Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  A letter of September 19 to Scribner: “There have been no dolphin, albacore, small tuna or bonito. There are only the very big marlin now which, with the heat, are down deep and should be drifted for with boats about 80 and 100 fathoms down. I did this Sunday but caught nothing. Picked up about a 30 lb. wahoo trolling home when it was almost dark.” Writing again to Charlie the next day, a watery reprieve: “Caught one 200 lb marlin just before it got dark. He was foul hooked near the vent and jumped very wildly (as who wouldn’t). The leader finally caught around his tail and with a straight pull he ran off about 300 yards of line. I killed him in less than 15 minutes but when I had him on top of the water comeing into the boat with a big sea running a shark hit him.” Toward the end of this typed letter of September 20, 1951: “The paper said this morning that the last three days were the hottest in the history of Cuba.”

  No fish to speak of. Unrelenting heat. Death at every turn. It was almost as if he understood by these omens what was coming, ten days hence, middle of a Los Angeles night, and of his own role in it, which he’d deny for the rest of his life.

  *For the balance, Hemingway and Dos Passos and Shipman (who must have been a hell of a sport), went around Montparnasse that fall, scrounging the dough with IOUs to friends and barkeeps. They brought the big canvas home in a taxi, and when it began to billow in the wind like a sail, Hemingway made the driver slow to a crawl. In 1926, when he and Hadley separated, Hemingway moved the painting to her new apartment. In 1931 he asked to borrow it back for five years. He never returned it. Today The Farm hangs in the National Gallery of Art, its value in the millions.

  †For two months, Hemingway couldn’t get rat-faced James Jones out of his spleen. On April 11, to Scribner (it’s the letter in which he’s telling of his breakfast of rye crisps and of how enjoyable it is to take a day off), he says, “All I hope is that you can make all the money in the world out of him before he takes that over-dose of sleeping pills or whatever other exit he elects or is forced into. In the meantime I wish him no luck at all and hope he goes out and hangs himself as soon as plausible.” Next paragraph: “All this written by a boy who resolved to be a good Christian all day today anyway before biteing on the nail tomorrow.” Nine days earlier, Walter and Nita have been out to the finca for a swim. “Black Dog lay nobly and serenely at his master’s feet,” Walter records in his diary. “The afternoon was calm. We left with an armful of books.” Six weeks later, May 18, 1951: Hemingway is boiling again. Just yesterday, he’s completed A Sea Chase and so has laid in a couple of big steaks to celebrate. He’s typing letters this afternoon with his usual jumpy spaces. On his desk is a letter from Scribner accusing him of “malice.” Look, Charlie, he writes, very sorry I got you so angry. I get exhausted after a day’s work. No malice against the Jones boy. When’s it okay not to bet on another horse? Three paragraphs down: “Malice is a rough word to use in a letter.” It’s as if that word has lit the fuse: “Max was Max with five daughters and an idiot wife. Tom Wolfe was a one book boy and a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice. Scott was a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money.” He postscripts twice in pencil: “Please don’t be offended by any of this and remember I am writing from fondness. Glass OK. with usual pm decline. Hurricane seems to be petering out.”

  ‡Re the stress: Patrick Hemingway, eighteen, had suffered an undiagnosed concussion in a car crash in Key West (Gigi was driving), and shortly after, on a visit to Cuba, he complained of headaches and went into deliriums and turned violent. He was given shock treatments. For a month, his father slept on a mat in the hall outside his room. Others, including Pauline, over from Key West, helped with the nursing, too, but Hemingway, assuming charge, took most of the midnight-to-dawn shifts. For something like forty-six days, Patrick had to be fed rectally. Hemingway said he averaged two hours sleep in twenty-four. His blood pressure spiked. To escape, he drank—and red-coppered his hair.

  §In one of their steamer trunks was a book called The Joy of Cooking, a wedding present from the Hemingways the previous April. The inscription: “For Nita and Walter, hoping the new joy of cooking won’t over-shadow the old. Love from Papa.”

