Hemingway's Boat (12 page)

That Friday night, the sixth, he went to Uncle Gus Pfeiffer's apartment and showed a roomful of guests three reels of home movies from the safari. Sometime that weekend, he saw Edwin Balmer, the editor of
Redbook
magazine. Balmer, a native Chicagoan, fifteen years older, had gone out of his way a decade and a half before to try to help twenty-year-old Hemingway get published. Hemingway was the famous man now, and the veteran editor was the one with awe in his eye and eagerness in his voice, hoping to snare some new piece of Hemingway fiction. Hemingway hadn't forgotten Balmer's earlier kindness, when he was so raw, back in Illinois and up in Michigan. “I am too grateful to you for the trouble you took with me when my stuff was worthless and for encouragement and good advice you gave me,” Hemingway wrote from Key West, four months after they'd met in New York, addressing him still as “Mr. Balmer.”

Editors of
The Saturday Evening Post
also tried to woo him—they'd be eager to pay $4,000 for a piece of fiction and up to $2,500 for any article he'd like to write.

The wooed man also saw—abortively—a sad, anxious, apparently potted F. Scott Fitzgerald, who'd come up to New York from Baltimore for the publication of
Tender Is the Night
, the novel that both Fitzgerald and Max Perkins were praying would resuscitate a fading reputation. Fitzgerald was not quite seven years from his early death in the screenwriting mills of Hollywood.
Tender
, of course, is the story of an impossibly charmed couple, the Divers, Dick and Nicole, whose lives are charmed no longer. Doctor Diver is mysteriously going down; he's lost some essence of himself, some indefinable emotional vitality. The pride and discipline are draining away. Just as mysteriously, his emotionally ill spouse is regaining her health.
The creator of this beautifully written but structurally difficult-to-follow fable hadn't published a novel since
The Great Gatsby
. That was nine years before. In between had come Zelda Fitzgerald's breakdowns and institutionalizations, and the collapse of the world's economy. The twenties were over, and the poet of the Jazz Age feared in his bones his book would fail. As critic Alfred Kazin once wrote, Fitzgerald had labored over
Tender
while “struggling against a mountain of debt, his notoriety as a drunk and a has-been, and his despair over his schizophrenic wife.” So there is a way to think about Fitzgerald's achievement in heroic terms, even if so much of his ruin was self-inflicted. He feared for his book's failure even as the friend and fellow author who'd supplanted him at Scribners—and who'd just bought a new boat, and before whom the supplanted man was apparently behaving like a pathetic drunk—seemed to do little else but succeed, at least insofar as Scott's blurred vision could register. I say “apparently” behaving like a drunk because we have no one else's word for what happened that weekend but Hemingway's, and it is so brief that it's hardly word at all (though there are other accounts of how badly Scott was behaving in general, waiting for his book to appear).

Fifteen months earlier, in January 1933, also in New York, Scott had met Ernest in a drunken state, and that time, too, things had gone badly. Edmund Wilson was present and recorded the night in his journal:

According to the late critic-biographer Matthew Bruccoli, who wrote acutely about Hemingway and Fitzgerald for decades, the 1933 encounter possibly prompted the following entry from Fitzgerald in his notebooks: “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.” But they did, a year later, on that April weekend in New York. What survives is an oft-quoted letter from Hemingway to Fitzgerald, written about eight weeks later, from Key West, after Hemingway had read and made his thumbs-down critical judgments about
Tender
. (By then, however, Hemingway had slowly begun
to revise his first opinions of the novel, albeit grudgingly.) Fitzgerald ached to know what Hemingway felt. He had allowed himself almost to grovel for Hemingway's response. “For God's sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can't hurt my feelings,” Scott had written on May 10, a month after their meeting. It was a brief note. What he got back was a long letter dated May 28 from a supposed friend who knew he had every psychological advantage; a friend who by turns bullied and lectured and counseled and pitied and forgave him: pure Hemingway. It couldn't have helped matters that the letter contained brilliant and offhand turns of phrase. “I'd like to see you and talk about things with you sober,” Hemingway wrote. “You were so damned stinking in N.Y. we didn't get anywhere.” (More on that later.)

Tender Is the Night
, published at $2.50 a copy and contracted to earn its author thirty-seven-and-a-half cents a copy in royalties, went through three small printings and sold about fifteen thousand copies in all, a disappointment, but not an out-and-out commercial failure, as has often been said. It netted its strapped author an eventual $5,104.65. But what the novel has come to represent in American literature obviously has no price.

Something else apparently happened to Hemingway that weekend, involving a woman who, so far as I know, has never been identified in print. That is close to astonishing considering this long-dead woman's claimed importance—by Hemingway himself—as the principal inspiration for what is one of his two or three greatest short fictions, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The extravagantly wealthy Manhattan society matron, according to Hemingway, invited him to tea and presented him with an alluring offer. (You might also call it provocative.) She would foot the bill for a return trip to Africa, apparently whenever he wished, as soon as he wished, as long as she could go along, accompanying Pauline. Carlos Baker says briefly of this incident: “As Ernest later told the story, he considered the lady's offer and politely declined.” Baker doesn't say her name, either in his text or notes, and neither will her name be found among his archived papers in Firestone Library at Princeton.

