Hemingway's Boat (41 page)

In the early part, he reports on
Pilar
herself, telling of how, on foot and with a flashlight and with the wind howling and trees falling and the rain in sheets and wires lashing down around him, he fought his way to the
navy yard in the middle of the night. (His car, which he'd left in front of the house, because he feared for the rickety garage, was flooded out.) Earlier, in Sunday daylight, he'd done what he could, shifting
Pilar
to the safest part of the sub pens, securing her with fifty-two dollars' worth of new ropes and cables, wrapping the lines themselves with heavy canvas as a ward against the fraying. The Coast Guard had recently seized a rum-running boat, and this scow was tied up next to his own. The boat was secured to the dock by lines tied to ringbolts in the stern, and he knew that they'd jerk right out when the storm came, and that the “booze boat” would then come smashing right into
Pilar
, busting her into pieces. He told himself:
If my boat goes tonight, I'll never get enough money in one place again to get another
.

The remainder of “Who Murdered the Vets?” is about what Hemingway saw at Camp No. 5 at Lower Matecumbe, after he and some other volunteers from Key West had gone up to be part of a rescue effort. Eight out of 187 vets at the camp had survived. Bodies were strung high in trees, “beginning to be too big for their blue jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry.” Corpses everywhere: “Hey, there's another one.” He's got “low shoes, copper-riveted overalls, blue percale shirt without collar, by Jesus that's the thing to wear, nothing in his pockets. Turn him over. Face tumefied beyond recognition.” Hemingway seems to have written the piece in one sitting, five days after the storm was gone and he was home in Key West. On the same day, he told Perkins that he'd not seen such death since the lower Piave in 1918. Five days later, in another letter, he told Sara Murphy he was refusing payment. He wanted the editors to print a disclaimer to the effect: “We disapprove of Mr. H. and do not want anyone to ever be sucked in by anything else he may ever write but he is a very expensive reporter who happened to be on the spot and because he does not believe in making money out of murder he has written this for us for nothing.”

His own inner hurricane of anxiety and bitterness, driving him deep into a new round of sleeplessness and old thoughts of self-destruction, came with the reception of his book by those angleworms in New York. He'd called them that on page 21 of
Green Hills of Africa
. Not quite a hundred pages onward, he'd spoken of book reviewers as “the lice who crawl on literature.” It was as if he was begging for it, and they, the lice, the worms in the bottle, obliged.

Hemingway and his wife were booked into a suite at the Westbury Hotel at Sixty-ninth and Madison. He'd not been in Manhattan before when one of his books came out and he was doing so now against his better judgment. On the official day of publication, the two most prestigious papers in the city,
The New York Times
and the
New York Herald Tribune
, creamed him.

On A-1 of the
Herald Trib
is a pair of three-deck headlines, the head on the left about the British being cool to a peace bid by Mussolini, the one on the right about the cooling of mobster Dutch Schultz. (He's just been gunned down in New Jersey.) His review's on page 17. Just as Max has promised, there's an ad for the book opposite the review: “Published Today.
Green Hills of Africa
. By Ernest Hemingway. The story of a month's big-game hunt in Africa told with the movement, beauty and suspense of a fine novel.” Lewis Gannett's syndicated Books and Things goes down the left side of the page. There's a line about “the increasingly thin books of Ernest Hemingway,” a writer who seems to be evincing “the tired passion to escape, the sinking into contentment with the odor of mere blood—the farther from home the better.” Shit.

The
Times
review is on page 19, alongside the headline “Needlework Art Seen in 2 Exhibits.” The critic is John Chamberlain, who's not much over thirty, but who looks twenty, a stringbean New Deal liberal. Chamberlain, who's fairly new to the paper, is the first daily reviewer in
Times
history. He produces five columns a week, and his alive prose in the staid old girl has become a morning must-read for all the park-bench intellectuals who both wish and don't wish they had a job to go to. John Chamberlain can't abide Hemingway's book:

In the first paragraph, Chamberlain has quoted in full the offending “angleworms” passage, in which the “I” of the story opines: “ ‘Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is
done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle.' ”

The next day, in the
Saturday Review of Literature
, Bernard DeVoto, a critic with an even larger reputation, says of
Green Hills:
“A pretty small book for a big man to write.”

Some good reviews appeared that weekend, both in New York and across the country. On Sunday, October 27, he got what amounted to a qualified rave in
The New York Times Book Review
—and that was far more important than any daily review. (He didn't make the cover, though. He made page 3 . Mark Twain's notebooks and a Twain critical study got the cover.) But the damage had been done, certainly in Hemingway's view. The initial press run of 10,550 copies proved sufficient. He would later tell Perkins that the three things that ruined his book were its high pricing, his remarks about the critics, and the company's failure to push back at the early bad notices with sustained advertising.

The most wounding review was Edmund Wilson's, in
The New Republic
. It was in the issue of December 11, 1935, leading the Winter Book Section. It was lengthy and uncompromising, and seems to mark the moment when Wilson turned on Hemingway more or less for the long haul.

