Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Re what Hemingway said to his son in Havana: you killed her. In Papa, on page 7, Gigi says the trip was after Lorian was born, and that he took both his new wife and new baby to introduce them to his father. But Lorian wasn’t born until December 15, and Gigi and Jane were back in the States by mid-November—there’s a Hemingway letter of late November documenting this. So once again he either misremembered or misled. But the spiritual truth is there.

  WHAT HE HAD

  Precede. “Downhill” quote is on page 345 of Islands, and “make love to who” passage is on page 344. “Both be alike” passage is on page 299–page 300 of Farewell. EH’s “outside all tribal law” entry in Mary’s diary is quoted on page 369–page 370 of her How It Was. “Felt the weight and strangeness inside” passage is on page 17 of Garden.

  Re that oft-quoted passage, and also re the word “tremulousness”: Frederick Crews used the word in his 1987 New York Review of Books essay (“Pressure Under Grace”), and the word put another image in my head: tuning fork. In his brilliant, bloodless dissection (disguised as a book review), Professor Crews quotes a passage from Mary’s memoir that has been much taken up by the latter-day EH psychologizers. It’s a mock interview that Mary’s husband created in 1953 for her apparent enjoyment, and it appears on page 368–page 69 of How It Was. I’ve heard this passage referred to as “the famous sodomy passage,” as if it were the smoking gun of smoking guns. EH is supposedly clowning with an imaginary interviewer. “Reporter: ‘Mr. Hemingway, is it true that your wife is a lesbian?’ Papa: ‘Of course not. Mrs. Hemingway is a boy.’ Reporter: ‘What are your favorite sports, sir?’ Papa: ‘Shooting, fishing, reading and sodomy.’ Reporter: ‘Does Mrs. Hemingway participate in these sports?’ Papa: ‘She participates in all of them.’ ” Concludes Crews: “The manually sodomized partner, we can infer, was Hemingway himself.” Well, maybe. And maybe not. Re Grace Hemingway and the psychic damage she may have inflicted on her child (not least by dressing him as a girl and twinning him with Marcelline), Crews writes: “In all likelihood what Grace wanted, beyond an enactment of some private cross-gender scheme, was a boy whose sexual identity would remain forever dependent upon her dictates and whims. If so, she gruesomely got her wish. The apparent effect of all that dolling and doting was not so much to lend Ernest a female identity as to implant in his mind a permanently debilitating confusion, anxiety, and anger.” Which only makes me think of Gigi.

  Chapter. I suppose the chapter represents my nearly twenty-five years of trying to think about EH’s tormented youngest son, since that night in Coconut Grove. I’ve tried to name in the text key people I interviewed, but here’s one source I didn’t name: C. E. “Abe” Abramson, a Missoula, Montana, real estate agent and voracious reader and all-around intellectual gadfly. He befriended Gigi early in Gigi’s Missoula years and stayed in touch with him until the end. Abramson and I have been talking about Gigi in one way or another since the Washington Post pieces. As is evident, I’m indebted hugely, and not just for this chapter, to John Hemingway and to Strange Tribe, and am proud to regard him as a latter-day friend and fellow searcher of unsolvable riddles. John has reproduced in his too-little-recognized book, at nearly full length in some cases, previously little-known correspondence between Hemingway and Gigi. Just as evident here will be my debt to Valerie Hemingway’s Running with the Bulls. Valerie and I know each other casually. I have heard her read from her memoir at Hemingway gatherings—the first time was at a Michigan Hemingway Society conference several years ago. She was in her late sixties then and seemed wise and exuded much dignity and was in the company of her son, Edward, a writer of, among other things, children’s tales. He was friendly, if wary.

  My indebtedness will also be evident to Lorian Hemingway’s beautifully titled and written Walk on Water. Lorian and I have communicated somewhat elliptically through the years. After the Washington Post pieces, she called to say I hadn’t gotten her father wrong, even if I had gotten some facts about him wrong. Like all of Gigi’s children, she remains skittish to talk to outsiders about her father, and who could blame her, or them? Gigi’s former wife, Ida, has also never consented to talk to me, even though our mutual friend Abe Abramson tried several times to intercede.