  That Idaho night, the trouting took place in a moonrise, on the Henrys Fork of the Snake, with the Centennial Mountains rising on one side and the Tetons on the far other and with lodgepole pines standing up on the near bank like spooky sixty-foot stalks of corn. Suddenly, after a 9:00 p.m. dinner, Ernest Hemingway’s middle son said, “So why don’t we go out?”

  I remember how we walked single file, in our waders and fishing vests, down a silvered path, and how Patrick entered the stream so noiselessly. The water was very cold and up to our waists. Everything was so quiet, so absent of urban sounds. Patrick fished with a black graphite rod and a beautiful antique reel and a peach-colored line to which he had knotted a size 16 elk hair caddis dry fly. A No. 16 is tiny enough that three of them would sit handily on your thumbnail.

  In the gathering dark of that mid-June 1987 evening, the water seemed to lie around us like glass. We stood about fifteen yards apart. Fat, pulpy rainbows began rising to our casts. You couldn’t quite see them but you could hear them sipping and slurping and breaking the water. Patrick worked his rod like a wand, sending his line in great noiseless loops far out onto the stream. We fished for about an hour and barely spoke. But at one point, after he’d reeled in a particularly beautiful rainbow and held it at the surface of the water in one hand and had expertly removed the hook with his other hand and had then studied his prize for an instant more before delivering it back to the inkiness from which it had come, Patrick called over in the softest voice, “I love fishing after dusk. It’s called fishing off the mirror.”

  Earlier that day, this same Hemingway son, about to turn fifty-nine, who had on fire-engine-red L.L. Bean suspenders and an Orvis fishing shirt and a big outdoorsy watch that kept slipping around on his wrist, had leaned across a booth in a crowded noontime café and said in a very warm voice able to be heard by everyone in the room:

  “Killing. Now that’s something I know quite a lot about, actually. Killing. Big-game hunting is very good training for war. I’ve never had any experiences in war. But I feel if I lived in a country that didn’t have hunting, I’d be drawn irresistibly to be involved in a war. War is about organization and terrain and supply. So is hunting. I’ve shot many wild animals, and you wouldn’t believe how many people have said to me in my life, ‘But, Pat, you don’t seem like the killing type.’ Oh, no? Let me tell you a little story. I’ve seen packs of wild dogs in Africa literally killing an animal by biting it to death on the run. The animal is trying to escape and the dogs are taking out whole chunks of him, as they go. This seems truly horrible, being eaten alive while you’re trying to get away. And yet these same canine fellows can be quite wonderful to each other in a different context. They can nurse each other, they can make their camp while one of their number is recuperating. Now, would you ever think that your little Fido eating his Alpo there on your kitchen floor—would you ever think he’s capable of doing something like this? But he’s descended from these boys, isn’t he?”

  The dirty, scary, toothsome Hemingway grin had come all the way up. “Well, I am descended directly from Ernest Hemingway.”

  The good and the affectionate and the just Patrick Hemingway, which is how his father fictionally described him in Islands in the Stream, said many startling and seemingly performance-based things before we’d gotten tired of talk and gone fishing.

  A day and a half later, in Ketchum, I was with the eldest son, Jack. That encounter, too, had its soft and anything-but-soft moments. And then, on the fifth day of the trip, when I was still in Idaho, the phone in my room rang and there he was on the other end: Gigi. For more than two weeks, I’d been trying to reach him. I’d left many messages at numbers in Montana, Florida, New York City. They weren’t his phone numbers, but the numbers of people who were said to know him and to be in sporadic touch.

  He
sounded very up. He said he was in Coconut Grove. He’d gotten my messages and was very sorry he hadn’t been able to find the time to call back. “Lots of things going on,” he said. I asked if I could come. “Of course you can come, I’d enjoy talking about it, you know, life with Papa and all that, by the way, how are Jack and Pat, you’ve already seen them, you say, I’ll bet the weather’s great up there in Idaho, isn’t it, you’ll find it’s hot as Christ down here, are you sure you really want to come?” He had seemed to say this in about two breaths.

