Hemingway's Boat (21 page)

We spent some of that evening paging through old family photo albums and scrapbooks. White Earth, North Dakota, looked like a nineteenth-century town with false storefronts. “His mother, just like Hemingway's, was the strong one,” she said. “Four kids on a farm, miles from anywhere, and she somehow made sure they all went to college.” She pulled down from a high shelf one of her father's old violins. It was in a battered leather case with red-velvet lining. The strings were a fist of broken wires. Hemingway used to tell friends that the violin case made Arnold look like an underfed gangster.

On another night, Dian talked of a high school letter jacket she had badly wanted as a teenager. “I hadn't played enough on the girls' basketball team to earn a letter. The jacket was leather and wool. I think it must have cost twenty-five dollars. There's no way in hell we could afford that. But he came into my room and woke me up and said kind of roughly, ‘The jacket's yours.' I think he'd been up all night thinking about it.”

Had any of Arnold's apparently failed efforts at fiction or other pieces of serious writing ever been found? “No. I don't know how much he tried after a certain point, or whether he burned it all, or took it to the dump, or whether he kept on, or just gave up and stopped years before. We don't know. Only the Hemingway manuscript and the fishing logs from the boat.
Well, a few other things. But when I found that sheet of paper where he's talking about wanting to get the book out, but can't, I knew I had to try.”

A carbon copy of the incomplete
Pilar
fishing logs from the summer and fall of 1934 in Cuba now resides in the Hemingway archives at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, an intensely valuable documentary resource. Nearly all the log was dictated aboard the boat by Hemingway to Arnold, who took down the words in longhand, and who then, apparently, once he was back in Key West, not long before he left Hemingway's company, transcribed the pages to type. (He must have done so at his mentor's request.) This, from page 141 of
With Hemingway:

Dian took a year off to work on her father's manuscript. She and her mother spent many hours deciphering crabbed handwriting written in over faded lines of type. She gave the book its unassuming title. From her foreword: “I whipped the manuscript into shape in much the same way my father was taught to whip big fish: by giving myself plenty of slack, striking some parts and pumping up others, reeling all the while, and finally mastering it.” She sent the book around to various publishers, including Scribners, which sent it back. She found an agent who believed in it and who got the manuscript accepted by an esteemed editor, Robert Loomis, at Random House, with a modest contract and a small printing. When it appeared, in the fall of 1984,
With Hemingway
died very quickly, although the book received some admiring critical notices. In
The Washington Post
, Jonathan Yardley wrote: “This brief account of a year spent hanging around with Ernest Hemingway is an unexpected literary discovery, one of no particular moment but quite considerable charm.” The book won an overseas literary award. But it never made it into tiny Robert Lee's tiny public library, not until a handful of years ago, when perhaps some late-blooming local consciences began to awaken.

In the final pages of
With Hemingway
, the author has his mentor telling him, “The best stuff you've got is from your farm life in North Dakota and your sister's murder. That's something nobody else can write and nobody can ever take it away from you, but you don't want to use it for a long time. Save your best stuff until you've learned how to handle it.” In
Islands in the
Stream
, there's a passage in which the main character, the painter Thomas Hudson—Hemingway in faint disguise—is talking about the creative process to his writer friend, Roger Davis (again, Hemingway, or certainly parts of Hemingway). Davis's brother had drowned in a Maine lake when they were boys. Their canoe had tipped over. Davis, unable to save his brother, and haunted by that fact ever since, wonders if he can find a novel in the trauma. “You never will if you don't try,” Thomas Hudson tells him. “Just start with the canoe—”

“And end it how?”

“Make it up after the canoe.” And a minute later: “You could just make the canoe and the cold lake and your kid brother—”

But Arnold Samuelson never did make the canoe.

So
was
he the boy who flew too close to the sun and got melted by his own daring? “Icarus”: that's the title of an article written by Hemingway essayist Robert Lacy, a handful of years ago in a university journal. It's one of the few useful, if relatively brief, things ever written about the Maestro. Otherwise it's just the scattered and often inaccurate mentions in the standard biographical texts, and the handful of critical notices in book review sections after
With Hemingway
was published.

In truth, the one slim book Arnold Samuelson accomplished in his youth, the bulk of it done under Hemingway's eye, wasn't just good; it was fine. It didn't need to be compared to anything Hemingway had ever written, or that anybody else had ever written. But its author couldn't see that. As he wrote in that scrambled, undated note to himself: “On the other hand if I can fix it up so that it can be read, who knows, it might be literature.” But he could never fix it up, not to his satisfaction. No wonder, as the decades piled on, he turned increasingly to his silences and hostilities. His rage was directed primarily at himself, at his inability to complete a page of prose—and this, too, has its tragic Hemingway echoes. So many writing dreams ended up dying inside both men. In
Papa Hemingway
, A. E. Hotchner's highly controversial book about Hemingway and his last days, Hotchner has Hemingway asking, “What do you think happens to a man going on sixty-two when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself?” On the next page, Hemingway says: “Because—look, it doesn't matter that I don't write for a day or a year or ten years as long as the knowledge that I
can
write is solid inside me. But a day without that knowledge, or not being sure of it, is eternity.” Earlier,
Hotchner quotes a dead-voiced Hemingway saying: “I've got it all and I know what I want it to be but I can't get it down.… I
can't
.”

