Hemingway's Boat Read online

  ALSO BY PAUL HENDRICKSON

  Seminary: A Search

  Looking for the Light:

  The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott

  The Living and the Dead:

  Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

  Sons of Mississippi:

  A Story of Race and Its Legacy

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Paul Hendrickson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this work have appeared in different form in Men’s Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Town & Country.

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found following the index.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hendrickson, Paul, [date]

  Hemingway’s boat : everything he loved in life, and lost, 1934–1961 /

  Paul Hendrickson. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-70053-7

  1. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Journalists—United States—Biography.

  I. Title.

  PS3515.E37Z628 2011

  813’.52—dc22

  [B]

  2011003398

  Jacket photographs courtesy of the Ernest Hemingway Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  For Jon Segal,

  editor and friend of three decades

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Amid So Much Ruin, Still the Beauty

  PART ONE

  GETTING HER

  American Light

  That Boat

  Gone to Firewood

  States of Rapture

  PART TWO

  WHEN SHE WAS NEW, 1934–1935

  Home

  Shadow Story

  High Summer

  Catching Fish

  On Being Shot Again

  Outside Worlds

  Exuberating, and Then the Jackals of His Mind

  PART THREE

  BEFORE

  Edens Lost and Darkness Visible

  PART FOUR

  OLD MEN AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA:

  ERNEST/GIGI/WALTER HOUK, 1949–1952 AND AFTER

  Moments Supreme

  Facet of His Character

  The Gallantry of an Aging Machine

  Braver Than We Knew

  In Spite of Everything

  “Necrotic”

  What He Had

  Reenactment

  Epilogue: Hunger of Memory

  Acknowledgments

  Essay on Sources

  Coda: On the Curious Afterlife of Pilar

  Selected Bibliography

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  We have a wonderful current in the Gulf still in spite of the changes in weather and we have 29 good fish so far. Now they are all very big and each one is wonderful and different. I think you would like it very much; the leaving of the water and the entering into it of the huge fish moves me as much as the first time I ever saw it. I always told Mary that on the day I did not feel happy when I saw a flying fish leave the water I would quit fishing.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, in a letter, September 13, 1952

  Then, astern of the boat and off to starboard, the calm of the ocean broke open and the great fish rose out of it, rising, shining dark blue and silver, seeming to come endlessly out of the water, unbelievable as his length and bulk rose out of the sea into the air and seemed to hang there until he fell with a splash that drove the water up high and white.

  “Oh God,” David said. “Did you see him?”

  “His sword’s as long as I am,” Andrew said in awe.

  “He’s so beautiful,” Tom said. “He’s much better than the one I had in the dream.”

  —Islands in the Stream

  The dark is different in Havana. It’s lit in a kind of amber glow, as if everything’s on low generator, weak wattage. If you come into Cuba for the first time at nighttime, this feeling of strange darkness is intensified. Even the plane must sense this—or at least the pilot—for it seems to hang forever in a low, back-powered glide, as if working through a tunnel, before hitting the runway with a smack at Aeropuerto Internacional José Martí La Habana. You emerge from the Jetway into a terminal with the complexion of tea water. In the customs and immigration area, soldiers in the olive drab of the Revolution are walking large dogs. If your papers are in order, a latch on a door clicks open. Like that, you’re on the other side of a lost world that’s always been so seductively near and simultaneously so far.

  PROLOGUE

  AMID SO MUCH RUIN, STILL THE BEAUTY

  On Pilar, off Cuba, midsummer 1934

  MAY 2005. I went to Havana partly for the reason that I suspect almost any American without a loved one there would wish to go: to drink in a place that’s been forbidden to American eyes (at least mostly forbidden) for half a century. So I wanted to smoke a Cohiba cigar, an authentic one—and I did. I wanted to flag down one of those chromeless Studebaker taxis (or Edsels or Chevy Bel Airs, it didn’t matter) that roll down the Prado at their comic off-kilter angles, amid plumes of choking smoke—and I did. I got in and told the cabbie: “Nacional, por favor.” I was headed to the faded and altogether wonderful Spanish Colonial monstrosity of a hotel where you’re certain Nat King Cole and Durante are in the bar at the far end of the lobby (having just come in on Pan Am from Idlewild), and Meyer Lansky is plotting something malevolent in a poolside cabana while the trollop beside him rubies her nails. I also wanted to stand at dusk at the giant seawall called the Malecón that rings much of the city so I could watch the surf beat against it in phosphorescent hues while the sun went down like some enormous burning wafer. I wanted to walk those sewer-fetid and narrow cobbled streets in Habana Vieja and gaze up at those stunning colonial mansions, properties of the state, carved up now into multiple-family dwellings, with their cracked marble entryways and falling ceiling plaster and filigree balconies flying laundry on crisscrossses of clothesline.

  Mostly, though, I went to Cuba to behold—in the flesh, so to speak—Ernest Hemingway’s boat.

