Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Four days earlier, the chief shooter of the family talked of the upcoming match in a letter to his first wife. His present wife wasn’t home—Martha had gone off on a Caribbean journalism assignment, in a thirty-foot sloop, for Collier’s. Two days earlier, he had turned forty-three. Perhaps this is why Hemingway was so sentimental for the times he and Hadley had known when they were just kids in Paris. The night before, he couldn’t sleep. So he lay awake trying to “remember the races out at Enghien and the first time we went to Pamplona by ourselves.” He addresses Hadley as “Miss Katherine Kat.” He tells her he loves her very much, and feels it’s all right to say this, because “it is just untransferable feeling for early and best Gods.” Damn, if he doesn’t love fishing and the sea and his boat—“I would hate to die, ever, because every year I have a better time fishing and shooting. I like them as much as when I was sixteen.” As for his boys, he is trying to be a good father. Gig, who is “a better boy all the time,” is “known in the papers as el joven fenomeno Americano and day before yesterday a reporter called him ‘el popularissimo Gigi.’ So now we say go down to the post-office and get the mail popularissimo or time for bed, popularissmo. But inside himself he is very happy to be the popularissimo and he shoots like a little angel.”

  The little angel didn’t win, but he scored a huge moral victory, not to say earned his father’s bursting pride. He even beat his dad. And there was no way Hemingway would have eased off. He would have been shooting for his life at the all-day event.

  The author of Papa devotes most of a chapter to the contest, and exaggerates what happened. Gigi didn’t tie for first place; he finished fourth. He didn’t knock down twenty birds in a row, as he said; he got twelve straight, partially got his thirteenth, hit six more dead on, which finished him just out of the money. There weren’t 150 shooters entered, as he wrote; there were 30. But by any measure, his performance was a triumph. The great Diaz, who’d been shooting for decades, did end up winning, and Carlos Quintero and Antonio Montalvo fought to a tie and went into a shoot-off. These were possibly the three best marksmen in the country and, by extension, the hemisphere. “Havana” is one of the most beautifully written chapters in Papa, but amusingly the author (not to say the author’s father in his letters) didn’t get his own age right:

  At age eleven, I’d just tied for the shooting championship of Cuba against some of the best wing shots in the world. Minutes later at the bar I was explaining to a group of newly acquired admirers that it was really nothing if one had my 20/10 vision, fabulous reflexes, co-ordination, guts and stamina. After listening to this as long as he could, papa took me aside and said:

  “Gig, when you’re truly great at something, and you know it, you would like to brag about it sometimes. But if you do, you’ll feel like shit afterwards. Also, you never remember how a thing really felt if you talk about it too much.”

  He got that part exactly right.

  The day following the championship, Hemingway typed a two-page letter to his absent wife. She was somewhere down the Caribbean. “Dear Pickly,” he began. You would have been so proud yesterday. Gigi never once let his nerves get to him. Poor Patrick blew up after a good start. But Gigi was hitting them all—“drivers to the right, to the left, high screamers and two slanting incomers.” He was “almost like that girl who won the Grand National in National Velvet. Imagine him not blowing up after that thirteenth and when they robbed him he came over to me and said, very quietly, ‘Papa they lied and they stole from me and watch me kill this pidgeon now to show them.’ It was a high one and he hit it and it seemed as though it were going outside the wind and then he chopped it right down against the inside base of the fence.” Hemingway told Martha how he’d taken his sons into town for dinner, and of how they came home and lay down in a bed together and talked to the ceiling in the dark about what had happened.

  Two weeks later, on August 14, Hemingway wrote again to his wife. She was still at sea. The letter’s addressed to “Muki.” He said, “Think all the time have put in with them (children) hasn’t been wasted. Childies take lots of patience as they go through the damdest things but these childies are comeing along all right now. The shoot was the turn of the corner for Giggy.… He’s just got what he did that day inside of him like the vault of a bank full of o.k. securities.”

