Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Before Walter could fully get him in profile, the vision coming toward him had seemed almost to bound up onto the west terrace. Maybe an hour before, the sun had broken through, after what had seemed like weeks of gray skies. The finca was now cast in a dusky glow. That sounds too hokey, but Walter noted this in his journal entry for December 14, 1950, and Havana newspapers of the day confirm it.

  Hemingway extended that enormous hand. Across the bow and foam of six decades, Walter can still hear the first words. “Hello,” he said, “my name’s Hemingway.” He said it softly, with shyness. The handshake turned out to be like that, too—solid, for sure, but with a surprising gentleness. He was looking directly at Walter, but even in the directness, there was something almost vulnerable.

  “I think he was trying to put me at ease,” Walter told me. “I think he was trying to say he wasn’t assuming I had to know what he looked like, even if the whole world did know. I think he was trying to signal in some way that we were sort of equal here, man to man.” Indeed, it almost sounds as if Hemingway had made up his mind to like Walter almost before Walter had a chance to open his mouth—something akin to the moment sixteen years before when a gawky, earnest boneyard just off the rails from Minnesota presented himself at 907 Whitehead Street. Had Hemingway done some reconnaissance on Walter? Was he embracing Walter because he so liked Walter’s girl? But turn that thought around. Why wasn’t Hemingway taking instant, vicious, proprietary exception to Nita Jensen’s new beau? Walter: “This will sound egotistical, but he was an astute judge of character. That was his business, right? I was dumb enough, and not just that first time, to try not to be a phony.”

  From a journal entry: “Still handsome with a reddish complexion (erysipelas? probably booze), he speaks slowly, with an odd turn of phrase that commands attention. His sincerity and humanity are very real, and almost astonishing in view of the tone of some parts of his writing.”

  The conversation got on to cockfighting. Hemingway said he hadn’t figured out the morals of it, only that he liked it well enough, and was raising gamecocks himself. He said the moralizers should understand that the birds are never made to fight and are not interfered with once they’ve been put into the pit. “It’s just in their blood to do it,” he said. Might Walter like to go with him sometime? Sure. (Was it some kind of test?)

  Suddenly, Hemingway had turned, lightly taken Walter’s arm, and said, “C’mon, kid, I’ll show you the joint.”

  A voice lifting, still astonished: “We left the women behind us.”

  Actually, the kid had already seen the joint, not that he was about to let on. A month before—when he and Nita had been dating for only three or four weeks—Nita had brought him out to the finca unannounced. But the Hemingways had been down the stormy coast with their Italian houseguests. Nita had asked the servants if it was okay to show Walter through the house. He’d surveyed the paintings, the animal heads coming out of the walls, the shelves of books, the typewriter sitting on a small Indian rug on a high chest in a bedroom at the south end of the house, the stacks of opened mail twined into packets on the double bed in that same room, the bee swarm of phone numbers written in pencil on the wall on both sides of the hand-crank phone in the pantry. (Walter had sealed the number in his memory: Cotorro 17-3.) His eye, the trained naval eye, was fairly recording the place. Standing in the long living room, he’d counted seven doors and arch openings leading directly to the other rooms, without hallways in between. Architecturally, the entire house flowed from that sunny room.

  And now he was getting a personal finca tour from the finca’s owner, which included several minutes of standing before Miró’s The Farm.

  From a journal entry: “The Venetians … made a brief entrance and vanished. She [Adriana] gracefully saluted me with a handshake, but the glimpse was too fleeting to decide if she is beautiful or merely attractive.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to borrow some books?” Hemingway said as the couple was leaving. He was leaning in through the darkened car window. That huge head.

