagled widower has been walking the slopes and ridges of his side of the Santa Monica range. He can begin literally at his front door. Usually he does his workout in the 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. hour. He’s almost always awake by 4:00. Old men wake up early. He’ll lie there for a while in the darkness. Possibly some memory of Nita or something about one of his children will float into his mind. He’ll listen for the soft thump of the newspaper hitting the front step. He’ll get out of bed, put on the coffee, come back, make the bed, get dre
ssed, do his exercises, retrieve the paper, go out the front door. He loves taking his walks in the early winter, when the hills are turning green with the oats the Spanish planted two centuries ago. He’s got about half a dozen routes, and he likes to vary them so that he won’t get bored. Few people will be out at this hour—the dog walkers, some joggers padding by. Two or three of his routes take him up pretty high, nearly to the top of the ridges, just as a bird would go, to crooked little streets named San Blas and Iglesia. On the inland slope of the Santa Monica range, the ascent is much steeper than on the seaward side. On the seaward slope, long, gentle canyons support clear-running streams, at least one of which, Malibu Creek, is still alive with steelhead and rainbows. The predawn fragrance of so many California blossoms, summer and winter, cannot help but remind Walter of predawn fragrances on an island he said good-bye to in the early fall of 1952, bound for new adventures and a new diplomatic assignment in Tokyo.
“I just don’t wish to go back,” he has said often. “I’m too old to go back now, but even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t go.”
“You kind of prefer to hold it all inside you?”
“I guess.”
“It’s a philosophical notion?”
“I don’t know if it’s that lofty.”
When his workout is through (the distance is closer to a mile and a half, but he permits himself to round it off at an even two miles, because of the inclines he’s negotiated, and, by the way, one of his curvier routes takes him right past a young and still green ceiba), he comes back to the house for his mug of black coffee and a page-by-page read of the Los Angeles Times. He takes his meds. He checks his e-mail. He eats his breakfast. “This gets me to about eight o’clock,” Walter told me once. “The rest of the day is pretty flat.” There was quiet resignation in it. I tried to shift the subject. He shook his head. “What you’re not quite seeing is the memory failure. My ancient memory is still there. Thank God. It’s the recent things. What can be done? Nothing. You outlive it. Except you don’t. You just go on.”
Years ago, starting out on this book, I used to go into a small soundproof booth at the Library of Congress and listen to Ernest Hemingway’s voice on old wire recordings. The material on the preserved spools had long been transferred to audiotape, but the voice I heard was the one that had been captured magnetically by lengths of wire in a house in Cuba in the late forties and into the early fifties. In August 1949, as a way of trying to help him beat back his mountain of mail, Hemingway’s publisher had presented him with a new wire recorder. He was said to be very tentative with it at first, and I can picture him holding the mic like a man holding something that’s about to bite. Six decades later, I could go into a room and hear the disembodied self of Ernest Hemingway spookily speaking in my ear in a thin, precise, high-timbered pitch. Actually, according to Walter and others, his voice wasn’t thin or high-timbered at all—it was just the primitive technology of the day.
On October 20, 1949, deep inside the writing of Across the River, about to go out for a long weekend on Pilar with his wife, Hemingway was using his new talk machine to write to his youngest son. Gigi, whose troubles were hardly unknown in the family, was then almost eighteen and in his freshman year at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, but soon to drop out, much against his parents’ wishes, and head for an abortive stay on the West Coast and a half-century spiral of psychic pain. In a month, Hemingway and his wife would sail for Europe on the Île de France, stopping over in New York, where among other things he would permit comely and ambitious young Lillian Ross to follow him around with her notebook. As for the new book, whose title hadn’t really come to him yet, he told his son that he was at fifty-four thousand words and coming like a racehorse down the stretch. “We are ahead by about eleven lengths as of this morning,” he told his boy. He’d been “averaging close to 1,000 a day keeping the quality as it should be.” Damn, he wished Mr. Gig could read it right then. Next paragraph: “Please don’t ever let them sell you on that powerful personality line which is evidently the thing on which my sons are sold now. I would not believe it myself because do not run as a powerful personality but rather as an instructor, never a professor, and am only fond of my children and try to tell them the truth. If there is any such thing.” Next came a revealing sentence: “Understand all your problems within the limits of my intelligence and back your plea all the way.” Further down: “[I]f you want to come up to New York to talk anything over …” Toward the close: “It’s a beautiful morning, Schatz, with the mist laying in the hollows and over the hills as gray as Monet ever painted it.” Signing off: “So long, Mr. Gig, and try not to worry. It never got anybody anywhere. Much love from all your friends here, And from Papa.”