  The last few pages of the “Havana” chapter have to do with the Stream and Pilar—a particular incident. The fishing had been lousy that day. The youngest boy was out into the water, near a reef, with his spear gun. He was after yellowtail and snapper and grunts. Gregorio was nearby in a dinghy, while Gigi’s father, and maybe Patrick, stayed on the main boat. Suddenly, there were three sharks.

  I took the grunts off my belt and tossed them toward the sharks. Papa was about forty yards away, and although I wasn’t much of a swimmer, I must have made it to him in near-record time. He lifted me up on his shoulders and then thrashed through the water to the dinghy.… I can’t say with certainty that my father was very brave that day. He seemed cool enough, but I could tell he was frightened, too.… I never felt more like his son than I did that day.… I hadn’t realized how much he really cared until he hoisted me on his own shoulders, which were barely out of water, and swam back across that reef with most of his own body still exposed under the surface.

  Four summers later, a precocious fourteen-year-old, going into his sophomore year at the same Catholic prep school in New Milford, Connecticut, from which his older brother Pat had just graduated, stole a pair of French underpants and some other lingerie from the closet of his newest stepmother. Mary Hemingway, who’d been Hemingway’s wife since March, accused her Cuban maid of the theft. The maid, in tears, said she was innocent, but Mary dismissed her. After Gigi had returned to the States and to Canterbury School, the garments were found—by Gigi’s father—under the mattress of the bunk bed in the room in the little guesthouse where the boys had slept that summer. Gigi later tried to lie his way out of it. His father knew. Eventually he’d own up to it. In a sense, Mary never forgave him this incident. That was part of her character: holding grudges.

  Two years later, the son who’d been so gifted with guns at the Cerro Hunters Club was trying hard to fashion himself into a writer—wouldn’t this have been the best way of all to win his father’s approval? There are a number of photographs around of Gigi from the summer of 1948, when he was about to enter his senior year at Canterbury. He was sixteen. All the baby fat was gone. He was taller, handsomer. There was something soft, though not unmanly, about him. He didn’t seem impish any longer so much as deep, inward. He seems rarely to be smiling in the pictures. The cinnamon-colored freckles dotting his high cheekbones and the ridge of his nose are still there. You can see him instantly appealing to girls—they’d want to protect him.

  That previous school term, his junior year (or “fifth former,” as it’s known at Canterbury), Gigi had become an associate editor of the school’s magazine, The Tabard. He’d won first place in a campus-wide competition for a historical essay. This was announced in the June 1948 issue. He apparently won first place in a fiction contest as well. The piece was said to be about seagulls. But the June issue makes no mention of a short-story prize. What seems to have happened is that a committee designated a prize, and the winner was informally told, who then told his parents, who of course were thrilled (there are letters documenting their thrill), but then someone on the faculty discovered the story was a rank plagiarism. The prize was rescinded and the scandal hushed up. At least this is what the current dean of faculty at Canterbury, Lou Mandler, surmises. (Mandler has done first-rate research on the history of the Hemingway family at Canterbury. One of the things Mandler’s research has uncovered is that Hemingway, the devoted father, seems never to have once set foot on Canterbury’s grounds, not even for his sons’ graduations—Patrick’s in 1946, Gigi’s in 1949. Both graduated with honors, near the top of their classes. Hemingway hated the school—for its perceived New England elitisms and parochial rigidi
ties.)

  In Papa, Gigi says he was eighteen when he committed the plagiarism. He couldn’t have been eighteen; he was gone from Canterbury by then. He claims to have written the seagull story on his father’s typewriter, on summer vacation.

  That summer in Havana I read papa’s favorites, from Huckleberry Finn to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: like him, I sometimes had two or three books going at the same time. Then papa steered me to the short story masters, Maupassant and Chekhov. “Don’t try to analyze—just relax and enjoy them.”

  “Now,” papa said one morning. “Try writing a short story yourself. And don’t expect it to be any good.”

  I sat down at a table with one of papa’s fine-pointed pencils and thought and thought. I looked out of the window, and listened to the birds, to a cat crying to join them; and to the scratch of my pencil, doodling. I let the cat out. Another wanted in.

