Hemingway's Boat (35 page)
Authors: Paul Hendrickson
Here they are, the Hemingway kids, day of the four blue marlin, July 20, 1935
,
standing with their windblown and barefoot and newly bearded specimen of a dad:
Patrick, the Mexican Mouse, in his dorky sunsuit and black tennies, sans socks. He often poses with hands on hips, as if to say to the world, as if to imitate his own father as a child: ain't afraid of nothin'. You might gaze on him and form the word “mouthy.”
Jack, in his knickers and webbed Boy Scout belt and canvas espadrilles, with their ribbon loops knotted at his ankles. He could almost be a dainty Parisian kid. His characteristic shyness has forced his head down in the instant before the snap. Schatz, as his dad calls him, when he's not
calling him the Bum or Mr. Bumby or some derivation thereof, has been fetched from St. Louis by his stepmother for this monthlong stay in the British West Indies sun with his half brothers, with whom he does and does not get along
.
Gregory, the Gig, Mr. Gigi, fitting himself neatly in the space between his protector's spread-apart legs. Isn't he the most innocent of the three, just a dopey little guy with pudgy fingers and rolls of baby fat? He'll be four in November
.
In the real-time space that existed on either side of this rectangle, the things of childhood had to have been happening. Can't you see Patrick taking his right arm off his hip and beginning to pick his nose? Or Bumby starting to bang Gigi on the top of his head? And Gigi scrunching up his face and bursting into tears? As the poet and critic Mark Strand, who has written eloquently about the power of family album photographs, once said, as he looked at a snapshot of his mother and his sister and his four-year-old long-ago self, and in so doing felt a great and terrible rush of sadness: “[I]t is so much about the moment in which it was taken. Like childhood itself, it is innocent of the future.”
In
Islands in the Stream,
one of the characters says: “Â âAnd the meanest is Andy.'Â ” Many pages later, after the broadbill swordfish fight that serves as the climax of the “Bimini” section, Thomas Hudson muses about his youngest boy: “But there was something about him that you could not trust.” This is Hemingway's next sentence: “What a miserable, selfish way to be thinking about people that you love, he thought.”
Islands
is the only novel into which Hemingway directly and unambiguously inserted his three children: Bumby as young Tom, Patrick as David, Gregory as Andrew. Each son is a minor-major character in the “Bimini” section
. Islands
is also a book that Hemingway didn't believe in enough artistically to publish in his lifetime, and the first fact may well have something to do with the second. Furthermore
, Islands
is a book that Hemingway had once envisioned as part of a mammoth trilogy of war novels about the sea, the land, the air. As many chroniclers have said, the dream never came close to reality. The land part ultimately got reduced and siphoned off into
Across the River and into the Trees.
The air part died aborning. And the “Sea Book,” or the “Sea Novel,” as Hemingway often capitalized it in letters and shadowy conversation, is what we know today as
Islands in the Stream
and
The Old Man and the Sea.
It's all pretty confusing, and the academics are still trying to sort out exact time frames of composition. In the summer of 1951, Hemingway put a
microfilm copy of sixteen hundred pages of the unfinished Sea Book into a lockbox at the Banco Nacional of Havana, keeping the original for revisions, but apparently he didn't work on it again after December 1951
â
or so scholars have concluded. Nonetheless he had to have known that one day, when he wasn't around, those pages would be taken up and retrofitted into a so-called finished work of art by the Hemingway merchants, one of the chief merchants in this instance being his fourth wife, whose six-line disingenuous note to readers at the front of the 1970 publication of
Islands in the Stream
said, in part: “Beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernest's.”
Although he doesn't specify his fictional sons' ages in the novel, Hemingway makes each of them a bit older than his true self. Thus, in the “Bimini” section of
Islandsâ
which is really the only place that they appear as breathing characters, since all three are dead by the time of the succeeding sectionsâyoung Tom Hudson seems about fourteen or fifteen, Davy Hudson about ten, little Andrew Hudson perhaps seven. There are places where the author doesn't even alter the real names of the people he's portraying. Now and again the main character addresses his oldest son as Schatz
.
The longest descriptive passage about the main character's youngest son occurs on page 53
.
Gregory Hemingway told me that, when he first read that page, the shock of recognition was so great, the words so stabbingly right, he decided, right there, if he ever wrote his own book about his father he'd use it as his epigraph
.
The smallest boy was fair and was built like a pocket battleship. He was a copy of Thomas Hudson, physically, reduced in scale and widened and shortened. His skin freckled when it tanned and he had a humorous face and was born being very old. He was a devil too, and deviled both his older brothers, and he had a dark side to him that nobody except Thomas Hudson could ever understand. Neither of them thought about this except that they recognized it in each other and knew it was bad and the man respected it and understood the boy's having it. They were very close to each other although Thomas Hudson had never been as much with this boy as with the others. This youngest boy, Andrew, was a precocious excellent athlete and he had been marvelous with horses since he had
first ridden. The other boys were very proud of him but they did not want any nonsense from him, either. He was a little unbelievable and anyone could well have doubted his feats except that many people had seen him ride and watched him jump and seen his cold, professional modesty. He was a boy born to be quite wicked who was being very good and he carried his wickedness around with him transmuted into a sort of teasing gaiety. But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it. He was just being good while his badness grew inside him
.
