His father, E. J. Houk, was a draftsman and master machinist out of Ohio with an incurably restless bone—which made him perfect for the rootlessness of California, but especially of Los Angeles, a place that seems always to have been invented yesterday. In the 1920s, Los Angeles was the fastest-growing city in the world. In Walter’s boyhood, his family—it was just himself and his parents and one brother sixteen months older to whom he would never really be close—moved something like nine times, in and around greater LA. At first, the family lived in rental apartments, and then in cheap little stucco bungalows without any shade, and finally in some substantial dwellings on modest lots. His folks would buy a fixer-upper, fix it up, apply for the next FHA home loan late at night at the kitchen table (it was his mother, Philippina “Bena” Houk, who was the brains of this operation), move to the new place in a slightly leafier neighborhood. The family’s path of migration was generally westward, toward the ocean; and northerly, out toward the San Fernando Valley, for this is the way the city was growing in the thirties and forties. “I grew up with no sense of roots or extended family,” Walter wrote once, in an unpublished memoir, which qualifies as an understatement. He said once, “I guess all that early dislocation is the reason I’ve never been a joiner—and pretty much of a loner.”
Those nine relocations during Walter’s growing up were in greater Los Angeles. But there were other uprootings—of a transcontinental kind. Before he was even five, Walter and his brother, Lawrence, had been transported by their parents from LA to Northern California (there was shipyard work for E.J. up there), back east to Akron (where their folks had started out their married life), and back once more across the country to the city of Walter’s birth (where the new Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant was promising steady work for the family’s breadwinner). That return to Southern California, on the eve of Walter’s fifth birthday, in the late spring and early summer of 1930, was made in a Dodge sedan, green with black trim and a flat black roof that needed coating every now and then to keep it from springing leaks. The car had a push-out windshield, to allow a breeze to get in, and you could adjust the angle and degree of tilt to suit conditions. The windshield got secured on either side of the window posts with two clothespin-like hinges. Once, when he was looking at some photographs of Pilar—Hemingway was standing at the wheel in the cockpit with no shirt on and his stomach popped out and his hair looking quite greasy—Walter pointed at one of the popped-out windshield panels, secured with clothespin-like hinges at what looked like a 45-degree angle. “See, Papa’s letting the breeze come in on his boat, just like we’d do with our old Dodge sedan, minus all the dirt and grime, when we were coming across America that time in 1930.”
He began talking excitedly about that trip. There was a terrible heat wave. The Dodge broke down in Garden City, Kansas. The two-day forced stopover had allowed the family to take in the big Decoration Day parade, where firemen pitched toy whistles and candy bars at the kiddies from the tops of their hook-and-ladder trucks. When I got back to my room that night, I consulted my Hemingway chronologies, and, sure enough, it turns out that the Hemingway family, in the early summer of 1930, about five weeks behind the Houk family, had made its own heat-choked transcontinental motor trip. Only instead of aiming south by southwest, from Ohio to California, the Hemingways (Ernest, Pauline, Bumby) had gone north by northwest, from Piggott, Arkansas, to the Yellowstone country of Montana and Wyoming. And, as opposed to traveling in a Dodge with a leaky roof that had been purchased on the installment plan, the Hemingway trip was made in a Ford roadster that had been presented as a gift by Uncle Gus Pfeiffer two years before. En route to the mountains (it was his first trip to that country, which he’d make his own in one way or another for the rest of his life), Hemingway had written several perspiring letters about the infernal temperature of the plains. The Houks would have come through Kansas City just before the end of May. Hemingway and his family were in KC over the Fourth of July weekend—where they took in the big parade. Hemingway gave an interview to a reporter for his old paper. Not much of an interview, not much of a story—five paragraphs on page 3, no byline. “The novelist, who was a member of the editorial staff of The Star prior to the war, in which he was wounded while in the service of the Italian army, will leave tomorrow for Wyoming to continue work on his next novel, which will have bullfighting as its background,” the story said. Death in the Afternoon wasn’t a fiction, but maybe he’d said so, or the reporter had scribbled it wrong.
