Hemingway's Boat (13 page)

“The Snows” is the fiction in which the verbally abused older wife says, “You don't have to destroy me. Do you? I'm only a middle-aged woman
who loves you and wants to do what you want to do.” Harry's wife has a great house on Long Island. She has a “well-known, well loved face” from magazines like
Spur
and
Town & Country
. She isn't what you'd call pretty, although Harry does appreciate her face. Harry's wife has a great gift for the bedroom. She is fond of drink. She has a daughter who made a debut. She has survived the tragedy of a husband's early death. Things had commenced easily enough between the widowed Helen and Harry. “She liked what he wrote and she had always envied the life he led. She thought he did exactly what he wanted to. The steps by which she had acquired him and the way in which she had finally fallen in love with him were all part of a regular progression in which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away what remained of his old life.”

In the spring of 1934, Helen Hay Whitney was fifty-eight years old. Although she was matronly looking, and had sort of a mannish face, the First Lady of the American Turf, as the sports pages liked to call her, still had piercing eyes and a way with long-trailing leopard-print scarves. She lived at 972 Fifth Avenue, that is, when she wasn't living at the family's 438-acre Greentree, in Manhasset, Long Island. It was one of the greatest houses on Long Island—twenty-one servants, stables, kennels, three grass tennis courts, its own nine-hole golf course, baseball diamond, indoor and outdoor pools, four Rolls-Royces in the garage.

She'd gotten married in 1902, in a Washington wedding attended by Theodore Roosevelt and all of his cabinet and the justices of the Supreme Court. Her father, John Hay, had once been President Lincoln's private secretary, and then President McKinley's secretary of state, and then TR's secretary of state. She was the mother of two adult children, Joan Whitney and John Hay Whitney, better known to the world as Jock.

In the fiction, the woman named Helen had lost her husband “when she was still a comparatively young woman and for awhile she had devoted herself to her two just-grown children, who did not need her and were embarrassed at having her about, to her stable of horses, to books, and to bottles.”

When Payne Whitney died, his wife was fifty-one. Their two just-grown children, Jock and Joan, respectively, were twenty-three and twenty-four.

Jock Whitney was destined to become a much more famous Whitney than either his mother or sister. Among other things he was a financier, sportsman, philanthropist, and would become the last owner of the
New York Herald Tribune
, in whose editions of April 4, 1934 (this would have
been three decades before Jock controlled the
Trib
), on page 4, Ernest Hemingway's photograph appeared beside this headline: “Stalking Lions Was ‘Exciting' to Hemingway.”

As for Jock's only sibling: by the spring of 1934, Joan Whitney was Joan Whitney Payson, whose Wall Street husband, Charles Shipman Payson, was waiting for the Wheeler boatyard in Brooklyn to complete his custom-built yacht, already named
Saga
. Not that Hemingway—in whose unfathomable head an idea for a story seems to have grown, following a spot of tea and spirits with a rich society lady—might have even known of that watery connection.

“The Snows” is almost nine thousand words long. Hemingway had first worked on the story in the late summer and early fall of 1935, after a season of great fishing on Bimini with
Pilar
, and had then put it away and didn't come back to it until the spring of 1936 in Cuba. In the early draft, the dying writer's name is Henry Walden, but by the time the story appeared in print the main character is just Harry. If Hemingway had kept to his earlier plan, the initials of his protagonist, no less than those of Harry's wife, would have been HW. (Hemingway doesn't say the name of Harry's wife until late in the piece. Only then does he begin calling her Helen, whereas earlier she'd been “the woman” or “she.” It's almost as if he was daring himself. In for a dime, in for a dollar.)

Literary critics have argued for years whether Harry's dream of flight to Kilimanjaro at the end of the story represents moral redemption. But apart from that, and separate from the beauty of the language itself, the real power of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is that an author still so young and in seeming control of his life and craft was able so vividly to foresee his own doom. There's a school of critics and biographers who contend that, by the early 1930s—roughly around the time he got his boat—the arc of Hemingway's creative life had crested and was on its way down. I think it's far more complex than that. I think it's a sine curve, like most of our lives.

