Hemingway's Boat (77 page)

What follows isn't meant to be an all-inclusive line-by-line source-noting; rather, a kind of prose-form road map, both essay and citation, not every citation, no, but ones I judge the reader will be curious to know about, and also ones where I am directly indebted to my predecessors. Truth be told, these notes are also a way of telling some side stories I couldn't fit into the main frame. I use “EH” fairly often; other abbreviations and shorthand will be evident. When citing page numbers for quoted passages from Hemingway's novels and book-length nonfiction, I refer, unless otherwise specified, to the original hardcover editions of those works. No page numbers are given for the short stories. For the EH journalism, just title and date and name of publication.

“In hunting” quote: “On the Blue Water,”
Esquire
, April 1936. “He can see” quote: “Out in the Stream,”
Esquire
, August 1934. “Once you are out of” quote: “On the Blue Water.” Conduct being “a question of how the good professional” quote:
Time
, July 14, 1961. The passage from
Holiday
appears in “The Great Blue River,” July 1949. The Norman Mailer quote is in “Punching Papa,” collected in
Cannibals and Christians
. The Edmund Wilson quote is on p. 802 of
The Sixties
. The Ella Winter quote is from a letter to Carlos Baker, February 10, 1962, and the original document is in the Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton
University Library. The Algren quote is from
Notes from a Sea Diary
, page 88 and page 93. EH letter to Sara Murphy is April 27, 1934.

Sanctity, or yearning for it. The first time I began to think seriously about Hemingway and this absurd notion was when I read Reynolds Price's essay “For Ernest Hemingway,” cited above. (It's in a 1987 Price collection, but I had discovered it some years before.) Price, a literary hero of mine, used the word “saintliness” and put it in italics. It jolted me. This became a new line of thinking and feeling, its own governing principle. In 2004, perhaps four or five months after I'd begun the book, Linda Patterson Miller, mentioned above, and of whom you've read earlier, picked up on the same idea. “I warned you that working with Hemingway would be a spiritual quest—totally life-affirming,” she e-mailed. I could almost hear her laughing—at my turmoil, already considerable.

Wagner's quote is in a 2002 monograph,
Blanchard Built
, published by the center.

Precede
. Grace Hemingway's “I will take care of it for you” is in her letter of March 24, 1929. The Lance Morrow quote is in his August 25, 1986,
Time
essay. Nearly all of Hemingway's major biographers have written of this wavery fable, as I like to think of it. On the key question, that is, of Grace's intent, judgment seems divided. But I believe something chilling had to be going on between mother and son. Grace had gone twice to the coroner to try to retrieve the .32. On February 24, in a ten-page letter of gratitude to her son for his financial support in the wake of her husband's death, a letter with much seeming forced gaiety in it, she said she had “secured” the weapon. “Do you want me to send it down to you. Les wants you to leave it to him, when you are through with it—but you have first choice.”
When you are through with it. First choice
. As I say, loaded, at least to my ears—and eerily premonitory of two suicides. In May 1965, writer Dawn Powell told Baker what she knew of the runny cake and the mailed gun. Baker then wrote to Dos Passos, citing Powell's account. Dos supplied his own inaccuracies—in blue ink over top of Baker's letter. We'll never know the truth of the matter.

Chapter
. Going to the New York Public Library to read the April 4, 1934, newspaper accounts of EH's arrival on the
Paris
of the day before gave me the idea for how to frame the chapter. Interestingly, of the city's big dailies, the New York
Daily News
, circulation 1.5 million, skipped Hemingway—they went with Hepburn.
She kept moving up in the various editions, and in the four-star final made page 3. I tried in vain to find out whether she and EH had met on board, or even at the publicity rail. But the bigger mystery is how the shipboard reporters would have missed Dietrich. Her story re meeting Hemingway, written twenty-one years later, ghosted or not, is in the February 3, 1955,
New York Herald Tribune
.