  She was sitting up on concrete blocks, like some old and gasping browned-out whale, maybe a hundred yards from Hemingway’s house, under a kind of gigantic carport with a corrugated-plastic roof, on what was once his tennis court, just down from the now-drained pool where Ava Gardner had reputedly swum nude. Even in her diminished, dry-docked, parts-plundered state, I knew Pilar would be beautiful, and she was. I knew she’d be threatened by the elements and the bell-tolls of time, in the same way much else at the hilltop farm on the outskirts of Havana—Finca Vigía was its name when Hemingway lived there—was seriously threatened, and she was. But I didn’t expect to be so moved.

  I walked round and round her. I took rolls and rolls of pictures of her long, low hull, of her slightly raked mahogany stern, of her nearly vertical bow. When the guards weren’t looking, I reached over and touched her surface. The wood, marbled with hairline fissures, was dusty, porous, dry. It seemed almost scaly. It felt febrile. It was as if Pilar were dying from thirst. It was as if all
she wanted was to get into water. But even if it were possible to hoist her with a crane off these blocks and to ease her onto a flatbed truck and to take her away from this steaming hillside and to set her gently into Havana Harbor, would Hemingway’s boat go down like a stone, boiling and bubbling to the bottom, her insides having long ago been eaten out by termites and other barely visible critters?

  A man who let his own insides get eaten out by the diseases of fame had dreamed new books on this boat. He’d taught his sons to reel in something that feels like Moby Dick on this boat. He’d accidentally shot himself in both legs on this boat. He’d fallen drunk from the flying bridge on this boat. He’d written achy, generous, uplifting, poetic letters on this boat. He’d propositioned women on this boat. He’d hunted German subs on this boat. He’d saved guests and family members from shark attack on this boat. He’d acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat.

  She’d been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years—which were his final twenty-seven years. She’d lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin. He’d owned her, fished her, worked her, rode her, from the waters of Key West to the Bahamas to the Dry Tortugas to the north coast and archipelagoes of Cuba. She wasn’t a figment or a dream or a literary theory or somebody’s psychosexual interpretation—she was actual. Onto her varnished decks, hauled in over her low-cut stern on a large wooden roller, had come uncounted marlin and broadbill swordfish, tuna, sailfish, kingfish, snook, wahoos, tarpon, horse-eye jacks, pompano, dolphinfish, barracuda, bonito, and mako sharks, which, as Hemingway once remarked, are the ones that smell oddly sweet and have those curved-in teeth that give them their Cuban name, dentuso.

  He could make her do sixteen knots at full-out, and he could make her cut a corner like a midshipman at Annapolis. When she was up and moving, her prow smartly cutting the waves, it was as if she had a foaming white bone in her teeth—which is an expression old seamen sometimes use. When he had her loaded for a long cruise, she’d hold twenty-four hundred pounds of ice, for keeping cool the Hatuey beer and the daiquiris, the avocados and the Filipino mangoes, and, not least, the freshly landed monsters of the Gulf Stream, which Hemingway always thought of as “the great blue river.” Who knew what was down there lurking in those fathomless bottoms—the skeletons of slave ships? Who’d ever caught what was possible to catch in those mile-deep waters of his imagination? “In hunting you know what you are after and the top you can get is an elephant,” Hemingway once wrote in Esquire magazine. “But who can say what you will hook sometime when drifting in a hundred and fifty fathoms in the Gulf Stream? There are probably marlin and swordfish to which the fish we have seen caught are pygmies.”

  Pilar’s master used to play Fats Waller records and “You’re the Top” on a scratchy phonograph while his boat rocked in the Stream and he waited in his ladder-back fighting chair, which had leather-cushioned armrests and was bolted to the afterdeck and could swivel in a 360-degree circle. He said the tunes were good for bringing up the monsters. When the mood was upon him, he’d sing along in his lusty baritone.

  In another piece for Esquire, also written in the mid-thirties, when he was still trying to decipher the mysteries of the Stream and escaping to it every chance he got, this most riddlesome of men wrote about the hooking of a marlin, always the blue river’s greatest prize.

  He can see the slicing wake of a fin, if he cuts toward the bait, or the rising and lowering sickle of a tail if he is traveling, or if he comes from behind he can see the bulk of him under water, great blue pectorals widespread like the wings of some huge, underwater bird, and the stripes around him like purple bands around a brown barrel, and then the sudden upthrust waggle of a bill.… To see that happen, to feel that fish in his rod, to feel that power and that great rush, to be a connected part of it and then to dominate it and master it and bring that fish to gaff, alone and with no one else touching rod, reel or leader, is something worth waiting many days for, sun and all.

