Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Up there, on a clear day, it’s possible to see all of watery metropolitan Miami. You can face southwest and cup your eyes and look down the flat curving necklace of the Florida Keys as far as your vision will allow. If you were able somehow to look nearly 155 miles down the blue-green necklace, to its last bead, you’d see another lighthouse, the one that stands catty-corner across from Gigi’s boyhood home, the one at 938 Whitehead, the one around whose grassy base he and his brother Pat used to sometimes play cowboys and Indians while their father, across the street, worked on Green Hills of Africa. When the mood was right, when the writing had gone good, their dad would knock off early and go find them and walk with them the eighty-eight circular steps to the top, sometimes carrying the younger one in his arms or on his back, telling them both on the way up rich stories about the old, lonely nineteenth-century keepers who used to spend the nights fueling their lanterns and positioning their big reflectors for lost ships trying to make home. Making home, such a complicated notion. I want to believe that a lost son, who’d decided to shed all his clothes so that he could feel lustful and lawless in the salt air, was intending to climb the lighthouse at Key Biscayne that noonday so that he could see, at least pretend-see, the lighthouse of his Key West boyhood, so he could see, way off in the distance, his father, his mother, his two brothers, Saint Mary Star of the Sea (where he served early-morning Mass in the middle years of grammar school), the P&O Steamship dock, the dance floor at Sloppy Joe’s, his father’s workroom, all the cats, his old bedroom up on the second floor, his maroon Sears, Roebuck bike, and, not least, down at the navy yard, bobbing so loyally, gassed up and good to go, his papa’s boat.

  Perhaps I came too soon. I was a painter of your generation more than my own.… You are young, you have vitality, you can imbue your art with a force that only those with true feelings can manage. As for me, I’m old. I won’t have time to express myself.

  —CÉZANNE, to a young artist in 1896,

  ten years before his death

  … all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you.

  —from Death in the Afternoon

  The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean.

  —from The Old Man and the Sea

  We looked and there it all was: our river and our city and the island of our city.

  “We’re too lucky,” she said.

  …

  Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, “I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.”

  —from A Moveable Feast

  EPILOGUE

  HUNGER OF MEMORY

  Under way, in her newness, that first summer 1934

  IN NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE, there is a belief about “blood memory.” It’s tied up with ancestral connection to language, song, spirituality, tribal teaching. If you lose the blood memory of your people’s language, you’ve lost your center. What happens if you are a writer and you’ve lost your center? In The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway wrote of his frozen writer protagonist:

  When he finally gave up writing that day it was afternoon. He had started a sentence as soon as he had gone into his working room and had completed it but he could write nothing after it. He crossed it out and started another sentence and again came to the complete blankness. He was unable to write the sentence that should follow although he knew it. He wrote a first simple declarative sentence again and it was impossible for him to put down the next sentence on paper. At the end of two hours it was the same. He could not write more than a single sentence and the sentences themselves were increasingly simple and completely dull. He kept at it for four hours before he knew that resolution was powerless against what had happened.

  We know what happened on Sunday morning, July 2, 1961. A writer who’d lost the prairies of Oak Park, the Michigan woods, the illimitable-seeming riches of the Gulf Stream, and now, or so he was convinced, the center of who and what he was, stepped inside a five-and-a-half-foot-by-seven-and-a-half-foot space at the entryway of his house and destroyed himself. He aimed for just above the eyebrows and nothing went awry. He’d been home from Mayo Clinic for two days, having been driven back to Idaho in a Hertz rental car in the company of his wife and an old boxing friend in whose Manhattan gym he used to take workouts. Mary Hemingway had gone to bed the night before in the big bedroom that occupies most of the upper floor; he’d taken the small room that’s down the hall. From their respective quarters, as they readied for sleep, they’d called out to each other snatches of an Italian folk song. At about 7:25 a.m. Mary was brought awake to what sounded like two muffled thumps. It was, she later said, like the sound of bureau drawers pulled out too far and falling to the floor. She rose on one elbow and called out her husband’s name. She threw back the coverlet and ran down the hall. One of the twin beds was mussed, but he wasn’t in it. She reversed direction, went to the head of the stairs, held for half a second, and tore down the twenty-odd steps, across the living room to see, or get a glimpse of, what her spouse had done.