  “My boat,” he said. “We’ll be getting you out on Pilar.” As it turned out, this wasn’t going to happen for seven more months. But there were reasons, which you’ll hear about in a moment. Meantime I have a theory: Was there something in Hemingway right then, after all the recent beastliness, which longed to intersect with someone wholly new, whom he’d perceived, in the usual heartbeats of recognition, to be a decent person, and with whom he could make a fresh start at being his own good man again? Could such a need have been operating in half-conscious ways? And if so, wouldn’t this desire speak in a fundamental way to the man he truly was, down deep, which he seemed to wish always to betray, sabotage? In the novel the critics had just savaged, the dying colonel asks himself: “[W]hy am I always a bastard and why can I not suspend this trade of arms, and be a kind and good man as I would have wished to be. I try always to be just, but I am brusque and I am brutal.… I should be a better man with less wild boar blood in the small time which remains.… God help me not to be bad.” On the next page, the narrator writes: “He went out, walking as he had always walked, with a slightly exaggerated confidence, even when it was not needed, and, in his always renewed plan of being kind, decent and good.…”

  That’s fiction, of course.

  For decades, a wonderfully humane writer and editor named William Maxwell worked at The New Yorker. Not long before he died (in 2000), in a piece called “Nearing Ninety,” he wrote, “I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living.” That’s Walter Houk, too. It’s true that he got to go out on Hemingway’s boat only about half a dozen times in the two years he knew Hemingway. But somehow he seems to have sealed inside him every last square inch of not just Pilar, but of that entire, exotic, long-ago Hemingway-cum-Havana-cum-Nita dream. One shard of Cuban memory, whether nautical or emotional or geographical, will splinter off another, and this in a person claimed to be on the path to Alzheimer’s.

  He said once that the kitchen galley, belowdecks, directly opposite the head, had a metal sink and cupboards and dish racks and an icebox and a three-burner enameled alcohol stove. (It did.) He was talking once about her length. Pilar was listed in the old Wheeler catalogs as a thirty-eight-footer—not Pilar, of course, but the stock model on which Hemingway put down his money when he went to Cropsey Avenue. Hemingway himself tended to speak of her as a thirty-eight-footer, but he was also known, especially in later years, to round her off at forty. “True enough on the thirty-eight,” Walter said once, rifling for some papers in his basement. “Her waterline length was thirty-eight. But her overall length was thirty-nine. Thirty-nine and one inch, to be precise—so, hell, you might as well say forty. Her registered length was thirty-five feet. No, thirty-five feet, five inches, to be precise. That’s what the certificate of admeasurement says.” He explained that “admeasurement” was a nautical term for hull measurement. He located a piece of his own writing on the subject. It said: “[R]egistered length is an internal measurement calculated by measuring between ‘perpendiculars,’ as from the stem or forward perpendicular aft to the stern post or rudder post. It of course has to be shorter than a water-line or overall length.” Yes, sometimes Walter can sound more than a little like a pedant and one-upper.

  Studying Pilar photographs, he once said, “Do you know how Papa used to signal for Gregorio to take the wheel when he was on the topside and Gregorio was down below? He’d stamp three times with his feet through the floorboards. Big nautical secret.”

  Another time he was looking at a set of close-ups of the flying bridge. “What is this object?” he asked. He was pointing to something affixed to the horizontal rack just behind the wheel. The object was covered with a rubbery-looking or maybe canvas-like hood. It was tied at its neck with a cord. Extending down below the object was a handle with a knob on it. “We know he had a searchlight with a blinker device for Morse-code signaling—he’d used it at night on his wartime patrols off the north coast of the is
land. I should know what this thing is. I was on that bridge. Why is it covered? Well, that’s easy. You cover anything you can cover at sea to keep it from corroding in the salt air. Anything metal will start to corrode. Brass will start to turn green. You’re going to have me obsessing on this thing. We know Pilar had a compass. Course, it could also be a pelorus.” The following week there came in the mail a lengthy explanation of a pelorus, something about circular horizontal rings and 360-degree markings and the “intersection of two lines to two different landmarks whose position is known from a nautical chart.” But he’d decided the object was a searchlight, after all.

  Another time we were looking at a set of photographs that I’d brought with me from the JFK Presidential Library. He fixed on Pilar’s bow. “Mmmm,” he said. “He’s under way with the fenders out. That’s not good. It says that not everything’s shipshape.” I had just walked back down the hall from the bathroom, where there was a cube of unused soap in a meticulous soap dish, and beside it a row of three perfectly folded hand towels.