E. B. White's parody is in the April 14, 1934,
New Yorker
. Re cost of the safari: the figure has ranged over the years from $25,000 to $33,000; I'm going with a round-off. Mark Stevens's quote is in a February 7, 2000, essay in
New York
magazine. “It is awfully easy to be hardboiled” quote is on page 34 of
The Sun Also Rises
. “I sat in a corner” passage is on page 76 of
A Moveable Feast
. EH quote about remembering when and where he wrote
A Farewell to Arms
is dated June 30, 1948, and is in the introduction to an illustrated 1948 edition of the novel. “I was always embarrassed” passage is on page 184–page 185. Max Eastman's review is in the June 7, 1933,
New Republic
. MacLeish's “I have always suspected” quote is in his letter to Baker, August 9, 1963. “Before these rich” passage is on page 209–page 210 of
Feast
. “We had tried” is on page 86 of
Green Hills of Africa;
“What did you get?” passages are on page 291 and page 293 .

Re EH and Frank Lloyd Wright: Oak Park historians say there's no evidence the egomaniacal architect and future egomaniacal author ever met or talked in their overlapping years in that manicured place of broad lawns and reputedly narrow minds. (There's also no evidence Hemingway ever said that, even though you hear the claim all the time.) But it would be accurate—albeit fanciful—to go this far: had he wished to, Wright, from a high stool in his octagonal drafting room, in, say, 1906 or '07 or '08, could have looked out his window, catty-corner across Chicago Avenue, and observed the elementary-school children of Oliver Wendell Holmes School at their noon play, one of whom could have been one of his own children, and another of whom could certainly have been Ernest Hemingway. It's not literary or architectural scholarship—just fun—to squint and picture a roughly forty-year-old visionary gazing out on a fairly typical-seeming schoolboy named Hemingway, still in single digits, whose family name Wright may or may not have known. (I'm pretty sure he did: EH's mother and Wright's wife Kitty were casual friends who came together to paint, to talk books and the suffrage movement at Oak Park's Nineteenth Century Club.)

Re the retyped letter of EH to Fadiman, and the loss of the original: After his October 28, 1933,
New Yorker
review of
Winner Take Nothing
, Fadiman's editorial assistant, Miss Bert Hunt, bet her boss he'd hear from Hemingway. Fadiman said he doubted it. Hunt said she'd put a hundred bucks on it, but that the bet would have to run six months, in case EH was on the high seas or in a jungle somewhere. When the letter came in, Hunt grinned and collected her hundred. After Fadiman had read it and yukked, he had wanted to toss it, but his assistant, recognizing its worth to future scholars, remembered that she stuck the letter in a folder marked “Important Letters to Keep.” Just to be on the safe side, she
typed out a duplicate copy for herself. Twenty-five years later, Fadiman confessed to Hunt he'd sure like to have that old Hemingway letter. She was then retired in Palm Beach. Apparently she couldn't find the original, but retrieved the copy she'd typed out and squirreled away. These details are in a Hunt letter to Baker of March 25, 1962, eight months after the suicide. A few years ago, I decided to try out the story on Fadiman's daughter, Anne Fadiman, herself a respected author. She said the way her father always told it was that he just threw out the letter. In any case, all praise to the faithful and posterity-minded Miss Hunt.

Re EH and Ned Calmer: I decided to expand on Baker's account on page 257–page 258 of his bio, and did so by using two letters from Calmer to Baker and by conducting my own research. As I say in the text, I think the story is emblematic of the contradictory man with softness for those who are ill too early in life, women and children, especially.

Precede
. The passage from
Green Hills
is on page 49. The boat descriptions are from 1934 Wheeler catalog copy.

Chapter
. “Horsing Them in with Hemingway” appeared in the September 1965
Playboy
and is collected in
The Well-Tempered Angler
. Gingrich's words for EH after the suicide are in the October 1961
Playboy
. The master carpenter's certificate is in the
Pilar
papers at JFK.

To write this chapter, but even more the one that follows, I talked to boating and fishing historians, read books and magazines devoted to wooden boats and big-game fishing, went to maritime museums and libraries (and also to one latter-day shipyard specializing in vintage boats), but mostly I went to Wes Wheeler's Connecticut basement. He had ancient issues of the
Rudder
, dozens of old Wheeler catalogs, photographs, record books, family albums, court transcripts, bankruptcy notices. He's a walking Wheeler encyclopedia, and fine company to boot. On what he knows: the reason
I
know that Howard E. Wheeler himself had addressed the 1933 fold-over pamphlet to EH is because his grandson—Wes—instantly recognized the handwriting.

I am also more generally in the debt of four wooden boat authorities: Dick Wagner, Dana Hewson, Llewellyn Howland, and Anthony Mollica Jr.

Wagner gave me a personal tour of his Seattle center a few years ago and talked offhandedly for three hours about the mystique of wooden boats.

