Hemingway's Boat (61 page)
Authors: Paul Hendrickson
As they were purring through the channel, with the Morro Castle in the background, Walter climbed up to the flying bridge with his Argus and asked Hemingway if he could make a pictureâthe one you've already seen. Walter's girlfriend was on the bridge, too, in a red-checkered sunsuit and a white tennis hat.
There were several swims in the turquoise cove at Santa MarÃa del Mar, where they lay at anchor for three hours, and that wonderful lunch of alligator pears and fresh fish washed down with wine and beer at the folded-down table in the shade of the cockpit, and the naps, and long periods of semi-wakefulness, and just gazing out over foamy blue hills of ocean with very little being said by anyone. At length, they pulled in the anchors and glided back toward “the wicked city,” as Walter wrote in his diary entry. From that diary: “It hit with a bang that evening in the Floridita, when we were suddenly surrounded by mobs of people saluting him. A large part of the mob was Marita, Marchesa de San Felice, of the Italian Embassy, abandoned and wild. Quantities of champagne and caviar flowedâenough, in fact, that taken on top of the three double-sized daiquiris I had just had, I didn't stay to see the party over.” Walter has a memory of Hemingway stumbling toward his station wagon, the Italian diplomat's wife on his arm.
The next day, Sunday, Hemingway rang up Walter very early at his apartment in Vedado. He was ready to go out on the boat again. Still hungover, Walter picked up Nita at her boardinghouse and drove to the waterfront. This time the Marchesa was on board and her presence more or less ruined the mood, at least for Walter.
Fifty-three years from that birthday weekend, on my second visit to Woodland Hills, Walter and I decided more or less on the spur to go on a picnic in a little park close to his home. At Gelson's Market on Mulholland Highway, we bought Santa Fe chicken sandwiches, which the clerk put into pre-molded plastic containers. Walter had brought a small cooler from home with Cokes in it. He'd packed carefully into a wicker picnic basket real silverware and glasses and cloth napkins. The park was very hot. Some kids off a school bus, on an outing, were making too much noise up on a hill. We looked for shade and, unable to find any, took a cement table in the middle of a brown field. We spread out our lunch. Nearby was
a trash barrel being picked at by large green flies. Walter said he used to bring Nita here in her wheelchair. Mangy-looking squirrels came close; Walter eyed them in disgust. He fell quiet. We ate the sandwiches. We weren't dining on alligator pears on Ernest Hemingway's boat with a marlin leaping off the stern; no, we were at this ugly picnic table in this too-hot park in greater Los Angeles.
I said something about his need not to talk. “Well, I guess it's my way,” he said, “or at least my way now. But it also comes out of the tradition of sailing shipsâspending three months at sea, and you've said it all to your mate. And you save the talk for the tense moments of instructionâif a line breaks and you need a rope and have to act fast. It becomes a matter of luck almost. A superstition. That's how the connection is made. If you talk too much, you divert attention from other things that may need attention.”
Suddenly, I said, with no idea I was going to say it: “Fuck all those critics who wouldn't accept him after 1930.” I added quickly I was sorry for my profanity.
“It's a good Anglo-Saxon word. Why not?”
At length we packed up and went back to Gaona Street.
This was in 2004. I now know so much more about this proud, lonely old man, with his disposition to silences and emotional containment. The secrets have come out, or many of them. I've heard him talk of his regrets, most of which have to do with family. Not too long ago, as I write, I got an e-mail from Walter that made me sad. He said he could no longer afford to “overlook accumulating indications. Am trying not to make this just the old codger wailing gloom-and-doom for the next decade or so. Mortality just now seems not as fearsome as the scrambling of the mind. I think. I don't speak of this because no one knows how to respond except to say nonsense, you'll live to be 105 and I don't need that. Or pity.”
Too many times, on visits to Walter's, I've found myself exclaiming, “You
knew
the man.” And he'll shrug and say something like, “I arrived at my own conclusions. I didn't know about this Hemingway industry. I was a young man in Havana in love with a young woman and it just happened.” He'll invariably add: “I know what I know.”
On a recent visit, he talked about being depressed. He said he was afraid of what he might do at the endâ“you know, breaking down or something.” He said he'd begun to feel almost panicky.