  And in a different mood, a few years later, no less in thrall:

  Once you are out of sight of land and of the other boats you are more alone than you can ever be hunting and the sea is the same as it has been since men ever went on it in boats. In a season fishing you will see it oily flat as the becalmed galleons saw it while they drifted to the westward; white-capped with a fresh breeze as they saw it running with the trades; and in high, rolling blue hills, the tops blowing off them like snow.…

  He had named her after a shrine and feria in Spain that commemorates Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Our Lady of the Pillar. It’s in Saragossa, and he’d been to the bullfights there in 1926. But his boat’s name was also meant to commemorate the secret nickname adopted by his second wife, Pauline, before she was his wife, when the two were still in adultery. It was the name he would have given his daughter, he once said, if he’d ever been blessed enough to have a daughter. Pilar could fit six in her sleeping compartments, two more in her open-air cockpit with its roll-down canvas sides and copper screens for warding off the nighttime bugs. In her prime, she’d been known among Gulf Stream anglers for her shiny black hull, for her snappy seafoam-green canvas roof and topside. A boat with a black hull, riding long and low in the water, can be extremely difficult to sight against a glaring tropical horizon—so, yes, something ghostly.

  Her cabin sides and decks were crafted from Canadian fir and high-grade Honduras mahogany, with tight tolerances between the seams. But she wasn’t a luxury craft—she was ever and always, her owner liked to say, a functional fishing machine, sturdy, reliant, built to take the heaviest weather, “sweet in any kind of sea.” There’s a term old boatmen sometimes use to describe a reassuring boat in a heaving ocean: “sea-kindly.” That was Pilar, who’d come humbly out of a factory, and a shipbuilder’s catalog, a “stock boat” of the 1930s, albeit with her owner’s list of modifications and alterations for her. Over the decades Hemingway would add other modifications and innovations and alterations, further improving the well-built fishing machine that had already proved astonishingly durable and dependable.

  After Hemingway’s suicide, the pundits at Time wrote that conduct

  is a question of how the good professional behaves within the rules of a game or the limits of a craft. All the how-to passages—how to land a fish, how to handle guns, how to work with a bull—have behind them the professional’s pride of skill. But the code is never anchored to anything except itself; life becomes a game of doing things in a certain style, a narcissistic ritual—which led Hemingway himself not only to some mechanical, self-consciously “Hemingway” writing, but to a self-conscious “Hemingway” style of life.

  Yes, that was a piece of the truth about him.

  He used to love standing up on his beauty’s flying bridge and guiding her out of the harbor in the morning light. Sometimes, he’d be bare-chested. The flying bridge was his name for a top deck, and it wasn’t added until 1937, just before he left for Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War (and—not unconsciously—to find a hugely successful novel about it). The sportfisherman, in his raggedy and beltless shorts—or, if he was wearing a belt, putting it not inside the loops but over top of them—would have his tanned, muscular legs planted several feet apart, like a heavyweight braced for a roundhouse or a golfer ready to slam his tee shot. He’d have his white visor pulled low over his blistering nose that was coated with zinc oxide or glazed with coconut oil. (One of the reasons Hemingway grew his iconic white Papa beard of the 1950s was because his fair midwestern facial skin could no longer take the harsh Cuban sun.) He’d be waving to people he recognized on the shore. The flying bridge had its own set of duplicate engine controls, throttles and levers, coming up via several pipes through the overhead of the cockpit. The steering wheel on the bridge—flat as a plate in front of him, the way steering wheels are on the back of hook-and-ladder fire trucks—was out of an old luxury car from a Key West junkyard, polished wood set into a steel casing.

 
From up there, when he wasn’t manning the wheel, he could fight a decent-size fish—not a 450-pound marlin nor an Atlantic sailfish, but maybe a tarpon or a recalcitrant barracuda. On the way to the fishing grounds, he’d already have a line in the water, with a Japanese feather squid and a strip of pork rind on the hook, which in turn would be attached to a No. 10 piano-wire leader, which in turn would be knotted to a fifteen-thread line. This was for the smaller catches—good eating, good selling. Tarpon and kingfish liked to lie in close to shore and feed around the commercial fishing smacks. Hemingway was after almost any kind of fishing he could get, but he wouldn’t get all four rods going on the boat until Pilar had reached the Stream. On going out—“running out” is how he sometimes said it, just as coming home was “running in”—he loved watching the motion of the Japanese squid bait skipping on the whitecaps. In 1949, in Holiday magazine, when he’d owned Pilar for fifteen years and had been living in Cuba for a decade, and was married to his fourth and last wife, who liked going out on the boat almost as much as he did, Hemingway described this feeling in a discursive, lore-filled reminiscence-cum-piece-of-fishing-reportage:

  Coming out of the harbor I will be on the flying bridge steering and watching the traffic and the line that is fishing the feather astern. As you go out, seeing friends along the water front … your feather jig is fishing all the time. Behind the boulevards are the parks and buildings of old Havana and on the other side you are passing the steep slopes and walls of the fortress of Cabanas, the stone weathered pink and yellow, where most of your friends have been political prisoners at one time or another.…

  Sometimes as you leave the gray-green harbor water and Pilar’s bows dip into the dark blue water a covey of flying fish will rise from under her bows and you will hear the slithering, silk-tearing noise they make when they leave the water.

  The “slithering, silk-tearing noise” was always a good sign—that the monsters might come that day.