  Within twenty minutes I had checked out of my hotel room and was driving very fast the four-plus hours it takes to get to Salt Lake City. I couldn’t get on a flight to Florida until late the next morning. We didn’t meet until after eight o’clock that evening. By then his mood had crashed. Everything seemed seeping toward gloom and depression. But even in the gloom and depression, I’d encounter flashes of the old famous Gigi charm. The one in the family who fell like Lucifer possessed an extremely likable and caring side, which, from everything I know, he managed to hold on to, right up to the end, in pod 377 of cell 3C2 of the Miami-Dade County Women’s Detention Center, which came fourteen years after that night.

  BRAVER THAN WE KNEW

  Gigi, sitting watch on bow of Pilar, Cayo Confites, Cuba, June 1943

  I sometimes fantasy about what it would mean if a child … never had to disown his feelings in order to be loved. Suppose his parents were free to have and express their own unique feelings, which often would be different from his, and often different between themselves. I like to think of all the meanings that such an experience would have. It would mean that the child would grow up respecting himself as a unique person. It would mean that even when his behavior had to be thwarted, he could retain open “ownership” of his feelings. It would mean that his behavior would be a realistic balance, taking into account his own feelings and the known and open feelings of others. He would, I believe, be a responsible and self-directing individual, who would never need to conceal his feelings from himself, who would never need to live behind a façade. He would be relatively free of the maladjustments which cripple so many of us.

  —CARL R. ROGERS, On Becoming a Person

  A TV WAS ON in an upstairs room, flickering patches of silver against the stucco walls of the stairwell. A copy of M magazine (“How to Feel GREAT”) was on the coffee table in the living room. So was a huge book of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, opened in the middle and propped up like a missal at Mass. Spread out on the sofa was an old green flannel blanket, as if the physician, or former physician, had been trying to warm himself in the airless night. On the rug was a picture postcard, its face turned upward. Gregory Hancock Hemingway, MD, didn’t pick up the card, just stepped over it.

  Hanging down from the ceiling were some carved Haitian masks—scary as hell, the more so because it was so damned dark in the place.

  “Let’s go out back,” he said. “Perhaps a breeze will come in tonight.”

  I was eyeing the masks. He laughed, a big, guttural, liquid laugh. Patrick’s loud, high, and almost girlish laugh, and the way he’d stuck it in at weird moments, was still echoing. Of Gigi, Patrick had said, fairly breaking up: “The devils in him. There is something molten in him, demons roasting in fiery pits.” Jack’s laugh, by contrast, which had seemed to punctuate every other sentence, was chiefly about his nervousness. This laugh had its own disconcerting Hemingway quality—something sardonic, for sure.

  “Something, aren’t they?” he said. “They’re not mine, of course, they belong to the people who own this house. I’m just staying with them. I stay with a lot of people. By the way, I went to Haiti once. I remember walking into a hospital there, the pediatrics unit, and seeing twenty babies convulsing. It was an awful sight. At birth their mothers had rubbed their cords in cow dung. And no neonatal tetanus. It’s a ritual.” It was as if the caregiver in him was repulsed, but the symbolist in him, the symbolist’s son, was savoring the image.

  He had on running shorts and sneakers and a white T-shirt with “Unicorn University” printed in orange on it. His stomach was heavy; the nails of his fingers were long and shiny. He had very muscular legs. His neck seemed hammered into his brawny shoulders. The huge, wide, dark eyes were sunk deep in the pouchy face. His hair was long and stringy, oily-looking. His stylish red-stem glasses were almost dainty. That morning, while I was flying to meet him, he’d broken off a tooth right at gum level.

  All night he drank Scotch, just pouring it in over the top of the water and not even stirring it with his fingers. “I’ve had seven nervous breakdowns,” he said at one point. Very low, almost as if he were trying to whish-whish it through the back of his mouth, in the way that a naturalist, son of a naturalist, might call to a shore bird: “I’ve tried so goddamn hard my whole life to get free of it.”

  Earlier: “Yes, I had the most talent, I was the brightest, I could do so many of the things he loved most.” The statement hung. “I’ve been a doctor, that’s something. I’ve written a little. That’s something. And of course I guess you know that his father was a doctor, so a lot of people have drawn the point that I was only trying to please him.”