  Once, gazing at the photograph that begins this chapter, Walter began labeling parts of the boat with his No. 2 pencil. He drew a line with an arrow to himself and wrote, printing the words, “I am standing at the after end of the ‘sedan.’ ” (Why didn’t he just write “stern”?) He said, “This would have been August 26, 1951. A Sunday. I know because Nita was away, up in the States, on home leave, with her folks in Baltimore. On Monday, I wrote her a letter and told her to hurry back and described the outing the day before. That’s Mary and Felipe in Tin Kid. We didn’t catch any fish. Actually, our main goal was to get some good photographs for an article Mary was writing for a magazine.” He talked about Tin Kid, Mary’s sweet little twenty-foot launch, crafted from Cuban cedar, a gift from Papa. She was meant for local cruising, in and around Havana Harbor, although Tin Kid had been up as far as the lower Bahamas, in convoy with the big sister in whose wake she’s bouncing in this picture. Her open cockpit was five by seven. Walter said that Felipe was a joven from Cojimar. Hemingway didn’t like him much, but he was good at his job, which was to pilot Tin Kid. Walter said that in Cuba joven tended to be reserved for someone still a little green. Suddenly, as if standing up from a slice of emulsion, Walter said, “Wait here.” He came back with a copy of his two-page letter to Nita. (It was a carbon copy.) Typed at the top was “La Habana, August 27, 1951.” In the last paragraph, smitten, six months away from proposing matrimony, he had written: “I’ll be there with bells on Sunday, in lieu of a brass band.” It was signed, “Love, Walt.”

  It’s inarguable that right at the moment when Walter Houk was being led—literally—by the arm into Hemingway’s home and life, Hemingway had begun one of his most prolific writing streaks ever. It was the last great writing streak. As biographer Michael Reynolds has succinctly written: “Fifty-one years old, sicker than most knew, and eleven years without a successful novel, Ernest Hemingway seemed to have reached the end of his career.” Except he hadn’t. The Manhattan angleworms had written him off, said he was through, but what did they ever know? What they didn’t know in this case is that in the final three weeks of December 1950, and for five months into 1951, the written-off man could hardly be halted. It was almost as if he’d reverted to that seeming autodidact of twenty-five years before, back from the bulls, writing out of his head on The Sun. By Christmas Eve (two weeks after Hemingway and Walter had met, and not quite four months since Across the River), Hemingway “finished” what he was then calling “The Sea When Absent,” which was one part of his big Sea novel, which, in turn, was one leg of the never-to-be-completed trilogy about the Land, Sea, and Air. “The Sea When Absent” is what we today know as the middle “Cuba” section of Islands in the Stream. Scholars have determined that he probably began working on what became “Cuba” in the summer of 1948; that he had shelved the pages; that he had taken them up again in the summer of 1950 (in those flashing-outward, baiting weeks before Across the River); and that now, with many friends and family filling up the house for Christmas, and after twenty-one straight days of work, he’d brought the manuscript to its satisfactory end. It wasn’t satisfactory. “The Sea When Absent,” along with other parts, would go into a bank vault, or at least a microfilm copy, there to remain for the rest of a downward-sloping life. The author of the manuscript knew in his bones it wasn’t ready.

  In the first week of January 1951, after the noise from the holidays had subsided (Walter and Nita had been a minor part of the noise), Hemingway sat down in a relatively empty house on cool mornings and began his apparently simple, declarative story about a boy and a fish and an old man. He’d been saving himself, fearing himself, to write this story since about 1935. The title long in his mind was “The Sea in Being.” “It’s about an old man and a fish.… But it is about everything in the world that I know,” he said in a letter on January 17, after he’d been at it for about eleven days. He had six thousand words down, almost a quarter of the whole. Thirty-one days later, on February 17, he finished the first draft of what we know as The Old Man and the Sea. On February 6, in the middle of the torrent, he’d said in a letter that he had put down never less than a thousand words a day for sixteen days running—except twice.

