Hemingway's Boat (81 page)

As I note, scholars generally agree EH finished the “Cuba” section on Christmas Eve, 1950. Nine months later, early evening of October 2, 1951, he called his own child “harbor scum.” I think he reached into his recent fiction and found what he needed.

Re the spitting at his wife: Mary entered in her journal, “News of Pauline's death. Alto came over. They talked like vultures and I said so. E. followed me to my bathroom and spit in my face. Next day he gave me $200, which I gravenly accepted.” She must have meant
cravenly
.

Chapter
. The epigraph quote is on page 26 of
The Old Man and the Sea
, and the passage about silence is on page 43. Walter's piece is in
North Dakota Quarterly
65, no. 3 (1998). Letter to Wallace Meyer at Scribner's is March 4 and 7, 1952. The chapter represents a distillation of all I know and feel about a proud, honorable old man whom I first met in 2004—and continue visiting to this moment.

Precede
. EH letter re steering prowess is to Charlie Scribner, May 18–19, 1951.

Chapter
. Since I quoted or referenced a lot of EH letters in this chapter, I've tried to give dates and days in the text itself as a way to help keep the reader chronologically steered. But here are several dates and citations (not only to the letters) I didn't provide: Quote from
Old Man
re DiMaggio is on page 23–page 24. The New York critic EH wrote to on July 9, 1950, with his baseball conceit was Harvey Breit. EH's “shit on hope” is in
How It Was
. The motorboat passage from
Across the River and into the Trees
is on page 55–page 56 of the softcover edition, and the lovebird passages are on page 81 and page 89.
Time
's review is September 11, 1950. E. B. White's parody is October 14, 1950. Letter re
Pilar
taking the wind at 95 is November 28, 1950, to E. E. “Chink” Dorman-O'Gowan.

Re
Pilar
's wartime patrols: I could have, and possibly should have, written much more on this period, but I had another aim for the chapter, namely, documenting EH's rage. Of all Hemingway's full-length biographers, Michael Reynolds has done the most original work on
Pilar
's submarine hunts, and so I admiringly direct readers there.

Precede
. In her 1987 “Cuba Revisited” piece in
Granta
(researched in late 1985), Gellhorn writes: “Gregorio was interested in two large cement cradles, placed where the tennis courts used to be. The
Pilar
was his inheritance, he had cared for it and given it to the state, and it was to be brought here and placed on these
cradles.” See my coda at the end of these notes re the curious afterlife of
Pilar
—and the question of “bogus
Pilars
.”

Chapter
. Epigraph quote is on page 10 of
Old Man
. Re Walter's old UCLA painting teacher, Stanton Macdonald-Wright: art historians regard him as the most important twentieth-century figure on the West Coast to have taught and promoted Cézanne to his students. Since Hemingway's indebtedness to Cézanne is both profound and self-acknowledged, this seems just one more unwitting node of connection between Walter and EH. Interview in
New York Post Week-End
is December 28, 1946. “Why am I a bastard” passage is page 66–page 67 of
Across the River
. Letter to Scribner re his diet during his writing tear is April 11–12, 1951. Gigi's quoting of his father re Adriana is on page 111 of
Papa
. EH's letter to Nita in Baltimore is September 1, 1949. Walter's nearly book-length piece about
Islands
is in the Winter–Spring 2006
North Dakota Quarterly
. Re forests being clear-cut to “explain” EH's “fetishes”: One of the earliest and bravest and yet probably most “out there” works done on this whole subject is by Carl Eby, in his
Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood
. The book has sentences such as these: “To say that Hemingway
was
a transvestite would mistakenly give the impression that such fantasies dominated his erotic life; yet within the dominant field of his fetishistic fantasy, the transvestic position was one to which he returned repeatedly.” I first met Professor Eby—who teaches at the University of South Carolina–Beaufort—in Key West in 2004 at an international Hemingway conference. I was prepared to dislike him instantly, but in fact he was disarmingly friendly, not to say a little self-mocking. Early one morning he was on a panel, and the advertised title of his paper was “ ‘He Felt the Change So That It Hurt Him All Through': Sodomy and Transvestic Hallucination in Late Hemingway.” I ran into him in the hallway as the audience was gathering. “Uh, little bit grabby for 8:30 a.m., wouldn't you say?” he sort of hooted-cum-winked. I heard one of the old guard say afterward, “That man is
dangerous
.” Actually, I don't think so.