  He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs—ladylike. The shorts would ride up high. It was almost seductive. Once, he crossed his legs, took off his glasses, plowed his hand through his hair like an old torch singer, and sighed. “He got into everybody’s unconscious with his symbols. That’s part of what he’s about, you know.”

  Just ahead of this: “Let’s face it, any kid reaches a certain age where he wants to destroy his father and have his mother sexually. But this was impossible if you were a son of Ernest Hemingway. He was too large. I mean, on a basic psychological level, there was a time when you were just terrified of your old man because he was so much bigger than you were. In one sense, this never leaves you.”

  With almost no pause: “I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying not to be a transvestite. It’s a combination of things. The problems are twofold—no, they’re threefold. First, you’ve got this father who’s supermasculine, but who’s somehow protesting it all the time, he’s worried to death about it, never mind that he actually is very masculine, more masculine than anybody else around, in fact. But worried about it all the same—and therefore worried about his sons and their masculinity. Secondly, you start playing around with your mother’s stockings one day when you’re about four years old. Maybe it all starts with something as seemingly innocent as this. And why do you do this? Who knows? But it must have something to do with the fact that your mother doesn’t seem to love you enough. Or that’s your perception of it. Her maternal instincts just aren’t very strong.… You think she loves your older brother Patrick more. So maybe you’re putting on her clothes in the first place because you somehow think you’ll be able to win her that way, get close to her. But then, you see, it starts to feel sexy for its own sake, just to have those things on. It’s erotic, it arouses you. The third thing is your own heightened awareness to everything around you. You’re a writer’s son, after all. You take in a lot more.” He had said it all slowly, with his head slung a little off to the side, the way a child will do when he’s trying to puzzle out something.

  His hand moved into a long, wrinkly, narrow white sack of French bread on the table in front of him. The hand seemed to hold inside the sack, and then began to probe it. It was as if he was examining beneath a sheet. The hand pulled off a large chunk of the bread, came out of the sack, and the image was gone. He popped the bread into his mouth.

  “You know, he said to me one time, he was trying to help me, I knew it, no matter how it was killing him, he said, ‘Listen, Mr. Gig, I can remember a long time ago seeing a girl on a street in Paris and wanting to go over and kiss her just because she had so much damn red lipstick caked on. I wanted to get that lipstick smeared all over my lips, just so I could see what that felt like.’ The other thing about him—and, funny, with me too—is he really needed to be in love w
ith a girl to bring about this unexplainable chemistry that could produce the words in the right combination, you know, the whole artesian outflow. Hell, I’d love to be in love with a woman right now. Maybe I could actually be a doctor again. There’s been this one woman, lately. I can make out with her, all right, but the trouble is she’s fat and I can’t fall in love with her.”

  Later: “None of my mistakes were in medicine. All my mistakes were social.”

  Toward the end: “If I could only sleep well.”

  The laugh, stuttering from him: “Course I need a ‘fixed address.’ If only I had the goddamn ‘fixed address.’ ”

  His voice all the way back down: “I just can’t concentrate like I used to.”

  Coming in close: “Everything finally comes home to roost, doesn’t it?”

  Saying it twice: “Not much malevolence, you see. But an absolute destruction.”

  He walked me to the front of the house. Suddenly, he seemed anxious. “Listen, there’s no place for you to turn around here, you’ll have to back out, and these maniacs come flying down this street after midnight trying to kill people. You get in and back out very slowly, I’m going to go halt the traffic.” He broke into a trot. I rolled down the driver’s-side window and started to creep out. In the rearview mirror I could make him out, the fireplug figure in the unicorn T-shirt and satiny running shorts, arms extended outward, like a traffic cop without a whistle. He was standing in the street yelling at headlights: “Slow down, slow down, goddamn it, slow down, I gotta guy pulling out here!” I backed into the street, threw the car into forward. He ran over and slapped at the doorpost. “You know where you’re going, right, you go get a good sleep now, huh?”