Hemingway's Boat (83 page)
Authors: Paul Hendrickson
And yet: there seems no question that the boat on display at the
finca
is built from an authentic Wheeler hull. Some years ago a Wheeler family member went to Cuba and verified this. But is it possible that what is there is some
other
Wheeler from the thirties, some “cousin,” not the actual one Hemingway owned? You can make the argument go on and on.
It's a fact that
Pilar
had two main-motor replacements in her seagoing life. The flying bridge was added. Her outriggers got built and rebuilt. She underwent wartime alterationsâthe head in the main cabin got preempted for radio gear, for instance. Hemingway's boat is a metaphor for endurance, but changes were always being made to her in her owner's lifetime.
Regarding the issue of lookalike boats: Until a few years ago, there was a thirty-eight-foot Wheeler Playmate, built in the mid-thirties, looking very much like
Pilar
, anchored outside the International Game Fish Association museum near Fort Lauderdale. “Pilar's Sistership” announced the plaque beside it, with three errors of fact in its seven lines of type.
At Islamorada, in the Florida Keys, as you head toward Key West, there is a giant fishing outfitter store called World Wide Sportsman, and sitting inside on the main floor is a vintage sportfishing boat with the name
Pilar
lettered on it. “PILARâthe half-sister ship to Hemingway's famed âPilar,'Â ” a handout sheet proclaims. It goes on to say that this
Pilar
was built at a different Brooklyn shipyard a year before Hemingway's
Pilar
. Only in superficial ways do the two look alike.
Several months ago, as I was writing this, I went to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut,
and spent most of a day with Dana Hewson, arguably the foremost wooden boat expert in America, who, as I've noted in the preceding Essay on Sources, is vice president for watercraft preservation and programs at Mystic. He is also a member of what was formerly known as the Hemingway Preservation Foundation Advisory Board and is now the Finca VigÃa Foundation. As noted, the foundation is a private group, based in Boston, seeking financial ways to preserve, in cooperation with the Cuban government, Hemingway's home and property. The day I spent with Dana brought me all the way over in believing that the boat on Hemingway's hill is the real
Pilar
. Actually, I had believed it for a good while.
In November 2002, Dana had traveled to Cuba as part of the American delegation that participated in a formal signing of a document (Fidel himself was at the signing table) to begin the process of preserving Hemingway's home and property. The day after the signing, Dana examined the boat closely. He was allowed to get on board, comb her cabins, open her hatches, make sketches and measurements. After he returned home, he wrote up a brief condition assessment, with recommendations for
Pilar
's repair. Dana was sure the Cuban government would never allow the boat on Hemingway's hill to leave Cuba, and he was right.
Several years went by. The Finca VigÃa Foundation did what it could to raise money. It wasn't that Dana's urgent recommendations for
Pilar
were being ignoredâjust that the bureaucratic wheels turn very slowly in a socialist country that often doesn't have the money to provide basic needs for its people and that furthermore is in a suspicious standoff with what it regards as imperialist America. Both the Cubans and the American group were working hard to come up with a feasible plan for restoration. Meanwhile, in June 2005 Finca VigÃa was named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places (even though Hemingway's home wasn't
in
America). The next year, the
finca
was listed on the World Monuments Watch of the 100 Most Endangered Sites on the globe.
That same year, 2006, in April, Dana went again to Cuba with members of the Finca VigÃa Foundation. He again studied the boat on the hill, to see what temporary changes might have occurred, and while there he and others from the foundation got the news that the Cuban government would provide the funds for a complete restoration. The work would be done by preservation experts at Marina Hemingway in Havana.
And it has been done, and well.
Pilar
is now shiny as a new penny. Dana is pleased.
Through the years, Dana has heard talk of the “bogus boat.” One of the first things he told me in our day together is that when he opened the hatches on that first visit in 2002 and looked inside, he saw two engines. “No question,” he said. The main engine and its shaft came down the center; the secondary engine was at the port. “There was no second shaft installation, but there were two engines; I take that as just something that happened during one of the temporary restorations
through the years. It would have been cheaper. They got rid of the second screw to save money. They would have done other things like that in the various inadequate restorations.”