“Do you ever think about suicide, Walter?” I wanted to stuff the words back in.
“Of course. Often there doesn't seem very much point to hanging
around. I've fantasized going out in one great burstâright through that plate glass behind you, after the tenth martini.” The glass window and sliding door to which he was pointing led out onto the deck and to the live oak. He erupted into a laugh. “Don't worry, I don't think I would. Too much of a mess.”
Three weeks before he took Walter for his first cruise on
Pilar
, Hemingway's mother died in Memphis at age seventy-nine. Grace Hemingway was an old, bewildered woman who'd lost her mind and was often found wandering around her daughter Sunny's house in the middle of the night. They'd stuck her in a convalescent home, and when the staff there could no longer abide her, she'd ended up for several weeks in the mental ward of a county hospital. Although Hemingway had paid the costs, and had arranged for the church bells in the village below his house to toll on the day of the burial, he'd not attended the funeral. In a letter at the end of August, Hemingway made an accounting of the amount of recent death and dying: his mother; his father-in-law's losing battle with prostate cancer; his first grandson (Bumby's child), dead five hours after delivery; four of the
finca
's dogs poisoned by thieves; four cats lost or killed but in any case missing.
If July had been hot, August was hotter yet. Writing to Charlie Scribner on September 9, he talked of how there were just no damned fish in the Stream. It had to be the heat. Ordinarily he'd be out on the boat today, a Sunday, but, shit, why not stay home and save some gas and bait? Later in this letter, circling back to some of those who'd died, including Max Perkins, four years before: “But I have been so conditioned about it that I think of death now like a possible blow-out on a tire on a transcontinental motor trip. It is only something that has to be figured in.”
A letter of September 19 to Scribner: “There have been no dolphin, albacore, small tuna or bonito. There are only the very big marlin now which, with the heat, are down deep and should be drifted for with boats about 80 and 100 fathoms down. I did this Sunday but caught nothing. Picked up about a 30 lb. wahoo trolling home when it was almost dark.” Writing again to Charlie the next day, a watery reprieve: “Caught one 200 lb marlin just before it got dark. He was foul hooked near the vent and jumped very wildly (as who wouldn't). The leader finally caught around his tail and with a straight pull he ran off about 300 yards of line. I killed him in less than 15 minutes but when I had him on top of the water comeing into the boat with a big sea running a shark hit him.” Toward the end of this typed letter
of September 20, 1951: “The paper said this morning that the last three days were the hottest in the history of Cuba.”
No fish to speak of. Unrelenting heat. Death at every turn. It was almost as if he understood by these omens what was coming, ten days hence, middle of a Los Angeles night, and of his own role in it, which he'd deny for the rest of his life.
*
For the balance, Hemingway and Dos Passos and Shipman (who must have been a hell of a sport), went around Montparnasse that fall, scrounging the dough with IOUs to friends and barkeeps. They brought the big canvas home in a taxi, and when it began to billow in the wind like a sail, Hemingway made the driver slow to a crawl. In 1926, when he and Hadley separated, Hemingway moved the painting to her new apartment. In 1931 he asked to borrow it back for five years. He never returned it. Today
The Farm
hangs in the National Gallery of Art, its value in the millions.
â
For two months, Hemingway couldn't get rat-faced James Jones out of his spleen. On April 11, to Scribner (it's the letter in which he's telling of his breakfast of rye crisps and of how enjoyable it is to take a day off), he says, “All I hope is that you can make all the money in the world out of him before he takes that over-dose of sleeping pills or whatever other exit he elects or is forced into. In the meantime I wish him no luck at all and hope he goes out and hangs himself as soon as plausible.” Next paragraph: “All this written by a boy who resolved to be a good Christian all day today anyway before biteing on the nail tomorrow.” Nine days earlier, Walter and Nita have been out to the
finca
for a swim. “Black Dog lay nobly and serenely at his master's feet,” Walter records in his diary. “The afternoon was calm. We left with an armful of books.” Six weeks later, May 18, 1951: Hemingway is boiling again. Just yesterday, he's completed
A Sea Chase
and so has laid in a couple of big steaks to celebrate. He's typing letters this afternoon with his usual jumpy spaces. On his desk is a letter from Scribner accusing him of “malice.” Look, Charlie, he writes, very sorry I got you so angry. I get exhausted after a day's work. No malice against the Jones boy. When's it okay not to bet on another horse? Three paragraphs down: “Malice is a rough word to use in a letter.” It's as if that word has lit the fuse: “Max was Max with five daughters and an idiot wife. Tom Wolfe was a one book boy and a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice. Scott was a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money.” He postscripts twice in pencil: “Please don't be offended by any of this and remember I am writing from fondness. Glass OK. with usual pm decline. Hurricane seems to be petering out.”