“The Snows” had been off the stands about a month when Hemingway wrote to MacLeish from Cooke City, Montana: “Me I like life very much. So much it will be a big disgust when have to shoot myself.”

But listen again. This is Hemingway writing of the “tea-taking” in a posthumously published 1981 essay in
The Paris Review
titled “The Art of the Short Story.” He wrote it in 1959, when the journey to shotgun destruction had reached the point of no exit. As Hemingway himself might have said, 1959 marked the end of the beginning of all that. “The Art of the Short Story” is a terrible piece of writing—mawkish, boastful, truculent,
almost incoherent in places. But there are paragraphs less embarrassing and more coherent than others, and that includes those in which he writes about the origin of “The Snows”:

How someone I know who cannot sue me. I am not gambling with it. Or maybe I am. Who knows?

I spoke earlier of hints left inadvertently behind, and of clues outside the story. I believe that Hemingway left a telltale sign on an envelope that weekend—Arnold Gingrich's envelope, the one mailed from Chicago with the cash. The word I am referring to is partially obscured by a tiny brown blot. But what I believe is written on its front, along with “Wire Philadelphia” and “go to Museum” and “guy at 11:45 at Scribner,” is: “write Mrs. Whitney.” The last letter of “Whitney,” if it is Whitney, has the little dab of brown. I believe this was Hemingway's notation to himself to drop her a note of thanks for having him over. Thanks, but no thanks, Mrs. Whitney.

No correspondence between Hemingway and Whitney has ever surfaced, or vice versa. Which isn't the same as saying it didn't once exist.

One more clue:
Jock: The Life and Times of John Hay Whitney
, by the late
New Yorker
writer E. J. Kahn Jr., was published thirty years ago and is the only full-length biography of Jock Whitney. In its opening pages, there is this passage about Jock's mother: “Helen herself, though she all but stopped writing about the time that a third child was born to her in 1912 and died in infancy, never lost her interest in literature. It pleased her when people like Ernest Hemingway came to call. The story goes that she told him his works were mostly potboilers, and that he concurred.” There are no endnotes in Kahn's book to pin down when such a visit might have taken place. But if the real Helen Hay Whitney did indeed have the real Ernest Hemingway to a private séance in her salon, and if she did indeed make him an intriguing offer, and if she did indeed tell him that his stuff wasn't pure literature, and that he should try to do better, did her much younger guest take it all in with a predatory grin and ingrained midwestern politeness, knowing that he'd soon enough fix her up in print?

The woman named Helen in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is not Helen Hay Whitney, any more than the dying author named Harry is Ernest Hemingway. But there are just enough seeming allusions and parallels and associations to make clear that Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing and had some part of her in mind and some part of himself in mind when he sat down and began to tell lies terrifically, almost recklessly, in the way of a beautiful gambler.

“There was a lot more to the story,” Hemingway wrote to Buck Lanham.

But never mind. Because a boat-happy man is on his way home, full of benevolence and momentary good feeling toward humanity, in the wool overcoat he can't wait to shed. The April balminess of the Keys is two rail nights away.

Hemingway departed New York on Monday the ninth, by rail, in the early afternoon, ticketed through to Key West, but with a stopover in still-chilly Philadelphia to meet the “scientificos” of an institution that liked to bill itself as “the oldest continuously operating natural history museum in the western hemisphere.” Their names were Charles Cadwalader and Henry Fowler, and they were high officials of the Academy of Natural Sciences. (For the rest of his life, Hemingway could never quite get the name right.) Later that summer, these easterners, stiff in their personalities
and dress, both a good deal older than Hemingway, would take him up on his renewed invitation to go fishing with him in Cuban waters aboard his new boat. It was to be a month's expedition, but in the bargain they'd have something like the adventure of their lives, not to say something for their obituaries some decades hence: that they'd once fished big game with Hemingway.

