Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  In his retirement from Caterpillar, Dad-o became something of a rose fanatic. He gave up cigarettes just to have the money for new bushes. Weekends, he’d go around to juried shows with one of his favorite grandsons, Andy Rae. They’d get up early on a Saturday morning and go to the backyard and snip a just-blooming “Peace” rose or a bright red “Mr. Lincoln.” They’d put the prizes in a Styrofoam cooler and then light out for Illinois burgs like Pekin and Decatur and Mattoon, hoping to snare a best-of-show medallion. Late in the day, grandfather and grandson would pull into the driveway at 1013 North Frink—“Stinky-Frinky,” the grandkids called it—beat and happy.

  At age seventy-five, the idea came up to make a tape recording about his memories of his boyhood friend. In his flat midwestern drawl, he read into the machine Hemingway’s letter from Mayo. His voice lilted just a little on the word “kid.” The kid was on his way to eighty-nine when the massive stroke took him off in the early fall of 1987. His family had him cremated. The roses in the backyard and along the side of the house had come in beautifully that summer.

  EH letter to Philip Young is March 6, 1952. Young’s statement re “All theses” distorting the work is in his 1966 Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. EH’s undated letter to Marcelline re use of Windemere is circa July 1937, and his apology is December 22, 1938. The quote from Feast re the fishermen of Paris is on page 43. EH letter from the Pine Barrens is to Howell Jenkins, July 26, 1919. Marcelline’s passage about her father’s “disciplines” is on page 31 of her memoir, and Morris Buske’s “Hemingway Faces God” is in the Fall 2002 Hemingway Review.

  Re travel on the Manitou and other Great Lake steamers to the northland: William Lafferty of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, had the old timetables—and much else. (His website, Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia, was very helpful.) George Hilton’s Lake Michigan Passenger Steamers was useful, as was a July–September 1946 article, “Chicago to Mackinac: Story of the Northern Michigan Transportation Company,” by Thomas Dancey, in Michigan History Magazine.

  The Manitou, which I think of as the primal Hemingway boat, changed ownership several times during her career—but her cut-above service didn’t alter. Her longest operator was the Northern Michigan Transportation Company, referred to by almost everyone as the Northern Michigan Line. Just the name is said to have enlivened the pulses of Illinoisans dreaming through hard winters. In the Chicago Tribune and other dailies of the city, you’d see the NMTC’s display ads for their flagship boat, the one “equipped for people who travel right.”

  For the northland itself: Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant has an extensive Hemingway collection (and an angling one, too). In 2003, the Clarke mounted an exhibit called “Hemingway in Michigan, Michigan in Hemingway,” and the catalog was valuable. In 2007, the library helped put on an exhibit at the Crooked Tree Art Center in Petoskey (Up North with the Hemingways and Nick Adams), and again the companion booklet-catalog was helpful. (The two quotations in the text from Professor Frederic Svoboda are in that publication.) The Petoskey District Library’s History Department has much northland material. Constance Cappel Montgomery’s 1966 study, Hemingway in Michigan, was helpful—and still up-to-date in its own way. Walloon Lake has its own library—the Crooked Tree District Library—with works on the history of Walloon, particularly a lavishly illustrated local history–oral history titled Walloon Yesterdays. Speaking of lavish: JFK has hundreds of pictures of the Hemingways in Michigan, and boats are in half of them, or so it seems to me. And, of course, Grace’s exhausting albums, word and photo. Also: Jim Sanford, Marcelline’s son (and EH’s nephew), in Petoskey, was generous with his memories about water, about boats, about family disputes, and so was his brother, John Sanford, in California, who said in an e-mail: “I wish there were sailboats as I am a sailor myself.” Both brothers remembered the canoes. When EH was in high school (long before the Sanfords were alive), he gave his kid sister Sunny, five years his junior and the tomboy of the four girls, a picture of himself paddling a canoe. He wrote on the back: “Me trusty Bitch Bark viacle. Length 9 feet wt 20 lbs. Just as sturdy as a church, like hell. You have to part your hair in the middle to balance it.” Years later, Madelaine Hemingway Miller (Sunny) reproduced the picture in her adoring memoir, Ernie. The paddle her bro’s using is made of ashwood, given to him by an Indian who lived in the woods behind Windemere. Finally: in the text I spoke of Hemingway forsaking northern Michigan. But we do know he went back as a rolling spy at least once—September 1947, in his new royal blue Buick Roadmaster, with Toby Bruce doing most of the driving, the two of them en route from Miami to Ketchum via Walloon Lake. The last look.