  At 7:40 a.m. the telephone rang at the home of Dr. Scott Earle, who was on call that weekend for the Ketchum hospital. The hospital operator told him there’d been an accident at the Ernest Hemingway home. Earle pulled on his clothes and was in the Hemingway driveway by 7:45. Mary signaled to him from a second-floor window not to come to the front entryway but around the other way. She met the doctor at the kitchen door. While she stayed behind, he went across the kitchen, stepped down into the living room and over to the vestibule, and saw on his own from the inner doorway the fragments of strewn bone, teeth, hair, flesh. The walls and ceiling and floor of the boxlike space were “speckled,” the doctor said, with a yellowish red. Hemingway’s legs were “flexed,” and between them, resting against his chest, was the double-barreled 12-gauge. In place of a head, the doctor saw a “disc-shaped and empty skull.”

  For the rest of her life, Mary Hemingway never used that entryway.

  At the funeral, three days later, the pastor of Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Church in Ketchum read from Ecclesiastes: “One generation cometh and another passeth away, but the land abideth forever.” He mistakenly stopped short of the words “The sun also ariseth.”

  The stone the family picked was flat to the ground, and wide, as if to accommodate the special bulk beneath it. This half a century on, the stone is there, unchanged, except by the wear of time, in the town cemetery just north of the village center, set between two pines more than thirty feet high, and there is a rough-made white wooden cross at the head of the smooth gray marble. There is only the name, Ernest Miller Hemingway, and his dates, 1889–1961, cut carefully in.

  If you go to the other end of town, northeast, about a mile up past Sun Valley Lodge, off Trail Creek Road, you’ll find a small Hemingway memorial. It’s in a grove of aspens and willows with clear running water. There is a bust of him, mounted on a stone pedestal. Inscribed at the base are some words edited by his wife that he once wrote for a Sun Valley friend, who’d died in a hunting accident:

  Best of all he loved the fall

  The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods

  Leaves floating on the trout streams

  And above the hills

  The high blue windless sky

  Now he will be a part of them forever

  It’s heartbreaking to read Hemingway’s letters of his last few years and see how Pilar and the sea were slipping from him, no less than his mind was. For all the years he’d had her, Hemingway always knew he could stop what he was doing and drive to the waterfront and meet Gregorio and unfasten the ropes and climb up onto the bridge and step on the starters and glide his boat out of Havana Harbor toward the Stream. In the midday heat, he used to love to lie on his back on the long bed on the s
tarboard side in the cockpit and watch the rod tips make sawing arcs against the puffy clouds. Gregorio would have the wheel then. Hemingway would prop himself against a reading pillow with a book and drink. Soon he’d be asleep. Often during these siestas, Mary wedged herself in beside him on the inner side of the leather bunk.

  “You know you love the sea and would not be anywhere else,” Hemingway wrote in Islands in the Stream. “She is just there and the wind moves her and the current moves her and they fight on her surface but down below none of it matters.”

  By the end, none of it was mattering in a different way. On April 21, 1961, in Ketchum, four days before Hemingway was flown again in a Piper Comanche four-seater to Saint Marys Hospital at Mayo Clinic for more shock treatments and locked rooms, Mary found her husband standing in the same vestibule off the living room where, two and a half months hence, he would succeed in killing himself. He was wearing his Italian bathrobe. It was midmorning. He was holding a shotgun. On the ledge in front of him, he had set two shells upright. From How It Was:

  “I was thinking we might go to Mexico,” I said softly. “Gregorio might be able to get Pilar over there.” Ernest turned and looked at me, but my message didn’t connect. “I read somewhere that there’s marvelous fishing off the Yucatán peninsula. We really haven’t discussed Paris, either. We could sublet a little flat there. We’ve been awfully happy in Paris, lamb.”