Homeward on the
Paris
, one day out of New York harbor, Hemingway had answered a letter from Cadwalader, the museum's managing director. The letter had been forwarded to France by Scribners. Cadwalader inquired whether Hemingway might be interested in helping the academy's naturalists conduct research in the Gulf Stream on sailfish, marlin, tuna, and other game fishes, “in order that our knowledge of these fish may be advanced.” Hemingway's reply of April 2—one week before he and Cadwalader met—was written in longhand in blue ink, on a small piece of manila stationery folded in half, thus giving him four sides. “On Board” Hemingway wrote over the sepia typescript of “S.S. Paris.” He followed with the old flooding graciousness: “I would be very happy to co-operate with you in any way.… It would be very interesting to have a complete collection of these fish and determine scientifically which are truly different species and which are merely sexual and age variations of the same fish. No one has studied them as they should be studied.”

Hemingway's father, Clarence E. (friends and relatives knew him as Ed, which is how I'll refer to him through the rest of this book), the deeply troubled physician, had an eye for detail, an interest in science and the natural world. He loved microscope slides even as he loved the life of the outdoors. Grace Hall-Hemingway, for all her crushing will, was artistic and refined and highly intelligent. It makes whole sense that the son of Grace and Ed Hemingway would have been drawn to the academy's proposition.

Cadwalader received Hemingway's shipboard reply on the fifth, the day—I feel certain—Ernest and Pauline were at the foot of Cropsey Avenue securing
Pilar
. The scientifico, who hadn't yet been awarded that word as his Hemingway nickname, cabled the author immediately, and then followed it up with his own letter, inviting him to be his houseguest in the Philadelphia suburbs. On the sixth (the day he showed home movies to envious friends), Hemingway cabled back at 1:35 p.m.:
CAN COME PHILADELPHIA MONDAY AFTERNOON ENROUTE KEYWEST SAME NIGHT WILL WIRE TIME ARRIVAL MUSEUM MONDAY THANKS INVITATION REGRET HURRY UNABLE ACCEPT HEMINGWAY
.

For all his adult life, Hemingway was in love with and expert at the economic
art of cable-ese. Economic in more senses than one. The pull and sport of telegram expression, in which the sender seeks to relay as much information as possible in as few words as possible, went back for him to at least 1922, when, having just been elevated to a staff reporter, he was wiring dispatches about the Greco-Turkish war from Constantinople to his penny-pinching bosses at the
Toronto Star
. As the great literary historian Malcolm Cowley once wrote, cable-ese for Hemingway “was an exercise in omitting everything that can be taken for granted,” which is another way of understanding how he arrived at his literary method.

On Monday, he sent another telegram from New York to Philadelphia at 11:50 a.m., an hour or so before boarding a train:
ARRIVING MUSEUM THREE FIFTEEN HEMINGWAY
. Ten minutes later, the cable was logged in at a Western Union office at 2111 Market Street in Philadelphia. (It would have come over the wire within a minute or so—somebody at the receiving end must have been out for a smoke or busy with other wires.) The words were taken off the teletype paper and glued in narrow strips onto a half sheet. The teletype paper was of the cheap, brownish colored, newsprint kind. The half sheet that the words were pasted onto was inserted into a Western Union envelope, and the envelope was hustled over to Nineteenth and Parkway, about six blocks distant, where it was likely handed to a receptionist at the museum's front desk, in return for a casually flipped coin. Somebody would have then quick-stepped the wire upstairs to Director Cadwalader's office, where its throat—the envelope's—would have been slit with a sterling-silver opener in just the way they always do it in old black-and-white movies. That nearly eight-decade-old wire, with its slit envelope, with its logged-in times, with its raised and glue-crusted strip of words on the cheap teletype paper, can still be fingered in a high-vaulted room in the academy's turn-of-the-century library on Logan Square in Philadelphia.