Hemingway's Boat (16 page)

Archibald MacLeish, to mention only one long-standing if wary friend and fellow athlete, will come on board a handful of times in these first days, only to end up in a row with
Pilar
's captain, provoking the captain to say of the poet in a letter to their mutual artist friend Waldo Peirce: “He's gotten, between ourselves … a goddamned bore. Righteous, fussy, and a bloody bore. Strange mixture of puerility and senility. What the hell do American writers turn into?”

Yes.

The Maestro—that was Arnold Morse Samuelson's Hemingway-bequeathed nickname, which got shortened soon enough to the Mice. During dead calms on
Pilar,
the quiet evening drifts of that first (and largely disappointing) summer and fall of the fishing, when most of the marlin trophies had seemed to desert the Stream, or hang at the bottom, the Mice used to take out his battered violin and send Mozart and Beethoven out across the waves, not so well, but with great exuberance
.

Arnold Samuelson was the twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer and self-styled Hemingway character who tore from a Minneapolis newspaper Hemingway's photograph (yes, the one at the rail of the
Paris),
stuck it in his rucksack, and rode his hitchhiking thumb and the top of boxcars straight into his hero's life and right onto his new boat. For something like nine months, from late spring of 1934 to late winter of 1935
,
the Mice got to serve as the night watchman and deckhand and writing acolyte at the master's knee, making a dollar a day to boot
.

For the bulk of the nearly five decades he lived on the earth after stepping off Hemingway's boat, Samuelson, who'd once so badly wished to make it as a serious fiction writer, lived a socially outcast existence on the edge of a little jackrabbit crossroads in Coke County, Texas, called Robert Lee. Found among his scattered possessions, upon his death, was a three-hundred-page typed nonfiction manuscript about his long-ago time with Hemingway. Most of it he had drafted on
Pilar,
under Hemingway's guidance. But every now and then, through the decades, he would take out the fly-specked pages of his memoir and look at them by lamplight, adding, subtracting, rewriting, shifting around sentences and paragraphs, wondering—as he once wrote in a scrambled note to himself that was discovered by his family after his death—if he could turn the work into literature. That's only one of the sadder ironies—it
was
literature. He just could never see it
.

I can't really say, even now, why, nearly from the start, I felt myself pulled toward this eclipsed and footnoted and shadowed life, although I suspect the pulling must have had something to do with a daughter's brief and eloquent preface to her father's posthumously published and largely ignored work (which came out in 1984
,
three years after Samuelson was
dead), but also something to do with the photographs themselves. You see, there's something so appealing in that lank, boyish, midwestern face, in that bony frame, in the way bars of Gulf light swath across his back as he sits at
Pilar
's stern in her virgin newness, holding one of the deep-sea rods, feet propped against the live-fish box, long-billed swordfisherman's hat pulled low, nose coated with coconut oil, turning at this instant to share in some joke or inside story with his literary idol, who's seated right beside him. Who could be so fortunate?

But of course the gypsies have that curse: may your fondest fortune come true
.

Other book-length chroniclers of Ernest Hemingway have either ignored Arnold Samuelson's life altogether or else dealt with it in not much more than a couple of dismissive (and often inaccurate) paragraphs. But might a deeper look at his story reveal important Hemingway truths from oblique angles? “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” is the way Emily Dickinson started a poem. “If you go, it'll happen,” an old mentor from
The Washington Post
used to say. So I went, in search of the Maestro
.

Ernest and Arnold, summer 1934

WITH HEMINGWAY: A YEAR IN KEY WEST AND CUBA
begins with an importuning knock at the front door of 907 Whitehead Street. The “importuning nobody” (as a Hemingway essayist in an academic journal once wrote of Arnold Samuelson, accurately if a little meanly) has just come through the iron gate and up the walk and past the brown patches in Hemingway's front yard. He's swallowing his spit, shifting from one foot to the other, twisting his woolen hobo's cap like a man trying to get water out of a rag. Keep him here for a moment on Hemingway's doorstep, with his arm raised, in the dozen or so heartbeats between his knock and the crowding of the other side of the doorway with a sizable shadow. Think of Hemingway coming toward his front door from somewhere inside the house, wondering who the hell this is. Think of the knocker fighting off the urge to do a pivot and hotfoot it to the curb.

When exactly is this knock? The author of
With Hemingway
places the moment in late April 1934—but he's incorrect. Samuelson isn't really good at pinning down dates, and he's also prone to mangle certain easily checked facts and names. (At other times, he gets the chronologies and smaller facts exactly right.) But that's okay; he's far more interested in—and very good at—rendering the texture of experiences, not least his own.

It's really toward the end of the first week of May, two or three days before the Wednesday news item in the Personal Mention column of the
Citizen
that Hemingway has departed on the train to Miami the day before to collect his new fishing machine. This would mean it's either Sunday or Monday, May 6 or 7, 1934. Hemingway himself touched on the moment in a semi-famous piece in
Esquire
in 1935 titled “Monologue to the Maestro” (more on this later). He said the knock occurred right after he'd gotten back, on May 5, from a quick reconnaissance trip to Cuba. He'd gone over to politically turbulent Havana on the ferry with John Dos Passos to watch the May Day festivities, and to do some casual fishing, and to check personally on the upcoming summer's marlin prospects, and, not least, to secure the necessary forms and bureaucratic signatures for a good docking site when he'd return with his boat in July. Dos and his wife were leaving within the hour for the north, and Hemingway wished to see them off at the Key West rail depot. There were some letters he needed to get written and in the mail. And goddamn it here was somebody at the door. “[T]he road brings in every son of a bitch I ever knew or who ever read a line I wrote,” Hemingway once said in a letter.