Scribbling and tromboning through Walter’s history: In high school, he used to usher at the Hollywood Bowl, and so got to see—and hear—Rubinstein and Barbirolli and Rachmaninoff in the flesh. At Manual Arts High, he came under the spell of a literature teacher named Edna Joy Addison. Miss Addison led him to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and T. S. Eliot and the Brontë sisters—not to Ernest Hemingway. In the fall of 1940, when Walter was an eleventh grader, with For Whom the Bell Tolls outselling every novel in the country, Miss Addison took a look and pronounced the book trash. (Too much sex in a sleeping bag.) The following year, Miss Addison, a Victorian spinster, took her favorite pupil down to the Olvera Street Market in Los Angeles where you could buy authentic Navajo and Mexican crafts. It was a one-on-one outing, lunch included, with the gloved Miss Addison piloting her black Buick with the dignity with which she controlled a classroom. She told Walter she just wanted him to have the experience of other cultures. That day his eye fell on a tiny sterling silver box with an ornately worked and hinged lid. It was about one inch by one inch. He said he wouldn’t know to what use he’d ever put such a receptacle but that he loved the look of it. “Then you shall have it, you don’t need to use it for anything, it can just be,” Miss Addison said. It took Walter almost seven decades to find a practical use for this piece of saved art, whose silver is now tarnished but whose hinged lid still has a clean snap to it. Walter keeps the box in his left front pants pocket. Before he goes to bed, he puts into the box four large yellow pills, so that the next day he can swallow them, one at a time, with a glass of water, two before lunch, two before supper. They’re a hedge against what he has been told by his doctors is no longer a general old-age “forgetfulness,” but rather an advancing Alzheimer’s disease. The four gelatinous, horse-choking yellow pills fit perfectly inside the Navajo jewel. “I haven’t started putting the mail in the refrigerator or watering the plastic plants yet,” he said one evening at dinner, in a deflecting shrug.
On nearly the day he turned seventeen, Walter graduated from high school (he had skipped a grade in elementary school), and a week later he was enrolled at UCLA. The war was on; everything was at double time. After six months, he joined Navy ROTC and soon became captain of about a five-hundred-man brigade. The midshipmen lived in a converted dorm and wore brass-buttoned uniforms and marched every morning to class. Attending class year-round, and excelling, Walter completed three years of academic work in less than two. He majored in the sciences, with a minor in art, bonding (just as he had with Miss Addison) with an internationally known abstract painter of patrician cast named Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who told Walter that he might have a future as an artist. (He was wrong.) On summer sailings, clad in navy dungarees, the science-cum-art student learned steering, sextant-reading, knot-tying, deck-swabbing, watch-standing. The pull of the sea had always felt magnetic to him. As for the pull of Ernest Hemingway, not so magnetic. He read A Farewell to Arms and a few of the short stories, and thought them okay, but, clearly, Miss Addison’s shadow was lingering. “I can hardly believe it now,” Walter once said, “but I’d never heard of The Sun Also Rises when I was in college—and I was a pretty damn literate fellow. I’d read Ulysses and a whole lot else. How did I miss The Sun?”
The literate fellow, athletic, with his shock of dark hair, not quite nineteen, on the short side, but with a way of projecting both confidence and jauntiness, decided to take the national examinations for an appointment to the United States Naval Academy. He won one of the ten seats. Essentially
he’d be starting college all over again, which was fine by him, since he loved learning and wasn’t especially keen to go to war. He left Union Station for the East Coast on the City of Los Angeles on the day before D-day, June 5, 1944.