  Jeffrey Meyers’s piece in the Spring 1999 Virginia Quarterly Review was valuable, and I should also cite his concise reflections on Gigi in his Hemingway: Life into Art. Rolling Stone’s piece on Gigi, by John Colapinto, was published on September 5, 1992. E. L. Doctorow’s review of Garden, “Braver Than We Thought,” in The New York Times Book Review cited above, gave not only a line of thinking and feeling, but, as is evident, inspired one of my chapter titles. (He’s referring, however, only to EH, not to father and son.) A perceptive analysis of Gigi vis-à-vis Islands is Fred Ashe’s “ ‘A Very Attractive Devil’: Gregory Hemingway in Islands in the Stream,” in The Hemingway Review, Fall 2008. Court documents and arrest narratives and jail records, in both Montana and Florida, became their own little novels of textured detail. I was astonished to be able to obtain so easily the full record of Gigi’s death and autopsy from the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Department. I just went to the offices, and there the file was, stamped declassified. I was even allowed to make photocopies. In that file is a handwritten note from a department official to the effect that on October 9, 2001—nine days after her husband’s death—Ida Hemingway called and “stated that she would like to keep the file of her husband confidential.” She was told the procedures for getting the file sealed. This was done. But in early 2003 the file was unsealed, in connection with disputes and legal proceedings between Ida and several of Gigi’s disinherited children, including John Hemingway. (A settlement re the will was eventually reached, with terms kept secret.)

  Re dates of letters not obvious from the text: EH letter to Vera Scribner is February 18, 1952. Letter to Charles Scribner Jr. is February 25. Letters to his sons are February 22. Gigi’s reply: February 26. EH’s reply: March 2. EH’s letter to Mary Welsh re child-rearing is September 28, 1945. Gigi’s letter of apology to his father is May 3, 1954. EH’s letter re getting smashed in the “aircraft nonsense” is September 7, 1954. EH’s letter to his hospitalized son (“Do you have a good radio?”) is August 24, 1957.

  REENACTMENT

  Precede. I used arrest reports filed by both the Key Biscayne and Miami-Dade police departments; also newspaper clippings after Gigi’s death. Officer Nelia Real of KBPD declined to be interviewed, but her partner, Officer Ben Torres, spoke briefly to me, on the telephone.

  Chapter. Again, I used jail reports and medical-examiner documents and arrest affidavits, as well as secondary sources. Inevitably, there are time conflicts and other contradictions in the documents. If it isn’t possible to know the moment he died, 5:55 must be very close—within just minutes, apparently, of his mother’s death, half a century before, if you factor in the time differences, here to there, Eastern Standard Time to Pacific Standard Time. What a mystery.

  EPILOGUE: HUNGER OF MEMORY

  The Cézanne quote was in exhibit materials at a 2010 exhibition, Cézanne and American Modernism, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Death in the Afternoon quote is on page 122. Old Man quote is on page 31. Feast quote is on page 55–page 56. Garden quote is on page 239. The account of Hemingway’s death is from various sources, including my own Ketchum reporting, previous EH studies (bios and otherwise), and newspaper reports of the time. But I also crucially employed two pages of handwritten interview notes, and a typed document, from Baker, that I found at Princeton. Baker had interviewed Dr. Earle and Mary Hemingway as well as others, but in his bio made a more limited use of the materials. A valuable roundup of some of the contradictory things the press said at the time is John R. Bittner’s “Dateline Sun Valley: The Press Coverage of the Death of Ernest Hemingway,” collected in Hemingway and the Natural World, edited by Robert E. Fleming (see bibliography).