This
interrupter—who has written many first lines of would-be novels
and stories, all of them, he's now decided, being bunk and junk—could probably pass for somebody still in his teens. He's all elbows and big feet and has a former farm boy's blunt hands. He's about six foot and weighs maybe 175 dripping wet. He's got a “porcupine hair-cut” (as Hemingway will say in
Esquire
the following year). Mostly, he's got a look about him of extreme earnestness and seriousness.

Last night, as the night before, he lodged at the Key West city jail, where the mosquitoes were big as bombers. On his first night in town, he'd tried sleeping on the rough planking of the turtling dock, lying on his back, against his knapsack and violin case, to ease the pressure on his hip bones. A night cop had shaken him awake and taken him off to the hoosegow, where he promised him he'd be safer and even have a cot, or at least a hammock. He hadn't mentioned anything about the bugs.

This stranger, who's been wandering in America for much of the last two years, is down to a squashed loaf of bread and about eight bucks. Ever since he got out of college in the spring of 1932, he's been living on not much more than his wits. He's worked as a cub at a Minnesota newspaper, cut alfalfa in Iowa, slept all night in Los Angeles movie theaters, barbered with a pair of hardware-store shears. He's hitched and walked and ridden rails in his lace-up lumberjack boots with a fellow college-educated “tramp” (it's how he generally refers to himself) and together they've made it through the Pacific Northwest, down into Texas, across the middle border. He's awakened in his bedroll to April snowfalls of cherry blossoms in the state of Washington, speared salmon near the Pacific Coast with the bent-back tines of a pitchfork, panned for nuggets in sluicing California streams, decorated his Christmas tree (fetched illicitly from a nearby national forest) with cigarette butts and the tinfoil of gum wrappers, made himself into a half-assed roofer and a not-at-all-bad carpenter. He has set it all down in his notebooks, hoping to convert the base metal of raw sensory American experience into literary gold.

Some of it, in fact, has already been penned into long-winded journalistic travel accounts and mailed back to the
Minneapolis Tribune
, where he'd worked on and off through college—running copy down to the printers, subbing for the beat reporters, filling in on “late cops.” (It's an old newspaper expression, meaning that you hang around police headquarters to sop up whatever local crimes get logged onto that night's blotter.) The
Trib
, which didn't give him a full-time job after college, has published his road stories in an occasional Sunday series, headlining them “Letters from a Forgotten Boy.” So far, he's done nine pieces, and the editors have paid him
a total of fifteen bucks. He knows they're just Depression filler, nothing like the serious writing he feels called to do.

College was the University of Minnesota. He'd concentrated in journalism, hated it all the way through, refused formal graduation and a degree—a life of contrariness was already showing itself. On June 20, 1932, in a little hard-backed, marbleized notebook, the adventurer-to-be had set down the first journal entry of his newly escaped life: “Never have I spent my days in greater tedium. Graduation exercises took place without my participation. The fee is $10. The money will take me farther bumming than will the diploma. The only ambition that was predominant during the windup of school was to get out of town, never to view the interior of a university of any kind again.” He was already on the road when he recorded that. His older brother Sam—a Twin Cities doctor, who'd removed his tonsils free of charge as a kind of graduation gift and then shoved a few bucks in his pocket—had dropped him off on the outskirts of Minneapolis. There were a lot of hitchhikers that day, but none able to score rides in the way he scored them: by taking out his violin and turning his back to the oncoming traffic and starting to saw away. For instance, there was that farmer named Morica Rashin, from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, whose curiosity got the best of him—he slowed up, put it in reverse, backed up, and apparently said something like,
Get in, bub
.

This stranger—who was raised in a frontier-like place called White Earth, North Dakota, youngest child of severely religious immigrant Norwegians—has been spending eighteen-hour days of late at his writing. This past winter, having returned to Minneapolis, where much of his family now was, he'd toiled from the moment he got up until long past dark, forgetting sometimes even to eat, falling into bed exhausted only to wake up again and go over to the desk and pick up the sheets and see how truly bad his cooled-off prose was. So far he's written something like two unpublished novels and twenty short stories, and in the worst of his despair, about three weeks ago, he'd come across Ernest Hemingway's story in
Cosmopolitan
, “One Trip Across.” It was the most convincing piece of literature he'd ever read. There wasn't a fifty-cent word in it. He felt himself right there, on Harry Morgan's charter boat, in the glow of the binnacle light, off Havana, when the whole smuggling plot turns foul. That scene where Harry, a decent guy driven to desperate acts because of money, gets Mr. Sing down on his knees and then uses his thumbs to crack open the guy's talk box from behind—hell, he could hear that crack coming straight out of the ink on the printed page. And so an educated tramp in a
rented room in unthawed Minnesota had begun to think, dream, that if he could just have a conversation with Ernest Hemingway about the craft of fiction, even if it lasted five minutes, he might yet have a fighting chance with his own bad stuff. Which basically explains why and how he's come to be fidgeting here on Hemingway's doorstep in this moist morning heat; why and how he's made his own trip, not across but down, something like eighteen hundred miles, on his luck and spit, to the dividing line between the east of his youth and the west of his future.