Four nights later, Sunday, late at night, Gigi’s papa was back from the sea and dictating on the machine to Charlie Scribner. He said it had been a wonderful trip, and not least because of how rough the weather had been. They’d all taken it fine, including Pilar. They’d caught enough fish to fill up the deep freeze for weeks. He felt ready to go back at it hard again. “Want to clear everything up so as to sleep good and pitch good tomorrow.” A few sentences down: “Mary is fine and says she had the finest trip on the ocean that she ever made. For once it was almost rough enough for her.… At one time we had to have five anchors out and heard the surf cannonading on the reef all night. I like it very much but very few women do and I have been extremely lucky to find one who does.” The way “cannonading” came off his tongue and rolled through the mesh speaker in the darkened booth at the LOC was its own sweet onomatopoeia. It would be another four years before I discovered that the woman who took that letter off the magnetic spool and put it down in shorthand with a fountain pen in a tan marbleized stenographer’s notebook and then transferred it by typewriter to a piece of onionskin airmail letterhead that was surely limp with Havana humidity was Walter Houk’s wife—who wasn’t his wife at that point, who, in fact, hadn’t even met Walt yet. But Nita Jensen would, and eventually they’d get to California, beneath a gallant old live oak.
THE GALLANTRY OF AN AGING MACHINE
Motoring from Havana Harbor, August 26, 1951. Twenty-six-year-old Walter Houk is at the stern with his foot up.
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Old Man and the Sea
HE WAS BORN to working-class folk in Mission Hospital, on June 14, 1925, in a little nondescript community on the eastern edge of Los Angeles called Walnut Park. That was the summer of The Sun Also Rises—its seeming miraculous, falling-out-whole, first draft, which in effect was the final draft. Another story of that summer, not nearly so well known, might be thought of as the first node of connection between someone destined to be very famous and someone who’d achieve a startling lot in his life, even if none of it was destined for the front page, which is only the story of all the rest of us.
Two days before Walter Houk was born, and half a world away, on the Left Bank of Paris, twenty-five-year-old Ernest Hemingway and thirty-three-year-old Hadley Hemingway, who lived so reputedly broke and happy with their baby boy above the high whine of a sawmill, had gotten into their gladdest glad rags and gone to a major art opening. It was the first one-man show at the Galerie Pierre for the Spanish Catalan surrealist painter Joan Miró. Hemingway got seized that evening to own a canvas called La Ferme (The Farm). For some months he’d glimpsed the painting as a work in progress in the artist’s studio. The next day, saying that he wished it as a birthday present for his wife, he put down a five-hundred-franc note as a down payment, with the balance due in the fall. A small complication was that the gallery owner had already promised the painting to Hemingway’s friend Evan Shipman, the sometime American poet and lover of the horses at Longchamp and Auteuil. The day after that, at Shipman’s urging, the two nonheeled writers decided to do the sporting thing and roll the dice. Biographers disagree on whether the painting’s full
price was thirty-five hundred or five thousand francs, but either figure would have represented something mountainous to Hemingway. (The lower figure would have been $175; the higher, $250.)* In another two weeks, he and his wife would leave for Spain and the festival at Pamplona, and within little more than a year he’d no longer be poor or unknown or living with Hadley—one of the self-admitted biggest mistakes of his life. But the connecting point here is that he’d thrown the dice and held his breath and won his Miró on the same day that Walter was born—and twenty-five years later, in an impromptu tour of his home, Hemingway would be showing off that painting to Walter, whom he’d met about twenty minutes before, and who, in his own way, would feel transfixed by The Farm, as he’d be struck by the other modernist oils hanging casually throughout the house: the Paul Klee, the Juan Gris, the Georges Braque, the André Massons. But most especially the Miró, hanging on the south wall of the dining room. “You see,” Walter said once, knowing nothing of the dice story, “I’d never met anyone before who owned paintings of this quality. And since I was a painter myself, doing it in my spare time, trying to put together a show at a small gallery in Havana, this was eye-opening. Looking at those paintings with him that first day, listening to him talk about them with such pride, especially the Miró, with its technical precision, may have been my first real clue that there was some other kind of man here.”
Hemingway's Boat Page 41