Re Walter's old Havana journal in its retyped, incomplete state: I take on faith it's a document undoctored in any way—but would that we had it all.

Finally, re EH telling Nita he'd had lessons in hair-dying from the Alberto Culver company in LA en route to China in 1941: I don't believe it. The timelines would argue against it. He and Martha were in LA for barely two days in late January 1941. They stayed at the Gary Coopers' and were feted at parties. Could he have gotten away for blonding tutoring?

Precede and chapter
. I wrote the two-part, nine-thousand-word piece called “Papa's Boys,” which was published in
The Washington Post
on July 29–30, 1987. Three years
later, on May 13, 1990, I wrote “Rainbow Chaser” for
The Washington Post Magazine
. That was a piece about fly-fishing, and I began it with a memory of my night of having gone trouting with Patrick Hemingway. This precede, as well as this chapter, are a reworking and abridgment of those previously published pieces. But here's a story connected with the publication of “Papa's Boys” I've not told till now: About two weeks after I'd returned from Miami in late June 1987 and was trying to write a first draft for my editors, the phone rang. It was Gigi. He said he'd changed his mind and now didn't want me to “put anything in” about his cross-dressing, the more so since he planned to make a “comeback” in medicine. I was startled—only I wasn't. This kind of thing happens to journalists all the time, especially if they live and work in Washington, DC, where politicians try to backpedal after they've told you something for the record. I reminded Gigi he'd spoken to me willingly, and that for me to try to write around the fact of his cross-dressing, which was the central story of his life, would be a lie. Even though I knew I was within my rights, journalistic principles don't sound so grand on the telephone when you're talking to someone with both pleading and rage in his voice. He said I'd ruin his life if I wrote the stories. I reminded him that some of his arrests in Montana connected with his transvestism had already made local papers there. We argued. I said again he'd laid down no preconditions about his cross-dressing. He cursed and slammed down the phone. A little shaken, I went in and told my editors what had happened and that maybe we should include some of the phone call in the pieces themselves. No, that would be a bad idea, they said. That would raise more questions than it answered, would make me seem defensive. “Papa's Boys” came out. The same day, I nervously sent tear sheets and a cover note to all three sons. Patrick thanked me for sending them, but his letter then went into a strange tangent that had nothing to do with the pieces. Jack wrote and said he thought the series was well done, if in extremely poor taste. Gigi wrote and said my ambition “overcame” my sense of decency and that with “such malleable principles you should go far in journalism.” He wrote twice on the same day, August 1, 1987, addressing me as “Dear Paul,” using an ink pen, starting out in fairly smooth penmanship, the words getting larger and larger. “[A]nd your editor will probably credit you with a first, ie, a journalistic autopsy on a living human being,” he ended. And yet I heard later from one of his children he'd changed his mind and thought the pieces were pretty fair to him, after all. Which only suggests to me once more his decent-hearted and forgiving nature—in spite of everything.

Precede
. Re “Marty”: I can recall all three sons, if Jack not so much, talking about their leggy stepmom with an almost unconscious and faintly sexual schoolboy longing.

Chapter
. Epigraph quote is on page 231 of
Farewell
. Re “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something”: the story first saw print in the 1987
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
. The three sons signed their names to the foreword—so, again, praise to Gigi. A perceptive analysis of the story (even though his article contains several important errors of fact) is Robert C. Clark's “Papa y el Tirador: Biographical Parallels in Hemingway's ‘I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,' ”
The Hemingway Review
, Fall 2007. Lou Mandler, named in the text, was particularly helpful re Canterbury School—her two-part “The Hemingways at Canterbury,” published in the school magazine,
Pallium
, Fall 2008 and Winter 2009, and a later version, in
The Hemingway Review
, Spring 2010, is the definitive study.

Precede
. Again, a perceptive analysis is Charles J. Nolan Jr.'s “Hemingway's Complicated ‘Enquiry' in ‘Men Without Women,' ”
Studies in Short Fiction
, Spring 1995. The three other EH stories with homosexuality and/or lesbianism as the central subject: “Mr. and Mrs. Eliot” (from
in our time
), and “The Mother of a Queen” and “The Sea Change” (both in
Winner Take Nothing
). Re the need to fling blame from him: in the October 2 letter to Scribner, he said of Pauline, “Her get, and her families get, do not do well after adolescence. But you don't know about that when you marry a woman.”