Annapolis now. An even larger gaining of cockiness. “The academy conditions you to think that way about yourself,” Walter told me once. For the first time in his life, he’s older than his peer group. He’s a two-pack-a-day man now—Chesterfields, “short and mean,” as he likes to say. He likes to roll his sleeves up well past his elbows. He’s thinking of taking up a cigarette holder to combat the tar in nicotine. His mates have nicknamed him Vladimir. Vladimir barely goes anywhere without his gunmetal-gray Zippo lighter, which he can flick into fire on the first try. Walter’s is the last of the academy’s sped-up, three-year wartime classes—he and his mates of 1948A (the A stands for “accelerated,” and they will finish in June 1947) have to cram it all in. Summers are given over to a short leave home and then six weeks of classes and six weeks of cruises. One summer, he’s out on the Savannah, a light cruiser with six-inch guns; the next summer, he’s a gun captain on the North Carolina, a big battleship from the recent war, whose artillery pieces had bombarded Iwo Jima to soften up the dug-in Japanese before the marines got there. Walter gets to see the Panama Canal Zone and Cap Haitien and Guantánamo Bay, where he marvels at the idea of cactus and desert on a Caribbean island.
In that final year at the academy, Christmas 1946, forgoing a holiday at home (it would have meant three days each way by rail), the loner decided to seek the tropics, or at least the subtropics. He rode the Seaboard Air Line Railroad to Miami, thumbed down to Key West on the Overseas Highway. (Even though the war was over, if you were in uniform, you were golden for a ride.) He wasn’t Arnold Samuelson on the rackety top of a sooty freight, but the freedom he felt—not to say the sight of an almost surfless green and blue sea on either side of him that looked so unlike his California ocean—was exhilarating. He got to the bottom of the Keys about three days before Christmas, took a room on the third floor of La Concha Hotel (Max Perkins used to stay there when he came to see his star author), made some pencil sketches of the view out his window (one, dated December 23, 1946, is hanging in the small room in Woodland Hills where Nita spent her last days), sat on the docks, slipped into a bar or two, made entries in his journal, talked to no one. He didn’t ride the elevator down to the lobby, walk out onto Duval Street, go to the corner, go one block, turn left onto Whitehead, and then proceed four blocks down the street to number 907—that might have taken all of five minutes. He wasn’t even aware Ernest Hemingway had once bestrode this town.
And the bestrider himself? He’d just gotten home from New York. Hemingway and Mary had trained down to Miami and then caught a Pan Am DC-3 over to Havana’s Rancho Boyeros Airport in the same time frame that Walter was training and hitching to Key West—so paths had been vaguely crisscrossing again. The Hemingways arrived in Cuba on the twenty-third (“Got in here today,” he began a typed letter to Buck Lanham), the head of the house having recently made a boor and inebriated bully of himself at the Stork Club—twice. (Both occasions involved Ingrid Bergman, who’d been dining at a nearby table with a male companion. She’d played Maria in the 1943 movie of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and so the cameo-skinned beauty, who was appearing in a play in New York, in his mind belonged to him in proprietary ways, and so naturally he was compelled both times to begin tossing loud, insulting comments at her escorts.) He’d told the New York Post Week-End Magazine some silly lies, but also that he’d “like to write a good novel and ten or fifteen more short stories and not go to any more wars. I’d like to raise my kids.” Perhaps he’d said the last part with momentary quiet in his voice.
In the spring of 1947, not long from graduation, Walter Houk, midshipman, did something on his nerve and impulse that would change his life: he requested permission to resign from the academy following graduation. He wished to renounce his commission and his anticipated assignment to a light cruiser named the Pasadena in the western Pacific in favor of directly entering the Foreign Service. He sat for the exams, passed in style, attended graduation with his mates (his academic ranking was number 75 out of a class of 500), sailed his white hat into the air, got a little time off, got commissioned to the Foreign Service, and went to Washington to study for six months at the Foreign Service Institute. The navy was behind him.