Hewson is vice president for watercraft preservation and programs at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut—more about his crucial help at the end of these notes.

Howland, around boats his entire life, who once wrote a piece in
Wooden Boat
magazine titled, “Why People Own the Boats They Do,” said that the three finest
American boatbuilders of the golden age of boating—commonly understood as the first half of the twentieth century—were Herreshoff in Rhode Island, Lawley and Sons in South Boston, and Henry B. Nevins on Long Island. But those shipyards, in the main, were custom builders, producing lavish yachts for high society. To compare their silk-stocking wares to the humbler (and perhaps far sturdier) wares of a Brooklyn production yard seems an apples-and-oranges argument. When I asked Howland if he didn't think a Wheeler was the right boat, right maker, for Hemingway, he said: “A Wheeler was a good bargain at good workmanship. You see, pleasure boats and sportfishing boats of the kind Hemingway got from Wheeler are to real yachting as Miller High Life is to Chivas Regal. Okay, Howard Wheeler built an adequately competent boat, a good boat, at a good price. I'm not saying it was the wrong choice at all for Hemingway. It apparently fit the man. It's what he needed and wanted.” We spread out some pictures of
Pilar
, from that first season of the fishing, with her master's catches strung up on the dock beside her. “The phallic nature of the thing,” Howland howled. “It's pathetic.” Later, though, he said, softening: “Every day on a fishing boat it's a little theater. There's blood. It's a self-enclosed world. It's womb-like. Time is different. Time begins at dawn and ends at sunset. Here is a perfect time on a boat: you've had a long, hard day, you've caught your fish, and now you're purring home, toward your mooring.”

Mollica, a prolific boating historian, said of Wheeler: “For a boatbuilder to turn out stock boats every year, using the same hull, is a remarkable thing. I have a lot better feeling than some people would about production-yard boats, and that's because they have been tested and tried. They will last. Look at
Pilar
.”

Finally: On November 23, 1933, when a native midwesterner was on the Mediterranean en route for Mombasa, Vincent Astor was writing a letter to the Wheeler shipyard about his custom-built
Little Nourmahal
—which was then gracing the cover of the current
Rudder
. Old money versus new; custom versus stock; eastern blue blood versus Oak Park middle blood: while Astor was oozing with noblesse oblige (“I am delighted with her performance, and want you to know that she has proved herself to be a fine sea boat, most comfortable, and ideally suited to my purposes”), EH was raging on his French scow of a liner with its upchucking toilets. In three days he'd be upchucking to Kip Fadiman of
The New Yorker
. But who really gives a damn nowadays about Vincent Astor? And has his white-hulled beauty gone to firewood? Not so
Pilar
.

Precede
. The wild letter to Wilder is dated May 26, 1929, and I located it in the Wilder papers at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale.

Chapter
. The passage from
Islands
is on page 359. The Historical Index to
The New York Times
was helpful, as was a Wheeler file at the Brooklyn Public Library, as were general files at Mystic Seaport; the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia; and the International Game Fishing Association outside Fort Lauderdale.

What I love about the boom-to-bust Wheeler story is how self-made American it is—family and company. Wes Wheeler told me that in the early days of the company his father and uncles and aunts, along with Ma and Pa Wheeler, all used to live at the family boatyard. When the younger sons finished Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High, they put on aprons and got knee-deep in shavings in the mold loft, even as they took college engineering and drafting classes by night. Chris-Craft may be the Coca-Cola of American boating, but this boat-crafting family went for its Loop-O-Plane ride in Coney Island's shade. I noted that no one seems to know the total number of Wheelers that were built—in a real sense the company was always too busy just trying to survive to worry about counts for future boating historians. In a presentation he once made before the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Wes Wheeler said his grandfather's company had produced somewhere between four hundred and five hundred boats during World War II for the army, navy, Coast Guard, and War Shipping Board. Buried in a legal document from the fifties was the following sentence: “Both before and after the incorporation of these companies, petitioners practically designed, built, sold, tested, and delivered to the owners, private of Government, substantially every Wheeler boat, the 2,247th such boat being in construction at the time of trial.” That was written in connection with tax and bankruptcy hearings for the years 1946 and 1947, following the failure of the Sunlounge, and it's a fact that significantly more Wheelers were built after that. So probably three thousand is a good rounding guess.