  He stepped past her and went into the living room and looked out one of the windows at the mountains. The spring melting hadn’t yet come. He was holding the gun. Mary sat down on a small sofa. “Honey, you wouldn’t do anything harmful to me as well as you,” she said. In a little while, George Saviers, his doctor and good friend and hunting companion, was at the house; he’d been scheduled to come by to take his patient’s blood pressure but was a little late. He tramped into the house in his boots, saw what was happening, and said: “Hang on, Papa, I want to talk to you.” Saviers called a colleague, and the two doctors got Hemingway into the car and over to the Ketchum hospital, where they sedated him. When the weather cleared, the patient was taken back to Rochester. Mary Hemingway tells this story and then says, “Years later, reconsidering, I wondered if we had not been more cruel than kind in preventing his suicide then and there.”

  In truth, the receding of Pilar, the slipping from him of the Stream, had been happening for a long time—maybe from the mid-fifties on. On January 31, 1958, eleven months before Fidel entered Havana, fourteen months before Hemingway paid $50,000 in cash for the charmless, two-story block house where he’d end his life, he wrote a lengthy letter to Adriana Ivancich’s brother, Gianfranco. “Fish have disappeared from the ocean and the fishermen in Cojimar are desperate with the fish never comeing,” he said. “Havana is more like Miami Beach all the time. I do not know where to go. Do you?” That “Do you?” is so uncharacteristic. All his life, people had asked him about the next best symbolic place to go. At the end of that year, writing from Ketchum, he wrote to his middle son: “Cuba is really bad now, Mouse.… Might pull out of there. Future looks very bad and there has been no fishing in Gulf for 2 years—and will be eventually no freedom coastwise and all the old places ruined.”

  “When you have loved three things all your life, from the earliest you can remember; to fish, to shoot and, later, to read; and when, all your life, the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember,” he wrote in Esquire in 1935. Twelve years later, he said in a letter to William Faulkner: “My own country gone. Trees cut down. Nothing left but gas stations, sub-divisions where we hunted snipe on the prairie, etc.” In a sense, all his life had been a hunger to get back what he’d only briefly known.

  As noted earlier, what seems inarguable now is that Hemingway never recovered mentally or physically from those back-to-back plane crashes in early 1954 in Africa. The world, of course, wished to believe otherwise—he was Ernest Hemingway; he’d cheated death once more. Biographer Michael Reynolds has put it best: “Between 1955 and 1961 Hemingway’s life alternated between ever-shortening cycles of euphoric writing and paranoia-ridden depression.” And yet, in the face of all his illnesses, he kept on writing, or tried to—that’s the heroic part. In 1955 he spent the entire year in Cuba. In April 1956 he flew to Peru to help out the moviemakers on the film version of The Old Man and the Sea. (They couldn’t get the thousand-pound marlin they’d wanted for Spencer Tracy’s fight with the fish that got cannibalized by the sharks.) Later that year, Hemingway attended the corridas in Spain, and then he was in Paris at the Ritz. In the rotogravures, he was still his own kind of Hemingway hero, man of action and movement. If that was false, what was true was that he tried to find a writing desk, wherever he was: for work on his trilogy, on The Garden of Eden manuscript, on a series of sketches about being a young man in Paris. These he had started in July 1957, a month or so before his youngest son, back from a manic trip to Africa, got hospitalized in Miami and wrote to his dad apologizing for getting “into this shape.” Pilar is always there, in the backwash of these letters and emotions, but less and less.

  In 1959, he was back in Spain, to spend the summer covering for Life the mano a mano bullfights between Antonio Ordóñez and his older and more famous brother-in-law, Luis Dominguín. There was a big sixtieth-birthday party for Hemingway that started on the twenty-first and went till breakfast the next day. But his mood shifts were frightening. In October he began to write his nonfiction piece for Life, an agreed-upon ten thousand words. He wrote five thousand words in five days and said he’d hardly begun. At the end of the month, Hemingway sailed to America on the SS Liberté. A biographer of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, Andrew Turnbull, watched him touring the deck in a plaid shirt and sleeveless leather vest, speaking to no one, avoiding eye contact. Turnbull wrote him a note and had a steward deliver it. He asked if they might meet, and on the last day out Hemingway consented. They sat in the ship’s bar and Turnbull was struck by Hemingway’s “sad mask of a face,” both “shy and wistful, with something inexpressible in his glance.” The biographer held this apparition inside him and eight years later wrote a piece recalling it for The New York Times Book Review. Turnbull couldn’t avoid the feeling that at some indefinable point, probably back there in the mid-thirties, as the critics turned and the talent appeared to ebb, that the mask had become the face, and the face had become the mask, and Hemingway “ate his publicity and became a travesty of his former self. Never completely, though, and that was his pathos and his grandeur. Part of him knew what was happening.” Turnbull quoted from Richard II: “For you have mistook me all this while.”