  PART FOUR. OLD MEN AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA:

  ERNEST/GIGI/WALTER HOUK, 1949–1952 AND AFTER

  Isak Dinesen’s oft-quoted line, misquoted through the years, seems to have first been said in a telephone interview, and published in The New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1957. Jack Gilbert’s poem is collected in his Refusing Heaven.

  MOMENTS SUPREME

  Precede. Re the level of his anxiety and of how concentrated his mind had to have been: In the first letter of October 2 to Scribner, written by hand, three pages long, Hemingway starts in on the same line as the greeting, as if he can’t take the time to skip down a line. At the end, in a PS without the “PS”: “Times are bad general but we’ve seen worse.” The last four words are going up the side of the page. I first saw this letter, a photocopy, in the Baker files at Princeton. There’s a red line drawn through the sentences “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.” In the left margin, in what looks like Baker’s handwriting, are four words I’ve wondered about: “delete without indicating deletion.”

  Harbor scum: In Islands, in the middle “Cuba” section, there’s a passage about the diseased upper end of Havana Harbor. Thomas Hudson, having lost all three sons, is getting ready to go into town to make a report to a military attaché at the American Embassy re his submarine patrols. He’s trying not to think about it, and the “it” seems to be almost anything and everything in his recent and not-so-recent life. “It wasn’t the sea you wanted to forget,” he thinks to himself. Dressed now, he comes out of the long, bright living room that still seems so enormous to him. He comes down the stone steps. Some dead branches have fallen from the great ceiba. He climbs into his car with a drink of gin and bitters in his hand and his driver takes him down the long drive and unchains the gate and turns onto a side street of the dirty village below. They maneuver onto the old stone highway of Cuba, the Central Highway, cracked and cobbled, running downhill for three miles. A man drinking and self-pitying for things he can’t fully articulate, gone children, gone wives, destroyed friendships, squandered opportunities at his art, gazes from the window. He hates this part of the ride the most. “I drink against poverty, dirt, four-hundred-year-old dust, the nose-snot of children, cracked palm fronds, roofs made from hammered tins, the shuffle of untreated syphilis, sewage in the old beds of brooks, lice on the bare necks of infested poultry, scale on the backs of old men’s necks, the smell of old women, and the full-blast radio.” Now the approaching smokestacks of Havana Electric. Now the upper limit of the harbor, where the stagnant water is “as black and greasy as the pumpings from the bottoms of the tanks of an oil tanker.” The gates of a railroad crossing come up and the car is moving again and there on the right are the old wooden-hulled ships of the merchant marine. They “lay against the creosoted pilings of the wooden docks and the scum of the harbor lay along their sides blacker than the creosote of the pilings and foul as an uncleaned sewer.” This old colonial harbor, with its scum, has been like this for three or four hundred years.

  As I note, scholars generally agree EH finished the “Cuba” section on Christmas Eve, 1950. Nine months later, early evening of October 2, 1951, he called his own child “harbor scum.” I t
hink he reached into his recent fiction and found what he needed.

  Re the spitting at his wife: Mary entered in her journal, “News of Pauline’s death. Alto came over. They talked like vultures and I said so. E. followed me to my bathroom and spit in my face. Next day he gave me $200, which I gravenly accepted.” She must have meant cravenly.

  Chapter. The epigraph quote is on page 26 of The Old Man and the Sea, and the passage about silence is on page 43. Walter’s piece is in North Dakota Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1998). Letter to Wallace Meyer at Scribner’s is March 4 and 7, 1952. The chapter represents a distillation of all I know and feel about a proud, honorable old man whom I first met in 2004—and continue visiting to this moment.

  FACET OF HIS CHARACTER

  Precede. EH letter re steering prowess is to Charlie Scribner, May 18–19, 1951.