The summer after he finished college, before bumming through America, Arnold Samuelson hitched 560 miles from the Twin Cities back to the family farm in White Earth. His sister had been dead eight months. The homestead was abandoned—his bewildered parents, unable to face their grief alone, had packed up and gone to Minneapolis to be with their son the doctor and other family members. Weeds spiked the yard; rooms were furred with dust. The twenty-year-old pitched a tent and lived with his horse, Dude, and his dog, Pup, down in a “coulee” (a kind of steep ravine, by a streambed). The Maestro kept an extensive diary, and reading it now is to see so many of the themes in his life that would later develop in sadder and bolder relief: incipient mood swings, fights with a neighbor, the need to be left alone, even as he yearns for companionship, especially female companionship. At one point, he says: “Alone and incapacitated, I found in myself the sensations a wounded animal must feel when he lies alone in his den.” At another point: “The moon was full in a clear sky spangled with stars and graying northern lights alternating in the north.” At another: “I enjoy solitude in the woods and on the prairie as I can enjoy nothing else. It is supreme.” At another: “He makes many friends and keeps them, while I lose the few friendships that I contrive.” At another: “Parental tyranny I believe is the most despicable tendency, but it is tolerated more than cruelty to animals.” At the end of that summer, back in the city, ready to head out: “My attitude toward life is that it doesn't seem worth while, when one considers the great proportion of tedium and dissatisfaction as compared with the few ecstatic moments which are too short lived to really compensate for the vast amount of boredom and displeasure we humans endure. One may fairly doubt the worthwhileness of life.”

In this fifty-thousand-word document, some of it empurpled and other of it poetic, the diarist never mentions the murder of his sister—but its subtext is on almost every page. I now know that it was a deeply fatalistic and prone-to-depression “serious” young man who came knocking at 907 Whitehead in the spring of 1934.
They killed my sister, maybe they'll end up killing me
. Such fatalism only gives the instant lie to all those sunny-seeming pictures aboard
Pilar
. Such fatalism only links him up intimately with the deeply fatalistic and prone-to-depression man into whose good graces he'd improbably stepped, no matter how polar opposite their
stories would always be in other ways. In
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, the hero Robert Jordan, who has volunteered his services to the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, who has gotten over all wish for personal ambition as well as hope for his own survival, wonders if he can live “as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years.” He is free from his fear and discovers that a full union with another human being is possible. Let come what will come. Here's another expression of the underground river of Hemingway fatalism: not long after Arnold Samuelson knocked at his door—about three months later, by my calculations—in Cuba, with his boat, remembering Africa, remembering Spain, remembering a car wreck and a fractured arm out West, remembering a forward listening post on the Piave front in World War I when he was a teenager, the mentor wrote: “I did nothing that had not been done to me. I had been shot and I had been crippled and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing or another and I, truly, did not mind that any more.” That determinism comes at the start of chapter 8 in
Green Hills of Africa
, just ahead of the lengthiest and one of the most stream-of-conscious sentences Ernest Hemingway would ever commit to paper.

Echoes from the shadows. Not long ago, as I was writing this, I found buried in an archive a seven-page letter Samuelson wrote to Hemingway not quite a year after he had given up his job on
Pilar
. Basically, it's a guilt-ridden confession about getting a girl pregnant aboard Hemingway's boat. The impregnating happened after Samuelson and Hemingway had come back from their summer in Havana, perhaps three or four weeks before Samuelson had said good-bye to the Hemingway family and turned down Duval Street to ride the freights north toward home. It had happened late one night at the navy yard. The letter is undated but he wrote it in either late October or early November of 1935. He mailed it from Des Moines, Iowa.

“Dear Ernest,” he began, in his smooth penmanship. “Please read this. I've got a confession to make that may not be very important to you, but it means a hell of a lot to me.” He told how he had invited the girl onto the boat. He gave her name, said how young she was. It was clear from the start that she wanted to have sex, and that she had sought him out at the navy yard that night for that purpose. “It was a cold blooded sexual affair and when she was satisfied she left and I did not ask her to come back or tell her to stay away.” A little while later, she came back. “I let her on board.
The rubber was irritating, a lousy brand sold downtown, and she asked me to throw it away.” She went home and then some weeks later came back to the boat to tell him she was pregnant. For a long time he couldn't go to sleep, stumbled through his boat chores.

He said he'd not heard from the girl since he'd left town.

Yes, he needed to get on his own, to try to make it by himself as a writer. But in a far more crucial and immediate sense, Arnold Samuelson was fleeing Key West in February 1935, and in a cowardly fashion. And yet I am moved by the letter. It's the honesty, his shame, the bad conscience, the wanting to repair, those not-faint notes of midwestern, boyish innocence, in spite of everything. Call them atavistic Hemingway notes. Lost Hemingway notes. Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.