  The Liberté docked, and Hemingway went to his publisher and deposited the incomplete manuscript that would become A Moveable Feast. He flew to Cuba. Reporters were at the airport. They asked what he thought of America’s hardening attitude toward the Castro revolution. Hemingway answered that he thought of himself as a true Cuban, and to prove it he kissed the national flag. An account of this got back-channeled to Washington from Havana and put in his FBI file.

  A week later, Hemingway departed from Florida for Idaho in a nearly new Buick, provided by the sponsor of CBS’s Buick Electra Playhouse. Doing most of the driving was Roberto Herrera, an old Havana retainer, and also in the car were Antonio Ordóñez and his wife, Carmen, who were seeing the great American landscape for the first time. (Hemingway had invited them to Cuba and to Idaho without consulting Mary; she’d gone ahead to prepare the newly purchased Ketchum house for the Spanish guests.) Hemingway rode in the front passenger seat and kept a frightening log of the mileage and the gas—frightening if you read it now. He made his entries in a palm-size spiral notebook. On the starting-out day, November 12, he wrote: “Key W. 1420—2605.” This meant the group had departed at 2:20 p.m. with the odometer reading 2605. At “1510” (ten after three) they got to Marathon, Florida, and the odometer was 2656. The next entry: “1515—Leave.” Three days later, it was: “Leave—New Orleans 0830—3718.” Each gas stop got recorded—to the fractions of f
ill-up. Slidell, Louisiana: “15 3/10 gal.” Alpine, Texas: “16 0/10.” Jackpot, Nevada: “14 8/10.” On and on and on, nothing but numbers and the names of places, some abbreviated or misspelled. On November 18, Hemingway entered: “Arriv Ketchum 2315 6643,” which meant they’d made it to their destination at forty-five minutes to midnight on the seventh day out, having gone 4,038 miles and having spent $106.78 on gas and oil. (He’d totaled both.) It was as if the observer of the natural world, whose emphasis had always been on what can be seen and felt, never noticed a bird, a sunset, a tree, a dog, a mountain, let alone a passing car, or another human being. And yet Hemingway wrote some fine letters about the trip afterward.

  Early in the New Year, the Hemingways went to dinner at the home of old Ketchum friends, Lloyd and Tillie Arnold. Powder was drifting down in saucer-size flakes and the foursome watched it from the windows. Hemingway saw the lights on in the local bank. “They’re checking our accounts,” he said. “That’s just the usual cleaning women,” Tillie Arnold said. “They’re trying to catch us,” Hemingway said. “They want to get something on us.” Mary Hemingway said, “Who’s they?” Hemingway answered: “The FBI.” This story is in How It Was. Of course, anybody would have said it was an insane notion that FBI agents were going through Hemingway’s bank accounts on a January Saturday night. (They weren’t.) Totally paranoid—except in some weird, other clairvoyant sense, not so paranoid an idea at all.

  Unreasonably plagued by his bullfight article, Hemingway became convinced he’d work better at his old standing place (using the top of the bookcase in his Havana bedroom), so, having only recently come to Idaho, he and his wife packed and rode the train back across the country to Miami. His boat would be there in Cuba to ease the writing strains—except all that spring, the weather was lousy (“peevish,” Mary called it), and the fish didn’t come, and, anyway, it was as if, with all his work, which he felt so behind on, he could barely find the time to take her out. Too much energy required.