Hemingway's Boat (25 page)

Yes, Hemingway was “congenitally restless,” but is it possible he had set out purposely in this high moment of his life (new boat, new book ticking along, a father reunited with his boys) to destroy some of his closest friendships?
Did Hemingway want “a wholly different kind of human association—one he could dominate as a matter of course?” Those are Archibald MacLeish's words, in a letter, four years after Hemingway's suicide, speaking for himself and his spouse, Ada. What is inarguable is that so many of Hemingway's deepest relationships, especially literary friendships, going back to Paris, and even before Paris, would never be the same after the 1930s. One by one he'd lose them all—well, if not lose, exactly, estrange them all, in lesser and greater ways: F. Scott Fitzgerald (never mind the mentally broken Zelda, who'd pretty much always despised him, and vice versa); both MacLeishes; John Dos Passos and his wife, Katy (whom Hemingway had introduced to Dos Passos, and whom he had known and loved since teenage summers up in Michigan); Mike Strater; Gerald and Sara Murphy. The losing, or at least dropping off, happened with Gingrich, too, although he had never been a member of their expat Paris life. There's no question that Hemingway knew what he had done—it's remorsefully there in the letters. In 1943, by then living in Cuba, his third marriage all but finished, he'd write to MacLeish: “Why don't you come down here sometime.… I could take you to some odd places and you could have a change. I will promise absolutely not to be self righteous, no-good and bastardly as in my great 37–38 epoch when alienated all my friends (who I miss like hell) (not to mention my sonofabitching epoch of 1934 when was even worse). How is my lovely Ada?” That double parenthesis, that quick switch of thought, speaks gulf streams.

He and MacLeish had been friends since the summer of 1924. (They met at La Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse.) They went to Pamplona, to Saragossa, to the snow slopes of Gstaad, where Hemingway became devoted to the MacLeishes' young son Kenny, and vice versa. When Hemingway's marriage to Hadley fell apart, the MacLeishes took him in, kept his “god damned head working” (Hemingway's words) all through that emotional Paris winter of 1926–27. Archie and Ada were living then in an expensive borrowed apartment on avenue du Bois, and he and Hemingway kept their bicycles in the ornate front entrance, which disgusted the butlers of the other tenants.

The Depression forced the MacLeishes home—“Exile's return,” to use critic Malcolm Cowley's phrase and book title about the Left Bank lives that had to be reinvented back in America in the thirties. MacLeish went to work for Henry Luce's
Fortune
. This brought rebuke from Hemingway about selling out, which made Ada cry.

In November 1930, when Hemingway suffered a compound spiral fracture
of his right arm in an auto accident near Billings, Montana, MacLeish flew to his side (on a wind-flapping Northwest Orient airliner), only to be accused later by his friend of having come out to see him die so he could make literary jack out of it for some crappy magazine. Hemingway spent seven weeks recovering in a Montana hospital, growing a silky black beard, and here is some of what that accident had felt like:

That's from
Green Hills
, in a passage written not quite four years removed from the accident, after the crossing to Cuba for the season that was going to disappoint severely.

If the pattern through much of the thirties was for Hemingway to brutalize a friendship, and then to feel terrible about it, the pattern for MacLeish was to feel rage—then to swallow it and come back. There are two well-known fights between Hemingway and MacLeish worth describing. Both incidents involved fishing, and one was on his new boat. The first: March 1932, right before Josie Russell took Hemingway over to Havana on the
Anita
for marlin. Hemingway and Bra Saunders (the Key West and Bahamian fishing captain) and Mike Strater (painter pal from Paris, via Princeton) and Uncle Gus Pfeiffer went to the Dry Tortugas on a fishing holiday (Uncle Gus probably financed the whole thing). They got marooned by a norther; tempers frayed. After they were back in Key West, MacLeish told Hemingway that somebody should prick his ego balloon; Hemingway said MacLeish's prick wasn't big enough. The poet walked out of Whitehead Street and moved into a hotel and then flew back to New York.

The second rupture came around the third week of May 1934 (
Pilar
would have been in Hemingway's possession for about two weeks). MacLeish, feeling seasick, but trying to hide it, hooked into a sail.
Pilar
's master started screaming commands, while Arnold Samuelson watched open-jawed and took his mental notes: “Hi. A sailfish! He's after you,
Archie.… Get ready to slack to him. Don't strike until I tell you. There! He hit! Slack to him.
Slack to him!!
Shit! Why the hell didn't you slack to him? He's spooked now and he will never come back.” Enraged that he wasn't heeded, Hemingway took out a shotgun and began killing seabirds. “Ernest took to shooting terns, taking one on one barrel and the grieving mate on the other. He was fed up with the world and I was fed up with him,” MacLeish remembered years later, in a letter to Carlos Baker. (He seemed to be confusing the earlier fight in the Tortugas with the '34 humiliation on
Pilar
. No matter. What had burned itself in was the sight of the birds plopping in the water, two by two.) In an earlier letter to Baker, MacLeish had said: “It would be so abundantly easy to describe Ernest in terms, all of which would be historically correct, which would present him as a completely insufferable human being. Actually, he was one of the most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creatures I have ever known.” The one other person he'd ever met who could suck up all the air in a room just by entering it was FDR.

