Hemingway's Boat (64 page)
Authors: Paul Hendrickson
“I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something” is centrally about plagiarism, committed by a somewhat older schoolboy, the same one who'd shot so magically against adults. Part of the story's brilliance, though, is the way Hemingway collapses time and connects two events that happened in real life. Hemingway altered these events only minimally, which is one reason why, aesthetically speaking, it's a lesser story.
On June 26, 1942, with America seven months into world war, the three Hemingway sons flew together to Cuba on a Pan Am Clipper from Miami to visit their father. They arrived in time to celebrate Patrick's fourteenth birthday, two days hence. Jack, eighteen, who'd joined the Marine Corps Reserve, could stay for only ten days. He'd just finished his freshman year at Dartmouth and was scheduled to take summer classes, in the hope of earning a college degree in two and a half years before shipping off to Quantico,
Virginia, for officer's training. The plan was for Gigi and Patrick to remain at the
finca
for the remainder of the summer. Actually, Gigi, going into sixth grade, ended up staying into the fall, while Patrick, who was about to enter his freshman year of high school at a Catholic prep school in Connecticut, had to get ready to go north by mid-September. Among other pleasures of that summer, in addition to the pleasures (if occasional puking) aboard their father's boat, two largely unsupervised kids, away from their mother's more puritanically Catholic eye, were able to sleep as late as they pleased; to take made-to-order breakfasts on trays brought to their bed by servants; to drink all the Cuban beer (and Bloody Marys for the next morning's hangovers) they could suffer; to ride to the cockfights and the jai alai fronton in the back of their father's chauffer-driven car. (When they got there, they'd wager with their papa's money.)
â
There was also baseball. Two summers before, their father had built them a makeshift diamond just inside the
finca
's front gate, where the slope of the hillside wasn't so steep. The “diamond” was really a home plate and two bases set about seventy feet apart. The kids from the village came up again to play ball, sans shoes. Sometimes Papa pitched. He declined to run the bases. That summer, the team's sponsor and player-manager went into town and not only bought another round of balls, bats, and gloves but, this time, real uniforms (including cleats) with a team name stitched in royal blue across the flannel fronts of the shirts: Estrellas de Gigi, Gigi's Stars. That's because Gigi was the natural of the lot. The caps of the Estrellas de Gigi were emblazoned with a star, in the way of the Cuban national flag. There's an old sepia snapshot of Gigi, circa 1942, taken with his ball-playing pals. Their arms are slung around one another. They could be in an “Our Gang” movie.
But the shooting of that summer was best, at least for Gigi. The Club de Cazadores del Cerro (Cerro Hunters Club for English speakers) had been going since 1909. Its grounds were spacious and country-club colonial. In its early days, male members used to shoot in ties and shirts and suspenders
and boater hats, while their ladies watched from rockers and sipped drinks on the clubhouse veranda. In Hemingway's time, the Cerro catered to American industrial magnates and Cuba's intellectual bourgeoisie. It offered trap, skeet, rifle, live pigeons. Hemingway, who could show up in shorts and penny loafers, shot there for years.
On Sunday, July 26, 1942, three Hemingways competed for the national championship. That morning, the
Havana Post
ran a small story: “Cuba's 1942 competitive shooting season will be formally closed at the Cerro Hunters Club with holding of the National Live Pigeon Championship, third and last of the big three title shoots.⦠One of the largest fields to enter a 1942 shoot is expected to participate in today's live bird competition, to start at 9:30 a.m.”