  Sixteen days after finishing the Santiago story, on March 5, he began, apparently from scratch, what became the final section of Islands. It’s the part we know as “At Sea.” (His working title was “The Sea Chase.”) It was the story of Thomas Hudson’s pursuit of the crew of a sunken German sub, and of the painter’s own death in the process on the deck of his converted fishing cruiser as he listens to the “lovely throb” of her engines against his shoulder blades. On the starting day itself, he managed 1,578 words. Two and a half months later, on May 18, the story was done (not really). In the middle of the stretch, he had told Charlie Scribner that he was eating three rye crisps for breakfast, a couple of carrots, radishes, green onions. For lunch it was a peanut butter sandwich or nothing. “Will swim fifty laps in the pool so that I’ll sleep good and hit the book tomorrow. I’ll still go over 5000 for the week,” he said. He didn’t mail that letter for another day, which allowed him to do a count and put in a postscript: 5,267 words. This was in early April, and he was taking a day off. “My God it is fun not to be working for a day. I love to write. But it can be really tough too,” he said, like that boy in Paris writing to Miss Stein about a new fish story and, gee, isn’t writing such hard work, though?

  The commonly held view is that the writing frenzy had come about because of the presence of the green-eyed Italian girl who’d been living beneath his roof. (Actually, Adriana Ivancich and her mother slept in the little guesthouse down the drive from the main house.) As Carlos Baker put it, “He was neither the first nor the last of the romantics to elevate a pretty girl to the status of a muse while managing to remain in love with his wife.” In Papa, Gregory Hemingway, who was at the finca for the Christmas holidays in 1950, quotes his father as telling him: “God, I feel strong and I don’t think I even need to sleep, but Adriana is so lovely to dream of, and when I wake I’m stronger than the day before and the words pour out of me. They come so fast I can’t keep up with them and I don’t want to stop, but force myself to, after five hours, because I know I must be getting tired.… But the juices are flowing again, pal. No, not the seminal juices, you lecherous little bastard.” A few months later, in a letter to Adriana (it’s undated but he probably wrote it in late March), Hemingway alluded to the muse idea. By then Adriana and her mother were back in Italy. “Please give your mother my love and tell her how happy I was when we were a family here. We had the problems of a family and all the small worthless quarrels of a family which no family ever was without.… I was always happier while you and she were here than I have ever been.… Why aren’t you here now to come in with your shining loveliness when it is such a beautiful day?”

  The effect of Adriana cannot be discounted. But is it also possible to imagine him just flipping the bird at the world once m
ore?

  Walter: “He’d talk of his work a bit when we were there for dinner in those first months, and we were there a fair amount. It was kind of in code. I knew he was elated. I guess I thought this is how things are around here all the time—lots and lots of work getting done. I had no understanding of his psychic ups and downs, not then. But I’m convinced this is why it took so long for me to get out on the boat—he was too consumed and then exhausted afterward. He wanted it to happen, but couldn’t find the time.”

  Once, early on, at a lunch or a dinner, Hemingway said something about the “C” section of a three-part overarching work, or at least this is what Walter thought he said. “You mean, like A-B-C?” he asked. Hemingway laughed. No, like “sea, as in S-E-A.”

  On another visit, Walter said he’d been on subs in his academy days. Suddenly, Hemingway was leaning across the table and asking questions about layout, equipment, procedures during drills. He would have been at work then on “A Sea Chase.”

  Could Walter have been just the beneficiary of a soaring mood? Did the relationship flint-spark into being because his timing was so unwittingly good? While there must be some truth in that thought, it can’t possibly be all of it.

  Because in this same belle epoque of supposed new good feeling toward mankind, Hemingway was writing some of the vilest letters of his life. The same day that Hemingway had started “The Sea Chase” and had gotten down his 1,578 words, he typed a letter to Charlie Scribner. Recently, his publisher had mailed him the new Scribner’s war novel, From Here to Eternity, by James Jones, thinking he might like it and be enough outside himself to pass along a good word for a new kid on the literary block. Jones, a late discovery of Max Perkins’s, was another small-town Illinois boy, son of a medical man. How unthinking of Charlie Scribner.