We spread out a couple dozen photographs of the boat that had been taken through the years. He said, “I just don't see any way to prove that the boat there now isn't Hemingway's boat, given the amount of changes and restoration work this boat has undergone. Let me put that another way. Everything that seems âwrong' about this boatâand by that I mean everything that's not necessarily true to the Wheeler tradition or the look of the boat that Hemingway bought in 1934, or the boat that he made adjustments to through the yearsâcan be explained by whatever restoration processes she has undergone.”
He said, “When does a boat begin to deteriorate? When they chop the tree down. George Washington's axâthe head has been changed twice. The handle has been changed twice. Is it still George Washington's ax? What's the answer to that? I don't think there is one. You are always working on a boat, fixing her, making repairs, doing changes.”
He said, “Did the Cuban government take her into a back shed sometime back there and in the process of starting to repair her say, âOh, it's too damn hard, we'll just build a replica and pass her off as the real boat?' Yes, governments lie. Ours does. Theirs maybe more. Ernest Hemingway means an awful lot to the Cuban people, and so does his boat. His boat means an awful lot to American literature. But does any of that translate to the fact that somebody in Cuba pulled a fast one? From everything I've studied, I believe she's the real boat. Or at least I say it cannot be proven she isn't the real boat. That's where I stand.”
Me, too. To tell the truth, I am sort of secretly glad we can't know for certain; that she resists knowing, as her captain himself finally resists knowing. Which makes
Pilar
a better metaphor and storytelling vehicle than I ever bargained for.
âP.H., January 2011
Along with this list, interested readers are invited to consult the Essay on Sources, for not everything cited there is included here, and vice versa. Also, I've omitted in this list bibliographic information on Hemingway's own works, based on the idea that those works are easily accessible on their own, although in the source essay I've listed the dates and titles and places of publication for the Hemingway journalism that comes up in the text itself.
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Ashe, Fred. “A Very Attractive Devil: Gregory Hemingway in
Islands in the Stream
.”
Hemingway Review
28, no. 1 (Fall 2008).
Baker, Carlos.
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story
. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.
ââ.
Ernest Hemingway: The Writer as Artist
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ââ, ed.
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. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981.
Bedford, Sybille.
Aldous Huxley: A Biography
, vol. 2,
1936â1963
. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974.
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Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives
. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989.
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New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990.
Bethel, Rodman J.
Flagler's Folly: The Railroad That Went to Sea and Was Blown Away
. Key West, FL: Slumbering Giant Publications, 1987.
Bigelow, Gordon E.
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Brasch, James D., and Joseph Sigman.
Hemingway's Library
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Brian, Denis.
The True Gen
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Broer, Lawrence R., and Gloria Holland, eds.
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. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
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Classes on Ernest Hemingway
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ââ.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship
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ââ.
Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success
. New York: Random House, 1978.
Burgess, Anthony.
Ernest Hemingway and His World
. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.
Burrell, Rose Marie.
Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Busch, Frederick. “Reading Hemingway Without Guilt.”
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, January 12, 1992.
Buske, Morris. “Hemingway Faces God.”
Hemingway Review
22, no. 1 (Fall 2002).
Clark, Robert C. “Papa y el Tirador: Biographical Parallels in Hemingway's âI Guess Everything Reminds You of Something.”
Hemingway Review
27, no. 1 (Fall 2007).
Colapinto, John. “The Good Son.”
Rolling Stone
, September 5, 2002.
Comley, Nancy R., and Robert Scholes.
Hemingway's Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text
. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
Connett, Eugene V., ed.
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ââ.
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ââ, ed.
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Eby, Carl P.
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Atlantic Game Fishing
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ââ.
Fishing with Hemingway and Glassell
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ââ.
Sport Fishing Boat
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ââ.
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ââ.
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. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
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. Key West, FL: C. C. Belland and E. O. Swift, 1982.
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. Marietta, GA: Longstreet Press, 1992.
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. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
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. Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 2002.
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. Key West, FL: Langley Press, 1990.
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. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
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. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002
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ââ.
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