They sent him to Ecuador. He hated the fevered backwater. At the end of 1949, he was posted to Havana as third secretary. Instantly, things got better. He liked the coffee, the food, the women, the architecture, the music, the casinos, the nightclubs, the sunsets, the air of gangsterly intrigue. The embassy was right in the heart of the old city, bordering the Plaza de Armas. The embassy didn’t have its own building, but rather it leased space in a building that housed an American importer of farm equipment. Walter got a good office with a good view, and eventually he’d get an even better one—with a shuddering air-conditioning box. Some months into the next year, he bought himself a snazzy car. That fall he took an apartment that opened out onto a terrace that looked out over the rooftops to the Gulf—he enjoyed coming home after work, with or without dames, to pour a drink and to watch the big pearly Cuban moon roll up over his railing. He got assigned to the desk of the agricultural attaché. Eventually he took weeklong trips to inspect rice crops at places like Santiago de Cuba, at the far eastern end of the island. Cuba is the seventeenth-largest island in the world—the “long green lizard,” as a famous Cuban poet put it. It’s really a vast archipelago, and the curving coastline of its main island—something close to eight hundred miles on an east–west axis—is washed by the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. It’s only an island, yes, but it feels like a whole nation, which it is. It’s got the mountains, the seashore, big cities, villages stuck in colonial time. It’s the “little” nation that’s the “big” island that we have made this last half century into one of our larger Western Hemisphere myths, going back, at a minimum, to New Year’s 1959, when Batista fled and the Bearded One, as his worshipers liked to call Fidel, came down out of the Sierra Maestra to ride like Jesus into Jerusalem on the tops of tanks and on the hoods of jeeps. In Walter’s time, the not-yet myth of Cuba and the world was only a high-pitched, stringbeanish, rabble-rousing law student at the University of Havana, and then, following that, an agitating lawyer with his own scrabbling one-man practice in Havana.
The third secretary was in his post about ten months when he stopped by an embassy party one October night and was taken by a perky brunette standing in a group of male admirers. She was a typist and confidential secretary in army intelligence—those offices were housed in the embassy, on another floor. Her name was Nita Jensen, and she’d been born in Tacoma, Washington, but raised in the Canal Zone, where her father had held various quasi-governmental jobs. She’d gone to business school and had then begun working in government herself—a way to see the world. She’d worked in Guatemala and Madrid (where she’d fallen headlong for the bullfights and had read Death in the Afternoon as a kind of Baedeker) and Washington, DC. There seemed something charmingly naive and deceptively sophisticated about her. If she didn’t confide her age, she did confide that she was moonlighting, with the embassy’s okay, at the home of the great Ernest Hemingway. “I’ll take you out,” she said, the sentence sort of turning Walter on. It was clear to Walter how deeply enamored she was of the old guy.
Old guy in California talking. He’s got a liquid cough. Small, red, chapped, and blue-veined hands are riding the morning air. A lusty grin is easing up, making Walter Houk’s eyes, not quite the color of the sea, seem brighter, younger. “I was interested because she was interested. If she wanted to take me out to the finca, that was fine. I didn’t have that much invested in it. It’s true I’d bought a copy of Across the River that fall—he lived right there in Havana. Why not? I liked the book.”
December 14, 1950. The light was dimming. Out of the corner o
f his eye, the studly young government officer could see a wide, bulky vision in bagged-out khaki shorts and thatched sandals and with a deceptive lightness in his step coming toward him. The man was walking at a tilt, and on the balls of his feet, as if it were a half-conscious calf-strengthening exercise. He was carrying a clipboard. My God, what bulk was the first thought that entered Walter’s head. Hemingway looked old enough to be somebody’s grandfather. Walter saw a high center of mass culminating in a thick chest and shoulders that seemed twice as broad as his own.
Walter and Nita had been on the Hemingway premises for maybe forty-five minutes. Mary Hemingway had greeted them at the door. At first, the three had talked down by the pool and the tennis court. Mary, who hadn’t met Walter till now, had been cool toward him; polite, but formally aloof. And yet it wouldn’t be long, perhaps on the very next visit, that the finca’s mistress would draw Walter aside. “You know, young man, this almost never happens, my husband accepting another male in his home so readily. I don’t quite know why it’s happening here, but if I were you, I’d just go with it.”
After some time by the pool, Mary had led Walter and Nita up to the main house. “My husband will be by shortly—he’s been working late this afternoon,” she said. She was pointing out flowers, talking about gardening and house projects. Nita knew all that Mary was saying, but had been trying to pay attention. In this year and a half of her part-time employment, Nita had learned to work around Mary’s moods and envy and profanities. The two had established an uneasy peace, the more so now that Mary had stopped fearing Nita as any kind of romantic rival. They’d even been to town together on a few Saturday afternoons for shopping or the movies.
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