  Chapter. Since I quoted or referenced a lot of EH letters in this chapter, I’ve tried to give dates and days in the text itself as a way to help keep the reader chronologically steered. But here are several dates and citations (not only to the letters) I didn’t provide: Quote from Old Man re DiMaggio is on page 23–page 24. The New York critic EH wrote to on July 9, 1950, with his baseball conceit was Harvey Breit. EH’s “shit on hope” is in How It Was. The motorboat passage from Across the River and into the Trees is on page 55–page 56 of the softcover edition, and the lovebird passages are on page 81 and page 89. Time’s review is September 11, 1950. E. B. White’s parody is October 14, 1950. Letter re Pilar taking the wind at 95 is November 28, 1950, to E. E. “Chink” Dorman-O’Gowan.

  Re Pilar’s wartime patrols: I could have, and possibly should have, written much more on this period, but I had another aim for the chapter, namely, documenting EH’s rage. Of all Hemingway’s full-length biographers, Michael Reynolds has done the most original work on Pilar’s submarine hunts, and so I admiringly direct readers there.

  THE GALLANTRY OF AN AGING MACHINE

  Precede. In her 1987 “Cuba Revisited” piece in Granta (researched in late 1985), Gellhorn writes: “Gregorio was interested in two large cement cradles, placed where the tennis courts used to be. The Pilar was his inheritance, he had cared for it and given it to the state, and it was to be brought here and placed on these cradles.” See my coda at the end of these notes re the curious afterlife of Pilar—and the question of “bogus Pilars.”

  Chapter. Epigraph quote is on page 10 of Old Man. Re Walter’s old UCLA painting teacher, Stanton Macdonald-Wright: art historians regard him as the most important twentieth-century figure on the West Coast to have taught and promoted Cézanne to his students. Since Hemingway’s indebtedness to Cézanne is both profound and self-acknowledged, this seems just one more unwitting node of connection between Walter and EH. Interview in New York Post Week-End is December 28, 1946. “Why am I a bastard” passage is page 66–page 67 of Across the River. Letter to Scribner re his diet during his writing tear is April 11–12, 1951. Gigi’s quoting of his father re Adriana is on page 111 of Papa. EH’s letter to Nita in Baltimore is September 1, 1949. Walter’s nearly book-length piece about Islands is in the Winter–Spring 2006 North Dakota Quarterly. Re forests being clear-cut to “explain” EH’s “fetishes”: One of the earliest and bravest and yet probably most “out there” works done on this whole subject is by Carl Eby, in his Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. The book has sentences such as these: “To say that Hemingway was a transvestite would mistakenly give the impression that such fantasies dominated his erotic life; yet within the dominant field of his fetishistic fantasy, the transvestic position was one to which he returned repeatedly.” I first met Professor Eby—who teaches at the University of South Carolina–Beaufort—in Key West in 2004 at an international Hemingway conference. I was prepared to dislike him instantly, but in fact he was disarmingly friendly, not to say a little self-mocking. Early one morning he was on a panel, and the advertised title of his paper was “ ‘He Felt the Change So That It Hurt Him All Through’: Sodomy and Transvestic Hallucination in Late Hemingway.” I ran into him in the hallway as the audience was gathering. “Uh, little bit grabby for 8:30 a.m., wouldn’t you say?” he sort of hooted-cum-winked. I heard one of the old guard say afterward, “That man is dangerous.” Actually, I don’t think so.

  Re Walter’s old Havana journal in its retyped, incomplete state: I take on faith it’s a document undoctored in any way—but would that we had it all.

  Finally, re EH telling Nita he’d had lessons in hair-dying from the Alberto Culver company in LA en route to China in 1941: I don’t believe it. The timelines would argue against it. He and Martha were in LA for barely two days in late January 1941. They stayed at the Gary Coopers’ and were feted at parties. Could he have gotten away for blonding tutoring?