â¡
Re the stress: Patrick Hemingway, eighteen, had suffered an undiagnosed concussion in a car crash in Key West (Gigi was driving), and shortly after, on a visit to Cuba, he complained of headaches and went into deliriums and turned violent. He was given shock treatments. For a month, his father slept on a mat in the hall outside his room. Others, including Pauline, over from Key West, helped with the nursing, too, but Hemingway, assuming charge, took most of the midnight-to-dawn shifts. For something like forty-six days, Patrick had to be fed rectally. Hemingway said he averaged two hours sleep in twenty-four. His blood pressure spiked. To escape, he drankâand red-coppered his hair.
§
In one of their steamer trunks was a book called
The Joy of Cooking
, a wedding present from the Hemingways the previous April. The inscription: “For Nita and Walter, hoping the new joy of cooking won't over-shadow the old. Love from Papa.”
That Idaho night, the trouting took place in a moonrise, on the Henrys Fork of the Snake, with the Centennial Mountains rising on one side and the Tetons on the far other and with lodgepole pines standing up on the near bank like spooky sixty-foot stalks of corn. Suddenly, after a 9:00 p.m. dinner, Ernest Hemingway's middle son said, “So why don't we go out?”
I remember how we walked single file, in our waders and fishing vests, down a silvered path, and how Patrick entered the stream so noiselessly. The water was very cold and up to our waists. Everything was so quiet, so absent of urban sounds. Patrick fished with a black graphite rod and a beautiful antique reel and a peach-colored line to which he had knotted a size 16 elk hair caddis dry fly. A No
.
16 is tiny enough that three of them would sit handily on your thumbnail
.
In the gathering dark of that mid-June 1987 evening, the water seemed to lie around us like glass. We stood about fifteen yards apart. Fat, pulpy rainbows began rising to our casts. You couldn't quite see them but you could hear them sipping and slurping and breaking the water. Patrick worked his rod like a wand, sending his line in great noiseless loops far out onto the stream. We fished for about an hour and barely spoke. But at one point, after he'd reeled in a particularly beautiful rainbow and held it at the surface of the water in one hand and had expertly removed the hook with his other hand and had then studied his prize for an instant more before delivering it back to the inkiness from which it had come, Patrick called over in the softest voice, “I love fishing after dusk. It's called fishing off the mirror.”
Earlier that day, this same Hemingway son, about to turn fifty-nine, who had on fire-engine-red L.L. Bean suspenders and an Orvis fishing shirt and a big outdoorsy watch that kept slipping around on his wrist, had leaned across a booth in a crowded noontime café and said in a very warm voice able to be heard by everyone in the room:
“Killing. Now that's something I know quite a lot about, actually. Killing. Big-game hunting is very good training for war. I've never had any experiences in war. But I feel if I lived in a country that didn't have hunting
,
I'd be drawn irresistibly to be involved in a war. War is about organization and terrain and supply. So is hunting. I've shot many wild animals, and you wouldn't believe how many people have said to me in my life, âBut, Pat, you don't seem like the killing type.' Oh, no? Let me tell you a little story. I've seen packs of wild dogs in Africa literally killing an animal by biting it to death on the run. The animal is trying to escape and the dogs are taking out whole chunks of him, as they go. This seems truly horrible, being eaten alive while you're trying to get away. And yet these same canine fellows can be quite wonderful to each other in a different context. They can nurse each other, they can make their camp while one of their number is recuperating. Now, would you ever think that your little Fido eating his Alpo there on your kitchen floorâwould you ever think he's capable of doing something like this? But he's descended from these boys, isn't he?”