Chapter
. If much of it is the product of my own digging, I could hardly have proceeded without the help of Ruth Hawkins, named in the text. Hawkins—director of Arkansas Heritage Sites, which includes the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott—has done more work on the Pfeiffer family than anyone I know. Re Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard: Russell Miller's 1987
Bare-Faced Messiah
was helpful. Re Pauline and Jinny Pfeiffer and Laura Archera Huxley: both Huxley's
This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley
and vol. 2 of Sybille Bedford's
Aldous Huxley: A Biography
, contained their nuggets.

Re what Hemingway said to his son in Havana:
you killed her
. In
Papa
, on page 7, Gigi says the trip was after Lorian was born, and that he took both his new wife and new baby to introduce them to his father. But Lorian wasn't born until December 15, and Gigi and Jane were back in the States by mid-November—there's a Hemingway letter of late November documenting this. So once again he either misremembered or misled. But the spiritual truth is there.

Precede
. “Downhill” quote is on page 345 of
Islands
, and “make love to who” passage is on page 344. “Both be alike” passage is on page 299–page 300 of
Farewell
. EH's “outside all tribal law” entry in Mary's diary is quoted on page 369–page 370 of her
How It Was
. “Felt the weight and strangeness inside” passage is on page 17 of
Garden
.

Re that oft-quoted passage, and also re the word “tremulousness”: Frederick Crews used the word in his 1987
New York Review of Books
essay (“Pressure Under Grace”), and the word put another image in my head: tuning fork. In his brilliant, bloodless dissection (disguised as a book review), Professor Crews quotes a passage from Mary's memoir that has been much taken up by the latter-day EH psychologizers. It's a mock interview that Mary's husband created in 1953 for her apparent enjoyment, and it appears on page 368–page 69 of
How It Was
. I've heard this passage referred to as “the famous sodomy passage,” as if it were the smoking gun of smoking guns. EH is supposedly clowning with an imaginary interviewer. “Reporter: ‘Mr. Hemingway, is it true that your wife is a lesbian?' Papa: ‘Of course not. Mrs. Hemingway is a boy.' Reporter: ‘What are your favorite sports, sir?' Papa: ‘Shooting, fishing, reading and sodomy.' Reporter: ‘Does Mrs. Hemingway participate in these sports?' Papa: ‘She participates in all of them.' ” Concludes Crews: “The manually sodomized partner, we can infer, was Hemingway himself.” Well, maybe. And maybe not. Re Grace Hemingway and the psychic damage she may have inflicted on her child (not least by dressing him as a girl and twinning him with Marcelline), Crews writes: “In all likelihood what Grace wanted, beyond an enactment of some private cross-gender scheme, was a boy whose sexual identity would remain forever dependent upon her dictates and whims. If so, she gruesomely got her wish. The apparent effect of all that dolling and doting was not so much to lend Ernest a female identity as to implant in his mind a permanently debilitating confusion, anxiety, and anger.” Which only makes me think of Gigi.

Chapter
. I suppose the chapter represents my nearly twenty-five years of trying to think about EH's tormented youngest son, since that night in Coconut Grove. I've tried to name in the text key people I interviewed, but here's one source I didn't name: C. E. “Abe” Abramson, a Missoula, Montana, real estate agent and voracious reader and all-around intellectual gadfly. He befriended Gigi early in Gigi's Missoula years and stayed in touch with him until the end. Abramson and I have been talking about Gigi in one way or another since the
Washington Post
pieces. As is evident, I'm indebted hugely, and not just for this chapter, to John Hemingway and to
Strange Tribe
, and am proud to regard him as a latter-day friend and fellow searcher of unsolvable riddles. John has reproduced in his too-little-recognized book, at nearly full length in some cases, previously little-known correspondence between Hemingway and Gigi. Just as evident here will be my debt to Valerie
Hemingway's
Running with the Bulls
. Valerie and I know each other casually. I have heard her read from her memoir at Hemingway gatherings—the first time was at a Michigan Hemingway Society conference several years ago. She was in her late sixties then and seemed wise and exuded much dignity and was in the company of her son, Edward, a writer of, among other things, children's tales. He was friendly, if wary.