  The words on the Hemingway memorial at Sun Valley are from a eulogy delivered by Hemingway afte
r the death of his friend Gene Van Guilder, who died in a hunting accident (in October 1939). The eulogy was published in the Idaho Statesman on November 2, 1939. “You know you love the sea” quote is on page 239–page 40 of Islands. Letter to Patrick Hemingway is November 24, 1958. Letter to Faulkner is July 23, 1947. Michael Reynolds’s quote is in his “A Brief Biography,” previously cited. Turnbull’s reminiscence is in the January 16, 1967, New York Times Book Review. The account of EH’s kissing the Cuban flag, entered in his FBI file, was sent to Washington as a Foreign Service Despatch and titled “Ernest HEMINGWAY Gives Views on Cuban Situation.” It’s dated November 6, 1959, which was two days after he’d landed in Havana and kissed the flag. The log of EH’s cross-country trip is at JFK. Letter to George Saviers re not being able to be on his boat is June 14, 1960. Story of trying to get the swollen manuscript down to some kind of palatable size is in Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway. Re no record I can find that EH was ever on Pilar after May 19: four days before, at the annual Hemingway marlin-fishing tournament, Fidel and EH met for the first and only time. It sounds incredible, but el commandate, no deep-sea fisherman, won the two-day tournament without having rigged the outcome—or so the history books say, as well as my own research. From How It Was: “[H]e followed precisely the big-game fishing rules, hooking the fish and playing them, and his boatman made no attempt to gaff before he could grasp the leader, rather than the line.… [T]he combined weight of his fish earned him Ernest’s silver trophy cup, which he presented that evening at the dock. On the way home in the car Ernest murmured, ‘He said he’d read The Bell in Spanish and used its ideas in the Sierra Maestra.’ ” In several of the photographs of the two giants shaking hands, EH looks terrifyingly cracked. EH’s letter to Mary from Madrid re “just going to lie quiet now and try to rest” is September 23, 1960.

  Finally: a note on the picture captions. In some cases, I am certain, down to the day, down to nearly the minute, of the time and place an image was recorded. In other cases, I’ve been able to supply only approximate information. Hemingway, meticulous in so many ways in his record-keeping, was often curiously lax when it came to documenting photographs—and sometimes he was flat wrong. The audiovisual specialists at JFK were very helpful—and, like me, often exasperated in trying to fix a date and place.

  CODA

  ON THE CURIOUS AFTERLIFE OF PILAR

  On September 17, 1955, at his Havana home, Ernest Hemingway set down in blue ink on a sheet of onionskin letterhead stationery a last will and testament, in which he left his entire estate and property to his wife and nothing to his children. “I have intentionally omitted to provide for my children … as I repose complete confidence in my beloved wife Mary to provide for them according to written instructions I have given her,” he wrote. The instructions were said to be in a letter, dated the same day as the will. The letter is blacked out, so it is impossible to know what he said.

  On August 25, 1961—roughly eight weeks after the suicide—a facsimile copy of the handwritten will appeared in The New York Times. The day before, Mary had submitted the document for probate. The day before that, she wrote a signed and dated statement of her own that contained several errors of fact and included this: “Following the instructions of a letter—which was accompanied by his will … I have given Ernest’s yacht, the Pilar to Gregorio Fuentes.” Through the years, Gregorio maintained to interviewers and friends that he had been bequeathed the boat.

  I’m not so sure. As noted in the text, there exists a letter that Mary sent to Walter and Nita Houk, from New York, in February 1964, in which she said, “We’re letting Pilar rot away in Cuba because I know Papa couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else being her ‘commander.’ ” It doesn’t sound from that as if she’d made the boat Gregorio’s legal property.

  In How It Was, Mary’s 1976 memoir, she describes how Gregorio had come to the finca shortly after the suicide to talk about what might happen to Pilar now that her master was gone. Mary writes that she told Gregorio to remove the rods and reels and outriggers and other paraphernalia and then “take her out and sink her in the current.” Gratefully, that didn’t happen. Mary concludes this section of her memoir: “As it turned out, the Cubans used Pilar as a workboat for a while, and then installed her (poor thing) as an exhibit on the Finca lawn, so I was told.”

  In 2005, when I saw Pilar in Cuba, an officer at the finca handed me a two-page document titled “Yate El Pilar” (The Yacht Pilar) in which there was this sentence: “Gregorio kept it in Cojimar until he decided to give it to the Revolutionary Government. It was moved from Cojimar to Finca Vigía, as the Museum’s main exhibit.” No dates are provided. The document, which is an overview history of the boat during and after Hemingway’s ownership, is riddled with errors. But there the boat sits.

  So much for ownership issues. But there is a stickier question: Is the boat sitting on Hemingway’s old tennis court at the Museo Hemingway the real boat?

