Hemingway's Boat (3 page)

Ernest Hemingway has been examined by so many scholars and memoirists and respected biographers and hangers-on and pretenders and doctoral students desperate for a dissertation topic that I feel sometimes we have lost all sense of who the man really was. It's as if each new Hemingway
book by each new Hemingway “expert” wishes to contradict the last, which is one reason why I have been determined to try to anchor a Hemingway narrative, to ground it, in something that had existed in his world—that still exists, in its way—just as he had once existed in the world. I felt that if I could somehow learn whatever was possible to learn about a possession that meant so much to its owner—if I could actually
touch
it, too—then I might be able to begin to understand things about Hemingway, and not only Hemingway, in ways that I had not previously been able to understand. Indeed, I hoped to find people who were once on that boat, who had had their own deep relationship with her, and tell their stories, too. And I have found them, both the living and the dead.

Actually, as far back as the summer of 1987, as a
Washington Post
reporter, I searched out and interviewed Hemingway's three sons. The series of articles that resulted was called “Papa's Boys.” Their father had been dead for twenty-six years and the sons themselves were late-middle-aged men. What I recall so vividly about Jack and Patrick and Gregory Hemingway, in their deep psychic sibling pain, was their attempt to say how fine it had been to spend time with their father outdoors—in Idaho meadows, flushing quail; in the Stream, going for the monsters; in high Wyoming creeks, fighting rainbows. No one could ever take those feelings and experiences away. Past all their father's posing and public brawling, past all his posthumous critical whittling down, past all the intentional and unintentional psychic hurt he had inflicted on them, what each Hemingway son still possessed was the memory of the man when he was good. Patrick Hemingway, who is in Montana, the only one alive now (he is in his early eighties), the one whom his father had nicknamed Mouse, told me that it was as if some immense and wise Plains Indian, the head of a whole nation, was taking time out from warfare and buffalo hunts to instruct in the codes of manhood—of life itself. The chief taught his braves how to pee high and wide off rickety wooden bridges in the Florida Keys, how to crouch low and
whish-whish
through the back of their teeth for shore birds, how to enter pebble-clean rivers without spooking the cutthroat trout around their shoes. He taught them these things and a lot more besides, but in the end, which came sooner than later, everything changed. I recall each Hemingway son talking longingly about their father's boat, even amid stories about their retchings in the toilet down below when the seasickness overcame them; even amid stories about their inability to land the trophy fish that their dad—holding them by the waist and dousing them with pails of sea water to try to cool their bare bodies as they sat in the fighting
chair at the stern of the boat, with their small arms giving out—so badly wished them to land, not for his sake as much as theirs. It wasn't that the sons loved going out on
Pilar
for a day or several days; it was that their father loved being out there so much on his boat with them. It was enough.

Gregory Hemingway—the most deeply scarred of the three, the most gifted athlete in the family, the one with the truest writing gift, the son who'd been given the nickname Gigi by his father—had grown up to be a doctor, like his paternal grandfather. Gigi (with a hard G sound, pronounced like “Wiggy”) had also spent most of his adult life struggling—heroically seems not too strong a word—against the compulsion to adorn his squat, bulky body in hosiery, brassieres, wigs, girdles, makeup, spiked heels, fingernail polish, and then go out into public places talking to people in his deep-chested voice. He was fifty-five and in the Miami area when we met. Coarse gray hair fell in clumps over his face. His teeth were wrecked. Gigi was spending his days in public parks and libraries. He had no fixed address. He had been married and divorced several times. He was estranged from most of his children. The medical career had drained away. Sometimes, he said, he'd go out onto Biscayne Bay in a small rowboat to hand-fish over the side with a night crawler, to fall asleep in the sun until something below jerked him awake. Gigi said, and it was easy to believe, he'd undergone ninety-eight electroshock treatments. “I've taken every fucking pill there is,” he said. “These horrible mixed-up feelings you have, the love and the hate,” he said. We talked of yet another Hemingway biography that had recently come out, whose author, Jeffrey Meyers, had seemed to wish to put on view every nasty thing Hemingway had ever said or done in his life—so he had boatloads of material. Meyers described letters that a father had written about his troubled youngest son. These unpublished Hemingway letters of the 1950s, not well-known, had described Gigi, in the biographer's paraphrasing words, as “an exploded firecracker, worthless, no good, ruined by money, a macabre and mercenary mix of Charles Addams and the National City Bank, an absolute pathological shit, a son he would like to see hanged.”

And in a way, it was as if none of it mattered, not finally. I can still hear the exact tone of fantasizing voice with which Gregory Hemingway—a very nice man, despite everything, with a doctorly sense of wanting to ease the pain of others—said: “I think I want to go over to Cuba and find a way to get that fucking boat off the hillside at the
finca
and bring her back over here to Florida. It's where she belongs, you know. It would be a way of honoring him. This is where my father first learned to take her out on
the water and to sit in a chair and wait for a fish—when we were still living as a family in Key West. You know, there were periods when he didn't like to talk much on the boat. He'd just sit there and stare out over the water.”