Not long after the ugliness aboard
Pilar
, Hemingway, up in his workroom, wrote to Waldo Peirce and said what he said about MacLeish: nose picker, bloody bore, weird combination of senility and puerility. Maybe his bile had something to do with the single page of prose produced that day. Maybe, as others have speculated, he was still nursing a grudge against Archie for declining to go on safari with him. He typed the letter, writing in sentences by hand, and to me it is all a Hemingway Rorschach test. He typed, “It's too bloody pompous.” He wrote in (does this mean it was entered later?): “I shouldn't write this. So forget it. But he kept asking for it and asking for it. I only like the people I like. Not the bastards that like me.” He was out of space, so he turned the sheet sideways and wrote in the right-hand margin: “I wouldn't want to hurt his bloody feelings for anything. So tear this part out and burn it.”

In the last pages of the manuscript copy of
Green Hills
, there's a long meditation about cowardice. Hemingway's father, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and MacLeish, among others, are in this passage, which was ultimately deleted from the published book. Archie had the most charm of any of his friends, the narrator muses, they'd had wonderful times together, but, you see, “he was really a coward so you were never completely comfortable with him just as he was never completely comfortable with himself.”

In the late 1950s, the MacLeishes stopped off in Cuba on their way north from a vacation in Antigua to see Mary and Ernest Hemingway.
The welcome was so wistful and touching. It was as if Hemingway couldn't do or say enough.

And what of “poor Scott,” as Hemingway was ever wont to put him down, once he'd superseded him? On May 28, 1934, two days after the Waldo Peirce letter, Hemingway answered Fitzgerald's almost pathetic plea of three weeks before regarding Hemingway's opinion of
Tender Is the Night
. This is the letter where he reminds Fitzgerald that he'd been too damned stinko for any real conversation when they'd seen each other in New York on the weekend that he'd purchased
Pilar
.

He postscripts: “What about The Sun also and the movies? Any chance?”

And that very long story he was now going good on, that had crested two hundred manuscript pages? His letters from May to July show his continuing surprise at the way his book seems to want to grow—as if it has its own mind and refuses to be only a “story.” Always, no matter what else is being said, there is the preoccupation with word counts, page counts. Here he is on June 10, writing to his friends Grant and Jane Mason, who live in Havana: “Am on page 100 and think it will run maybe another hundred. Maybe less.” Here he is nine days later, writing to his wife, who's gone to Arkansas with the children to visit her parents: “Worked hard yest. Am on page 137. Going to write this morning and then go out in the boat this pm.… Sunday went sleepy as hell after getting to sleep on a hot night … to 7 a.m. Mass—then fished in the gulf.… I watered good yest p.m. It
hasn't rained since about 6 or 7 days now.” Here he is, next day, June 20, in a letter to Max Perkins: “Am on page 141 of the mss. (something over 20,000 words of the triply re-written shit-removed mss. so far. Will run another 10,000 it looks.) Am not troubled by the lack of confidence, what will the critics say, general impotence jeebies that seem to be driving the boys to religion.… Get out in the boat in the afternoons when my work is finished and keep my mind off it.” Here he is, the day after that, writing to Gingrich: “Then I've been in a damned fine epoch going well on this thing (up to page 147 on the triple re-written shitremoved now and going fine)…. You shouldn't fish blindly in the ocean any more than in a stream. You can know the damned gulf stream like a trout stream. The holes, the eddies, the shallows are all there. Only you can't see them.” This is the letter in which he speaks of “loosening,” of getting back “the old 4th dimension,” of becoming a writer yet.

That loosening: it's as if an imagination is intermingling salt water with desert, sea with plain, creatures of the deep with creatures of the bush. He's writing a book about Africa, but with the soundings and color shadings of the Stream. There are phrases and sentences and whole passages that would make you think of
Pilar
, even though
Pilar
is nowhere physically present. It's almost as if he's summoning Africa every morning through the mnemonic “trick” of getting on his boat and hauling in fish every afternoon. Hemingway was one of the most efficient writers who ever lived—he used everything.
Green Hills
, like nearly all his work, is about the experience of living your life, and sometimes he'll state this credo in nearly religious terms.

Only to live it. He wrote this passage in the period when he'd humiliated Archie and then attacked him in a letter and then hectored and counseled and lectured Scott in another letter, two days after.

Three weeks after, on June 21 (the day he writes to Gingrich of his belle epoque and of his general “loosening up”), he completes a six-page burst, concluding with:

The word “stream” appears twice here. The word will keep finding its way into his text—which can be almost unbearable to read in places: all that macho killing, all that unnecessary ego—but never more mystically than in the greatest Stream sentence in American literature. That sentence, with its 497 diagram-defying words, won't be about Africa at all, even though it appears in a story about Africa. It'll get itself onto paper at some point within the first month after the crossing to Havana, when his general progress on the book—because of his nearly nonstop fishing; because of how many people are crowding both his boat and life—has narrowed to a trickle.