Four days earlier, the chief shooter of the family talked of the upcoming match in a letter to his first wife. His present wife wasn't homeâMartha had gone off on a Caribbean journalism assignment, in a thirty-foot sloop, for
Collier
's. Two days earlier, he had turned forty-three. Perhaps this is why Hemingway was so sentimental for the times he and Hadley had known when they were just kids in Paris. The night before, he couldn't sleep. So he lay awake trying to “remember the races out at Enghien and the first time we went to Pamplona by ourselves.” He addresses Hadley as “Miss Katherine Kat.” He tells her he loves her very much, and feels it's all right to say this, because “it is just untransferable feeling for early and best Gods.” Damn, if he doesn't love fishing and the sea and his boatâ“I would hate to die, ever, because every year I have a better time fishing and shooting. I like them as much as when I was sixteen.” As for his boys, he is trying to be a good father. Gig, who is “a better boy all the time,” is “known in the papers as el joven fenomeno Americano and day before yesterday a reporter called him âel popularissimo Gigi.' So now we say go down to the post-office and get the mail popularissimo or time for bed, popularissmo. But inside himself he is very happy to be the popularissimo and he shoots like a little angel.”
The little angel didn't win, but he scored a huge moral victory, not to say earned his father's bursting pride. He even beat his dad. And there was no way Hemingway would have eased off. He would have been shooting for his life at the all-day event.
The author of
Papa
devotes most of a chapter to the contest, and exaggerates what happened. Gigi didn't tie for first place; he finished fourth. He didn't knock down twenty birds in a row, as he said; he got twelve straight, partially got his thirteenth, hit six more dead on, which finished
him just out of the money. There weren't 150 shooters entered, as he wrote; there were 30. But by any measure, his performance was a triumph. The great Diaz, who'd been shooting for decades,
did
end up winning, and Carlos Quintero and Antonio Montalvo fought to a tie and went into a shoot-off. These were possibly the three best marksmen in the country and, by extension, the hemisphere. “Havana” is one of the most beautifully written chapters in
Papa
, but amusingly the author (not to say the author's father in his letters) didn't get his own age right:
At age eleven, I'd just tied for the shooting championship of Cuba against some of the best wing shots in the world. Minutes later at the bar I was explaining to a group of newly acquired admirers that it was really nothing if one had my 20/10 vision, fabulous reflexes, co-ordination, guts and stamina. After listening to this as long as he could, papa took me aside and said:
“Gig, when you're truly great at something, and you know it, you would like to brag about it sometimes. But if you do, you'll feel like shit afterwards. Also, you never remember how a thing really felt if you talk about it too much.”
He got that part exactly right.
The day following the championship, Hemingway typed a two-page letter to his absent wife. She was somewhere down the Caribbean. “Dear Pickly,” he began. You would have been so proud yesterday. Gigi never once let his nerves get to him. Poor Patrick blew up after a good start. But Gigi was hitting them allâ“drivers to the right, to the left, high screamers and two slanting incomers.” He was “almost like that girl who won the Grand National in National Velvet. Imagine him not blowing up after that thirteenth and when they robbed him he came over to me and said, very quietly, âPapa they lied and they stole from me and watch me kill this pidgeon now to show them.' It was a high one and he hit it and it seemed as though it were going outside the wind and then he chopped it right down against the inside base of the fence.” Hemingway told Martha how he'd taken his sons into town for dinner, and of how they came home and lay down in a bed together and talked to the ceiling in the dark about what had happened.
Two weeks later, on August 14, Hemingway wrote again to his wife. She was still at sea. The letter's addressed to “Muki.” He said, “Think all the time have put in with them (children) hasn't been wasted. Childies take lots of patience as they go through the damdest things but these childies
are comeing along all right now. The shoot was the turn of the corner for Giggy.⦠He's just got what he did that day inside of him like the vault of a bank full of o.k. securities.”
The last few pages of the “Havana” chapter have to do with the Stream and
Pilar
âa particular incident. The fishing had been lousy that day. The youngest boy was out into the water, near a reef, with his spear gun. He was after yellowtail and snapper and grunts. Gregorio was nearby in a dinghy, while Gigi's father, and maybe Patrick, stayed on the main boat. Suddenly, there were three sharks.
I took the grunts off my belt and tossed them toward the sharks. Papa was about forty yards away, and although I wasn't much of a swimmer, I must have made it to him in near-record time. He lifted me up on his shoulders and then thrashed through the water to the dinghy.⦠I can't say with certainty that my father was very brave that day. He seemed cool enough, but I could tell he was frightened, too.⦠I never felt more like his son than I did that day.⦠I hadn't realized how much he really cared until he hoisted me on his own shoulders, which were barely out of water, and swam back across that reef with most of his own body still exposed under the surface.