I believe, however, that Hemingway left behind enough clues, in both life and art, some deliberate, some inadvertent, to allow us to identify her. The deliberate ones he inserted into “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” a parable about many things, but perhaps most centrally about the corruptions of wealth, and about what those corruptions have done to a kept man who
once saw himself as the possessor of a true writing gift but is now dying bitterly from gangrene on the African plain. The man in the fiction wishes to blame his fate as a failed writer on his rich bitch of a wife, whom he has never loved, not really.

The real-life woman breathing behind this work, or so I believe, controlled a fortune in the neighborhood of $179 million. Hers was one of the greatest and best-known surnames in America. The name stood for money, for sport, for art, for philanthropy, for noblesse oblige. She would have been twenty-three years older than the not quite thirty-five-year-old author who came to call on an April day before he entrained home to Key West. She was a big-boned, middle-aged widow, well preserved, with high flair, with noted cheek, with literary abilities of her own (she'd published a lot of poetry in her youth, some of it quite erotic for its time), whose financier husband had died seven years before of an attack of acute indigestion, leaving her the owner of one of the finest racing stables in America. Her name was Helen Hay Whitney, who'd won the Kentucky Derby, with Twenty Grand three years earlier, and she very much intrigued her guest.

I believe Hemingway both wanted and didn't want us to know her name. It's almost as if Hemingway was baiting his future chroniclers with hints, not to say courting libel in his own day. What a dangerous game, dangerous down to the point of giving the “made-up” woman in your story the same first name as that of the person with whom you'd been to tea in the enraptured afterglow of buying your boat. (According to Hemingway, “tea” was a few knock-backs of whiskey.) When the story was published, Helen Hay Whitney, with all her wealth, would have been very much and litigiously alive. But that's not why the incident is worth pausing to think about. Rather, it's because it goes straight to the heart of Hemingway's method of creation: telling terrific lies about real people, rearranging and transposing and conjoining, so that what he made up was somehow truer than if it had actually happened.

“Stop it. Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?” pleads the woman in the story whose name is Helen.

“I don't like to leave anything,” answers her husband. “I don't like to leave things behind.”

What happened, apparently, is that the widow of Payne Whitney had read about Hemingway in the papers, had seen his photograph. She saw the papers of April 4 in which the author stood beside his wife and held his banded fedora and told the ship-news reporters of his intention to return
home to Florida “to work like hell and make enough money so that I can go back to Africa and really learn something about lions.”

She sent him a note. Please come by. Hemingway doesn't say where the visit took place. Were just the two of them present? His couched words in subsequent years seem to suggest that. According to Hemingway, his hostess told him there'd be no need to worry about making more money for Africa because she had all the money required, and would be pleased to share some of it, since money was something only to be used well by those who possessed it.

Was she propositioning him with her money? Certainly you could construe that from what Hemingway later said, when he was spinning it all into myth, even though he also seemed to go out of his way in his several written accounts (there are only the written ones to go on, although Hemingway is said to have told the story more than once to friends) to say how “sincere” her offer was, how truly “nice” a person she was. It's possible her offer was no more and no less than what it purported to be on the surface. Where does the truth reside?

Here's Hemingway writing of the incident in a January 1, 1947, letter, a decade after “The Snows” was published, to General Buck Lanham:

Where is that note she supposedly sent to him? I wish I knew.

The dying man in the fiction is filling with gangrene, while his spouse, the good and rich bitch, “this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent,” waits with him for an evacuation plane from Nairobi. The story takes place over the course of most of one day and that night. The rescue plane doesn't
arrive in time. Harry dies because he has done something so simple as to fail to use iodine two weeks previously when a thorn had scratched his knee, as he and his wife had crouched closer with their cameras to a herd of waterbuck. And so he goes in and out of his dreams and deliriums and acid accusations while the rot rises and the hyenas inch closer. “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.” The things he'd never get to write are presented in the form of five italicized and intensely poetic flashbacks.

But it's really himself Harry hates. “He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it … by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook.”

As I have said, there's no question that Hemingway's imagination is conflating and rearranging and transposing and upending several women and different events from his life in the service of his art. He's amalgamating two wives, one a former, one a current, both older than himself, both of whom, in one way or another, in lesser or greater ways, had kept him. At the time he wrote “The Snows,” Hemingway had been married just twice. If he'd had four wives by the mid-thirties, perhaps each would have made it in, in one rearranged and unflattering way or another. There are clearly disquieting messages for Pauline Hemingway, but there's no question that Hadley is a rearranged presence, too, and so also Agnes von Kurowsky, the Red Cross nurse for whom the young volunteer ambulance driver had fallen, so headlong, during his recovery from shrapnel wounds in a Milan hospital in World War I.

“The Snows” is the story in which Hemingway makes the famous crack about his friend Fitzgerald and his “romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.' And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott.” When Fitzgerald saw that passage on page 200 of the August 1936
Esquire
, he wrote to his friend and asked him to lay off in print. Hemingway apparently wrote a nasty letter back, which we don't have. For republished editions of the story, Hemingway changed Fitzgerald's name to Julian. But there was no chance any serious Hemingway student could have missed the true target of his scorn.