  I went to papa’s typewriter. He’d finished with it for the day. Slowly I typed out a story and then took it to him.

  His father read it and then slowly took off his glasses. According to Gigi, the stunned man said: “I’ve wanted to cut down for a long time. The writing doesn’t come so easily for me anymore. But I’ll be just as happy helping you as doing it myself. Let’s have a drink to celebrate.” From Papa:

  Only once before can I remember papa being as pleased with me—when I tied for the pigeon-shooting championship. And he was confident that there was another winner in the family when I entered the short story for a school competition and won first prize.

  Turgenev should have won the prize. He wrote the story. I merely copied it, changing the setting and the names, from a book I assumed papa hadn’t read because some of the pages were still stuck together.

  From “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something”:

  It was seven years later that his father read the prize-winning story again. It was in a book that he found in checking through some books in the boy’s old room. As soon as he saw it he knew where the story had come from. He remembered the long-ago feeling of familiarity.… In the last five of the seven years between the summer of the prize-winning story and the day his father ran onto the book the boy had done everything hateful and stupid that he could, his father thought. But it was because he was sick his father had told himself. His vileness came on from a sickness. He was all right until then. But that had all started a year or more after that last summer.

  There are no time frames in the fiction. But, as noted earlier, a good guess for the date of the story’s composition is mid-to-late 1955—which would have been “seven years” from the 1948 discovery of Gigi’s plagiarism in his fifth-form spring at Canterbury. In the last five of those seven years—that is, from 1950 to 1955—the boy in the story and the boy of real life had done every hateful and stupid thing. The fiction doesn’t specify what they were. In real life, nothing a youngest son would have done in this interval, after leaving prep school and dropping out of college and getting his girlfriend pregnant, was stupider or more irresponsible, certainly in his father’s mind, than an incident involving a movie theater—because that public incident had led directly to the middle-of-the-night death in a Los Angeles hospital of the youngest son’s mother.

  The final three sentences of the story: “Now he knew that boy had never been any good. He had thought so often looking back on things. And it was sad to know that shooting did not mean a thing.”

  And yet here is a characteristic Hemingway switchback. In 1955, four years after Pauline’s death, Gigi’s father was working overtime to try to be a supportive father. Hemingway hadn’t abandoned Gigi, or vice versa. They had said horrible, unconscionable things to each other. But in a way, wouldn’t that just prove how much they cared?

  *If there’s muddiness here, what can be said with certainty is that the pieces in The Washington Post marked the first time Gigi’s lifelong semi-secret was revealed in a national publication. Two years later, in 1989, Gigi spoke again of his cross-dressing, and of that first catching, to an interviewer for a short-lived celebrity magazine named Fame. It was as if the floodgates to his torment had opened. The title of the article was “The Sons Almost Rise.” Gigi told the interviewer that “[W]hen I look back on it—maybe I’m reading more into it than is there—the look of horror on his face may not just have been, ‘What’s wrong with my boy?’ Maybe it was ‘What’s wrong with the family? My God! Is he doing this too?’ ” The last sentence of this quote strikes me as a kind of provocative Gigi add-on—he knew it would make great copy. According to the son, the father had said, a couple weeks after the catching, “Gigi, we come from a strange tribe, you and I.” In 2007, that phrase, “strange tribe,” would become the title of a brave and moving and unjustly ignored book about the Hemingway family by Gigi’s own eldest son, John Hemingway, whom you’ll hear more about later. As for the questions of whether it really was his father who’d caught him, that first time, and at what age, Gigi told a noted Hemingway scholar named Donald Junkins, who’d become a good friend and the best man at his fourth marriage, that, yes, it was his father, and that he was about ten.

  †At prep school, Patrick would go out for freshman football, and make the team, greatly pleasing his slow-of-foot and semi-clumsy ex–interior lineman father, who’d only made second-string varsity in his final year at Oak Park and River Forest Township High. In a letter to his son about a month after he had arrived at Canterbury School, Hemingway said, “About football—always remember to swing your arms wide when you tackle. Open them wide before you make the tackle and then slam them together hard. Like slapping them together across your chest. Try always to fall sideways so as to protect your balls as in boxing. Wear a jockstrap when you play.”