  At least four times through the 1970s and 1980s the boat said to be Pilar was removed from the property and taken away to shipyards for repairs, hauled overland to Casablanca and Cárdenas and other places. The restorers would do their work, cosmetic or more substantive, and then she’d be brought back to the finca at the village of San Francisco de Paula on wide-load trucks. The comings and goings fueled rumors of a “fake” or “replica” boat. Somebody has switched the boats. It’s what I heard said almost as soon as I had begun working on this book in earnest about seven years ago.

  It’s true that you can look at certain photographs of the displayed boat that were made, say, in the mid-seventies, and see that some things are off from the boat Hemingway had been master of. She looks too bulky and upright—or might this be because of the angle from which the shots were taken? The flying bridge is wrong—but could that just be a result of quick repair work? Other and more superficial things, including insignia and the lettering of her name, are also incorrect.

  The rumors of a fake boat intensified among American Hemingway watchers in 1984, when the book publisher Lyle Stuart brought out an English edition of a Spanish work titled Hemingway in Cuba by a young Havana journalist named Norberto Fuentes. (The nonfiction book had been published that same year in Cuba.) Valuable in many respects, Hemingway in Cuba nonetheless contains numerous errors, some of which can probably be attributed to translation. In a section on Pilar, there is this: “In the famous Chullima shipyards on the city’s waterfront, an exact replica of Hemingway’s yacht was built. The work is of such precision and high quality that not even Gregorio Fuentes can tell which is the original.… Neither Gregorio nor anybody else can explain the reason for the new replica. The captain of the Pilar will often wistfully ask his friends at Cojimar, ‘Why a double for my boat—why?’ ” Fuentes reportedly later said that he hadn’t really meant “replica” and “double,” that the passage got bollixed up in translation.

  The boat at the finca clearly has only one screw—I verified this for myself. There’s no question Pilar ran two engines and two screws in her day. Hemingway speaks of this in many letters. As was noted in the text, the purchase order specified a small “4-cylinder Lycoming straight drive engine” that was to be used for trolling purposes and that was “to be installed as a unit entirely independent of main power plant, and all controls and instruments are to be at steering position.” In With Hemingway, Arnold Samuelson tells of taking a Pilar guest for a swim beneath the boat as she lay at anchor to see both propellers, the smaller of which was at “the side.” In another passage, he describes Pilar bucking headlong into the waves, with both engines hooked up, “and sometimes she rolled so much we heard the side propeller thrump when it came out of the water.” The Maestro doesn’t mention whether the little one was located at port or starboard, only the thrumping.

  An identification number for the hull can’t nail the case because, as was noted in the text, Pilar was built from a stock Wheeler hull. At Wheeler and many other boat manufacturers of the thirties, especially at
the stock production yards, a “builder’s plate” made of bronze or copper, with the hull number listed on it, got affixed to the boat after a boat was built and was ready to be given to her owner. Often the plaque got attached in the cockpit by the steering controls. The hull number on the boat at the finca was and is 576. I have never been able to find a piece of Wheeler paper that verifies 576 as the manufacturer’s hull number of Hemingway’s boat. The number is not on the original purchase order or bill of sale or various boat registry papers from the Department of Commerce. And even if there were such a piece of paper, or even if Hemingway had referenced this number in a letter (why would he have done so?), what would it really prove? For who is to say that somebody in a back shed at a Havana shipyard didn’t make a lookalike builder’s plate with that number on it and affix it to the boat? That’s the problem: the hull number wasn’t built into the hull itself, but rather attached—and thus detachable.

  And yet: there seems no question that the boat on display at the finca is built from an authentic Wheeler hull. Some years ago a Wheeler family member went to Cuba and verified this. But is it possible that what is there is some other Wheeler from the thirties, some “cousin,” not the actual one Hemingway owned? You can make the argument go on and on.

  It’s a fact that Pilar had two main-motor replacements in her seagoing life. The flying bridge was added. Her outriggers got built and rebuilt. She underwent wartime alterations—the head in the main cabin got preempted for radio gear, for instance. Hemingway’s boat is a metaphor for endurance, but changes were always being made to her in her owner’s lifetime.

  Regarding the issue of lookalike boats: Until a few years ago, there was a thirty-eight-foot Wheeler Playmate, built in the mid-thirties, looking very much like Pilar, anchored outside the International Game Fish Association museum near Fort Lauderdale. “Pilar’s Sistership” announced the plaque beside it, with three errors of fact in its seven lines of type.