  BRAVER THAN WE KNEW

  Precede and chapter. I wrote the two-part, nine-thousand-word piece called “Papa’s Boys,” which was published in The Washington Post on July 29–30, 1987. Three years later, on May 13, 1990, I wrote “Rainbow Chaser” for The Washington Post Magazine. That was a piece about fly-fishing, and I began it with a memory of my night of having gone trouting with Patrick Hemingway. This precede, as well as this chapter, are a reworking and abridgment of those previously published pieces. But here’s a story connected with the publication of “Papa’s Boys” I’ve not told till now: About two weeks after I’d returned from Miami in late June 1987 and was trying to write a first draft for my editors, the phone rang. It was Gigi. He said he’d changed his mind and now didn’t want me to “put anything in” about his cross-dressing, the more so since he planned to make a “comeback” in medicine. I was startled—only I wasn’t. This kind of thing happens to journalists all the time, especially if they live and work in Washington, DC, where politicians try to backpedal after they’ve told you something for the record. I reminded Gigi he’d spoken to me willingly, and that for me to try to write around the fact of his cross-dressing, which was the central story of his life, would be a lie. Even though I knew I was within my rights, journalistic principles don’t sound so grand on the telephone when you’re talking to someone with both pleading and rage in his voice. He said I’d ruin his life if I wrote the stories. I reminded him that some of his arrests in Montana connected with his transvestism had already made local papers there. We argued. I said again he’d laid down no preconditions about his cross-dressing. He cursed and slammed down the phone. A little shaken, I went in and told my editors what had happened and that maybe we should include some of the phone call in the pieces themselves. No, that would be a bad idea, they said. That would raise more questions than it answered, would make me seem defensive. “Papa’s Boys” came out. The same day, I nervously sent tear sheets and a cover note to all three sons. Patrick thanked me for sending them, but his letter then went into a strange tangent that had nothing to do with the pieces. Jack wrote and said he thought the series was well done, if in extremely poor taste. Gigi wrote and said my ambition “overcame” my sense of decency and that with “such malleable principles you should go far in journalism.” He wrote twice on the same day, August 1, 1987, addressing me as “Dear Paul,” using an ink pen, starting out in fairly smooth penmanship, the words getting larger and larger. “[A]nd your editor will probably credit you with a first, ie, a journalistic autopsy on a living human being,” he ended. And yet I heard later from one of his children he’d changed his mind and thought the pieces were pretty fair to him, after all. Which only suggests to me once more his decent-hearted and forgiving nature—in spite of everything.

  IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING

  Precede. Re “Marty”: I can recall all three sons, if Jack not so much, talking about their leggy stepmom with an almost unconscious and faintly sexual schoolboy longing.

  Chapter. Epigraph quote is on page 231 of Farewell. Re “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something”: the story first saw print in the 1987 The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The three sons signed their names to the foreword—so,
again, praise to Gigi. A perceptive analysis of the story (even though his article contains several important errors of fact) is Robert C. Clark’s “Papa y el Tirador: Biographical Parallels in Hemingway’s ‘I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,’ ” The Hemingway Review, Fall 2007. Lou Mandler, named in the text, was particularly helpful re Canterbury School—her two-part “The Hemingways at Canterbury,” published in the school magazine, Pallium, Fall 2008 and Winter 2009, and a later version, in The Hemingway Review, Spring 2010, is the definitive study.

  “NECROTIC”

  Precede. Again, a perceptive analysis is Charles J. Nolan Jr.’s “Hemingway’s Complicated ‘Enquiry’ in ‘Men Without Women,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction, Spring 1995. The three other EH stories with homosexuality and/or lesbianism as the central subject: “Mr. and Mrs. Eliot” (from in our time), and “The Mother of a Queen” and “The Sea Change” (both in Winner Take Nothing). Re the need to fling blame from him: in the October 2 letter to Scribner, he said of Pauline, “Her get, and her families get, do not do well after adolescence. But you don’t know about that when you marry a woman.”

  Chapter. If much of it is the product of my own digging, I could hardly have proceeded without the help of Ruth Hawkins, named in the text. Hawkins—director of Arkansas Heritage Sites, which includes the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott—has done more work on the Pfeiffer family than anyone I know. Re Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard: Russell Miller’s 1987 Bare-Faced Messiah was helpful. Re Pauline and Jinny Pfeiffer and Laura Archera Huxley: both Huxley’s This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley and vol. 2 of Sybille Bedford’s Aldous Huxley: A Biography, contained their nuggets.