Four summers later, a precocious fourteen-year-old, going into his sophomore year at the same Catholic prep school in New Milford, Connecticut, from which his older brother Pat had just graduated, stole a pair of French underpants and some other lingerie from the closet of his newest stepmother. Mary Hemingway, who'd been Hemingway's wife since March, accused her Cuban maid of the theft. The maid, in tears, said she was innocent, but Mary dismissed her. After Gigi had returned to the States and to Canterbury School, the garments were foundâby Gigi's fatherâunder the mattress of the bunk bed in the room in the little guesthouse where the boys had slept that summer. Gigi later tried to lie his way out of it. His father knew. Eventually he'd own up to it. In a sense, Mary never forgave him this incident. That was part of her character: holding grudges.
Two years later, the son who'd been so gifted with guns at the Cerro Hunters Club was trying hard to fashion himself into a writerâwouldn't this have been the best way of all to win his father's approval? There are a number of photographs around of Gigi from the summer of 1948, when he was about to enter his senior year at Canterbury. He was sixteen. All
the baby fat was gone. He was taller, handsomer. There was something soft, though not unmanly, about him. He didn't seem impish any longer so much as deep, inward. He seems rarely to be smiling in the pictures. The cinnamon-colored freckles dotting his high cheekbones and the ridge of his nose are still there. You can see him instantly appealing to girlsâthey'd want to protect him.
That previous school term, his junior year (or “fifth former,” as it's known at Canterbury), Gigi had become an associate editor of the school's magazine,
The Tabard
. He'd won first place in a campus-wide competition for a historical essay. This was announced in the June 1948 issue. He apparently won first place in a fiction contest as well. The piece was said to be about seagulls. But the June issue makes no mention of a short-story prize. What seems to have happened is that a committee designated a prize, and the winner was informally told, who then told his parents, who of course were thrilled (there are letters documenting their thrill), but then someone on the faculty discovered the story was a rank plagiarism. The prize was rescinded and the scandal hushed up. At least this is what the current dean of faculty at Canterbury, Lou Mandler, surmises. (Mandler has done first-rate research on the history of the Hemingway family at Canterbury. One of the things Mandler's research has uncovered is that Hemingway, the devoted father, seems never to have once set foot on Canterbury's grounds, not even for his sons' graduationsâPatrick's in 1946, Gigi's in 1949. Both graduated with honors, near the top of their classes. Hemingway hated the schoolâfor its perceived New England elitisms and parochial rigidities.)
In
Papa
, Gigi says he was eighteen when he committed the plagiarism. He couldn't have been eighteen; he was gone from Canterbury by then. He claims to have written the seagull story on his father's typewriter, on summer vacation.
That summer in Havana I read papa's favorites, from
Huckleberry Finn
to
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
like him, I sometimes had two or three books going at the same time. Then papa steered me to the short story masters, Maupassant and Chekhov. “Don't try to analyzeâjust relax and enjoy them.”
“Now,” papa said one morning. “Try writing a short story yourself. And don't expect it to be any good.”
I sat down at a table with one of papa's fine-pointed pencils and thought and thought. I looked out of the window,
and listened to the birds, to a cat crying to join them; and to the scratch of my pencil, doodling. I let the cat out. Another wanted in.
I went to papa's typewriter. He'd finished with it for the day. Slowly I typed out a story and then took it to him.
His father read it and then slowly took off his glasses. According to Gigi, the stunned man said: “I've wanted to cut down for a long time. The writing doesn't come so easily for me anymore. But I'll be just as happy helping you as doing it myself. Let's have a drink to celebrate.” From
Papa:
Only once before can I remember papa being as pleased with meâwhen I tied for the pigeon-shooting championship. And he was confident that there was another winner in the family when I entered the short story for a school competition and won first prize.
Turgenev should have won the prize. He wrote the story. I merely copied it, changing the setting and the names, from a book I assumed papa hadn't read because some of the pages were still stuck together.