  Things written in a kind of code. Things exposed under the surface.

  Hemingway wrote four stories about homosexuals and lesbians. The most psychologically layered and surprisingly sympathetic ran to five and a quarter pages in its first published form, in the 1927 Scribner’s collection Men Without Women. (It’s really a very brief story. The book was compact in design, with large type, making the piece seem deceptively longer than it is.) The story is called “A Simple Enquiry.” The irony starts there, for there is nothing simple in the enquiry the story turns on. A homosexual Italian major is reclined on his bunk in his hut at the snow-blinded front. He announces he is going to take a little sleep. Outside, the March sun is thawing the mounds of snow, which are piled higher than the hut’s windows. Signor Maggiore, as his subordinates address him, has been at his desk in the other room, oiling his swollen and blistered facial skin that has been badly burned by the sun’s glint off the snow. Very delicately he’s been “stroking” his forehead and cheeks and nose. Now, reclined, with the door half-open, his head on a rucksack, he tells his adjutant to send in the orderly. The orderly, whose name is Pinin, is nineteen. The officer, it hardly needs saying, has every advantage. “Come in,” he tells the boy, “and shut the door.” The orderly comes across the room and stands beside the bunk. The major wishes to know if Pinin has a girl, if he’s ever been in love, in love with a girl, or whether, in fact, he is—“corrupt.”

  “ ‘I don’t know what you mean, corrupt.’ ”

  The major tells him he needn’t be “superior.” Pinin studies the floor. The major is eyeing him up and down.

  “ ‘And you don’t really want—’ the major paused. Pinin looked at the floor. ‘That your great desire isn’t really—’ Pinin looked at the floor. The major leaned his head back on the rucksack and smiled. He was really relieved: life in the army was too complicated. ‘You’re a good boy,’ he said. ‘You’re a good boy, Pinin. But don’t be superior and be careful some one else doesn’t come along and take you.’ ”

  The boy stands there. He hasn’t been dismissed.

  “ ‘Don’t be afraid,’ the major said. His hands were folded on the blankets. ‘I won’t touch you.’ ”

  The piece ends with the orderly walking out awkwardly, stiffly. “Pini
n was flushed and moved differently.” As for the relieved Signor Maggiore, who will not be acting on his erotic urges today, he is still on his bunk, thinking aloud. That’s the story’s final sentence: “The little devil, he thought, I wonder if he lied to me.”

  For decades, Hemingway scholarship largely ignored “A Simple Enquiry,” and it is hard to understand why, for it has the terseness and precision and subsurface swirls of the best of Hemingway’s work. It seems to be suggesting that moral and sexual dilemmas are deserving of our deepest human understanding—not of our rejections and bigotries. Archibald MacLeish read the story and told his touchy friend in a February 20, 1927, letter: “I think its in your real manner, a fine, cool, clean piece of work, sure as leather, & hard and swell.” In the margin, he added: “Ten things ‘said’ for every word written. Full of sound like a coiled shell. Overtones like the bells at Chartres. All that stuff you can’t describe but only do—& only you can do it.”

  Twenty-four years later, on October 2, 1951, a sleepless, denying, lashing-out man employed the same semi-coded word, “corrupt,” in a letter to his publisher regarding his ex-wife’s death. Hemingway, remember, wrote an earlier letter to Charlie Scribner, on the day following Pauline’s death, in addition to the letter he wrote at 6:10 p.m., in which he called his son “harbor scum.” Here’s part of what he said in that first one, in respect to his late-night phone talk with Pauline, two nights previous, that, from all that can be known, had gone very cruelly: “I was sympathetic and kind although I did not feel that way since she had the boy in her charge and I had been writing her registered letters about how he was doing and asking for details and receiving no answers.… But this boy Gigi was not brave as Patrick always was. He was only terribly skillful and corrupted. His mother, and her sister being corrupt did not help him much.”