In the nearly two months since he'd left New York and come back to Key West, Hemingway had been consoling himself with afternoons on
Pilar
. The natural world itself is always there, the refuge. To read his letters of November and December to Max Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos and Sara Murphy and a handful of others is to gain new feelings about what would overtake Ernest Hemingway, under some mountains, far from salt water, on a Sunday morning a quarter century later.

On November 20, he wrote to the young Spanish American writer Prudencio de Pereda, whom he'd befriended in the past few years and whom he regretted not being able to get together with in New York. “[T]he thing to do is write and keep on writing,” he said. “Am feeling a little discouraged myself knowing that I've written a good book and having to read that it is shit etc. but then I always feel discouraged in the fall along with the trees and everything else.”

In early December, he's telling Sara that the mince meat she'd sent was marvelous. He talks of his “late age,” and of how he seemed to be made up of two Hemingways: the one who could stay out all night and drink, and the other with an atavistic midwestern conscience who somehow needed to keep on working and try to get to bed—if not to sleep—by ten o'clock, and hopefully not doing it alone. He and his boy Patrick had been out shooting the day before and “never saw a dove nor snipe nor plover so finally shot 2 buzzard, 1 chicken hawk and a large crane.” He closed, “With very much love much love and love also with love.”

In mid-December, Fitzgerald wrote to Hemingway. We don't have that letter, only Hemingway's reply of December 16. Scott must have registered small notes of reservation about
Green Hills
. “You know you are like a brilliant mathematician who loves mathematics truly and always gets the wrong answers to the problems,” Hemingway said. He went on: how is it that every time you meet an old friend, you have “to get stinking drunk and do every possible thing to humiliate yourself.” Despite it, his friends still love him, he said. Why, up in Saranac, he and Sara had spent a whole afternoon talking about how much they cared about him, he wrote. But then, softening, the bully goes away: “The more I think back to it the better book Tender Is The Night is. This may irritate you but it's the truth. Why don't you come down here?”

The next day, Hemingway wrote to Perkins. (It's the letter where he cites the three things that killed his book.) He'd only heard about Wilson's review. His books were no longer being judged on whether they were good
or lousy on their own merits, he wrote, but on how they stacked up against “A In Our Time B The Sun Also Rises C A Farewell to Arms D Death in the Afternoon. You may have noticed how this last which was hailed as lousy when it came out is now referred to with the hushhushes. It all gives me a pain in the ass.” Toward the close: “I feel sort of bitter about a lot of things but I always get over that.”

That same day he writes to Dos Passos, making cutting remarks about Fitzgerald. He and his family have $300 to get through Christmas, he says. A page or so later he's on Wilson again (although he still hasn't seen the review): “After all Bunny Wilson did speak well of me once so he has a right to try to put me out of business.” Goddamn it, he'd written a good book. He'd like to get the tommy gun he shot the sharks with on Bimini and go up to New York and spray the offices of
The New Republic
and a few other places just to “give shitdom a few martyrs.” Next three words: “and include myself.”

Four days later, he writes again to Fitzgerald. Scott has answered his of the sixteenth. (This second Fitzgerald letter is also lost, but in it he must have spoken about a list of health problems.) Hemingway's reply has a bit of the usual bullying and condescension, but his dominant tone is solicitous. It's the caring of someone redeemed by his own suffering—momentarily. “And you with a bad liver, lung and heart. That's damned awful,” he says.

If he wakes on the boat, he can generally go right back to sleep. But even if he can't, just lying there on
Pilar
makes it all right, somehow. He can just consider his life and “
not give a damn
—it's a hell of a help.”

Seven years before, in and around the time he'd first visited Key West, working on
A Farewell to Arms
, he has Lieutenant Frederic Henry, who's been blown up on the Italian front, alone in the American hospital in
Milan. He says, “I slept heavily except once I woke sweating and scared and then went back to sleep trying to stay outside of my dream.”

Sleep and fright. Outside his dream. On either the final day or the second to the last day of 1935, the insomniac wrote again to his editor, and again he railed against the critics—he could bring out
Hamlet
and they wouldn't like it if his name was on it. “[A]s I say I was never around N.Y. when a book came out before and certainly never will be again.” The bastards who write the columns hate his guts because they think he's loaded, and because they know he despises
them
, and all they can remember is “how wonderful Lady Brett was in the sun also rises.” And yet at the close, this small redemption: “Caught a sailfish yesterday and one the day before. First two decent days to fish in a month. Good luck to you and all your family. Say Happy New Year for us.”

The next summer, Hemingway returned to Bimini for almost six weeks. (His family was with him for most of it.) The year after that, 1937, he took
Pilar
to Bimini in late May, hoping to fish for most of the summer but found he could spend only a fractured run of days there—the world kept intruding on him. The Spanish Civil War was a year old by then, and his involvement in it, specifically with a film,
The Spanish Earth
, supporting the Republican cause, was one of the things taking him away. His affair with Martha Gellhorn was six months old by then, and this was an even greater thing taking him away, and not just from Bimini. Indeed, I've long wondered whether he already knew, by the late fall of 1935, when he had come back from New York and was deep inside his sleep fright, that an entire way of life was cracking beneath him—Bimini, Key West, all of it—and that something farther-shored was going to take its place.