I have come to believe deeply that Ernest Hemingway, however unpostmodern it may sound, was on a lifelong quest for sainthood, and not just literary sainthood, and that at nearly every turn, he defeated himself. How? “By betrayals of himself, and what he believed in,” as the dying writer, with the gangrene going up his leg, says so bitterly in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” one of Hemingway's greatest short stories. Why the self-defeating betrayal of high humanistic aspirations? The seductions of celebrity and the sin of pridefulness and the curses of megalomania and the wastings of booze and, not least, the onslaughts of bipolarism must amount to a large part of the answer. Hemingway once said in a letter to his closest friend in the last two decades of his life, General Buck Lanham, whom he had come to know on the battlefield as a correspondent in World War II: “I have always had the illusion it was more important, or as important, to be a good man as to be a great writer. May turn out to be neither. But would like to be both.”

I also believe there was so much more fear inside Hemingway than he ever let on, that it was almost always present, by day and more so by night, and that his living with it for so long was ennobling. The thought of self-destruction trailed Hemingway for nearly his entire life, like the tiny wakes a child's hand will make when it is trailed behind a rowboat in calm water—say, up in Michigan.

Many years ago, Norman Mailer wrote a sentence about Hemingway that has always struck me as profound: “It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.” The great twentieth-century critic Edmund Wilson, a contemporary of Hemingway's, who admired him early and had contempt for him late, wrote in his journals of the 1960s: “He had a high sense of honor, which he was always violating; he evidently had a permanent bad conscience.” A writer named Ella Winter, one of the Lost Generation exiles of Paris in the twenties, said in a letter, seven months after the suicide:

I think there's another truth here, too, and in a sense it doesn't even have to do with Hemingway; it has to do with
us:
namely, that his life, which is to say, the way he lived it, or our perception of the way he lived it, has always had the capacity to stir up complex things, to make us uneasy, defensive, secretly troubled about our own far less glamorous and more sedentary selves. Hemingway's fellow Chicagoan, the novelist Nelson Algren, to whom Hemingway was a hero, and who came along a literary generation behind him, once said of all the desk-bound critics who couldn't seem to bear the man in his own lifetime:

He led a life of action in the physical world, all right. But underneath that was a bookish man in glasses trying to get his work done, and finding it harder with each passing year.

So what we have of this man are the irresolvable contradictions of the life and the glories of the work—some of it. The Hemingway myth, however much oversold and devalued, can still powerfully stand in a new
century for a great many tensions unresolved in American males, or so I believe—and not only males. I also believe that all of Hemingway's writing, every bit of it, even at its most self-parodistic and Papa-cult worst, is seeking to be about the
living
of this life. The being of this life. The doing of this life. The engaging of this life. And in that sense, the work—and even, I am willing to say, so much of the coarsened personal history—can be thought of as something spiritual and indeed almost holy. In late April 1934, waiting in Key West with a schoolboy's excitement for his new boat to be shipped to him in Florida, Hemingway wrote to his beloved friend Sara Murphy: “Am working fine now—But I would rather had a good life than be a bloody great writer—(who says he's a b.g.w. Nobody) Have written
plenty
and will write
plenty
more. And I will be as good as I know and I'll know better all the time. But every day is a day and its
my
lousy life—not posterities. Oh well.” That's such a characteristic Hemingway letter—the streams of loose syntax, the blunt emotion.

Loop backward seventeen days from his death—to June 15, 1961, at Rochester, Minnesota. A man in the psychiatric ward of Saint Marys Hospital at Mayo Clinic is writing a different kind of letter to a nine-year-old boy. The man writes it on two small sheets of notepaper, in his big, round, legible hand, with his trademark downhill slant. An irreversibly damaged Ernest Hemingway, his inner landscape now a paranoid's nightmare, has found within himself at the end of his life the kindness and courage and momentary lucidity—not to say literary grace—to write 210 beautiful words to a kid he likes very much. Whenever I begin to feel revulsion at Hemingway's ego and boorish behavior toward other human beings, I like to take out a copy of this letter. Two hundred and ten words, with so much emotion tucked below the surface of the prose, the sentences pile-driven by contained feeling and acute observation of the natural world, would have been a half-decent output for a workday, even in a master's prime.

The boy—his name is Frederick G. Saviers, although everyone, including Hemingway, calls him Fritz—has a congenital heart condition. He is the son of George Saviers, Hemingway's small-town doctor in Ketchum, who was also one of Hemingway's favorite duck-hunting companions. In these last weeks, Hemingway has been brought once more for treatment to Mayo. Not long after this note to Fritz, Hemingway will fool his foolish doctors at the world-famous clinic into believing he is well enough to go home to Idaho. And almost immediately the Boss shotgun will go off in
the Sunday quiet of the house that sits a couple of hundred yards up the steep slope from the west bank of the Big Wood River.

The patient on the locked ward at Saint Marys on June 15, 1961, has just learned that Dr. Saviers's son is in a Denver hospital. In Idaho, Hemingway and Fritz and Fritz's father liked talking about the Yankees and rainbow trout. But none of that will ever be the same again.