Gregory did indeed use that as an epigraph for
Papa: A Personal Memoir,
which was published in 1976
. Papa,
only a little more than one hundred pages long, continues to stand on the top rung of all Hemingway family memoirs, no matter its inaccuracies and omissions and distortions and deeply embittered tone. In the preface, Norman Mailer wrote, “For once, you can read a book about Hemingway and not have to decide whether you like him or not. He is there. By God, he exists.” When his book appeared, fifteen years after his father's suicide, Hemingway's youngest son was in the fractured middle of his third marriage. He was a medical doctor, a semi-secret cross-dresser, a manic-depressive, an alcoholic, a largely neglectful father of eight (one of whom was an adopted stepson). And for all of that, and in another way
because
of all that, there were many people around who wouldn't have blinked to call him a very loving man. This is Gregory's opening sentence: “I never got over a sense of responsibility for my father's death and the recollection of it sometimes made me act in strange ways.”
Among other things that a widened, shortened, middle-aged, pocket battleship of a man with an incredibly old-looking face said in a ninety-five-degree Coconut Grove night was this:
He always had this tremendous need to have a son who would do well, please him inordinately. But how we felt so compelled to do all these things to make him love us. Look, my brother Patrick went off to Africa to be a professional hunter. So did I for a time. That's no way for an adult to spend his life, taking people out with guns to destroy animals. But this was the kind of person I consciously and unconsciously knew he admired. And so did my brother Pat. Pat would have been so much happier being a curator in a museum
.
Gigi shook his head. He was quiet for a minute
.
I don't know exactly how it was done, the destruction. You tell me. What is it about a loving, dominating, basically well-intentioned father that ends up making you go nuts? I mean, the anger you feelâat what, exactly? Because he got so large, did that mean the rest of us had to diminish? None of us have amounted to very much. You can be angry at a man's overpowering unconscious, I guess. But was that unconscious malevolent? Did he wish to hurt us by it? I don't think so, not really. He was trying to do his work. His own insides were a wreck. My brother Pat, who was a brilliant kid, who really could have been something, was absolutely destroyed by my father to do anything in the outside world
.
From left, Mike Strater, Baroness Blixen, Pauline, Ernest, and Bror Blixen, Bimini, early summer 1935
TO READ
the Bimini letters from the middle of 1935 is to think of someone almost not bothering with sleep, such was the exuberance for a new place he'd never been (as Hemingway said a bit tautologically in the May 1935
Esquire
).
Among the first visitors to arrive (not counting his spouse) were Mike Strater and the Blixensâthe voluptuous Eva and the legendary Bror, out of Africa by way of Sweden. Strater didn't know the Blixens. Everybody slept on board. In those tight, rolling quarters, with Hemingway's bulk and ego in the middle, it made for a combustible, eroticized mix. In between the sexual anxiety was the fishing tension, a constant implicit competition of its own.
Actually, you can feel the sexual tension just from looking at the photographs that were taken. It's so sybaritic-looking on his boatâthe sunbathing at the stern, the towels and tennis shoes flung here and there, the bare bodies coated with tanning lotion.
Strater, of course, was the six-foot, two-hundred-pound, Princeton-bred amateur boxer and tennis player and painter with the hawk nose and slight stutter and girlish middle name of Hyacinth whom Hemingway had first met at Ezra Pound's studio, thirteen years before, when he'd just come back to Paris from a reporting assignment to Constantinople for the
Toronto Star
. He and Hemingway were drawn to each other by their common interest in the sporting life. The two novices on the Paris climbâStrater once characterized their relationship this wayâwould talk painting and literature for hours and then go off to a Montparnasse gym or the pebbly tennis courts at the Jardin du Luxembourg to try to outwit and out-hit each other. (Neither was worth much of a damn at tennis, not then, but at boxing they were roughly matched, in both weight and skill.) Strater was the first artist ever to paint a portrait of Hemingway. In early 1924, when William Bird's Three Mountains Press published Hemingway's second book,
in our time
(in an edition of 170 copies), a printer's woodcut from what Strater called his “boxer portrait” of Hemingway made up the frontispiece. It had him staring moodily downward, as if into his pain. The full-face portrait had pleased Hemingway. The thirty-two-page book itself, made up of a dozen and a half prose vignettes so brief that they felt like jewels resting in the cup of your hand, had been a sensation among the Left Bank expats, at least the younger ones.
Strater, three years older than Hemingway, was president of the Maine Tuna Club. In the summer of 1933 he had caught sixteen tuna off the coast of Ogunquit, which is where he'd built a permanent home and had spent six months of every year since coming back to America in the mid-twenties. None of his New England tuna catches had been of the monster variety; Bimini was meant to fix that. For the last two years, ever since reports of giant tuna and swordfish and marlin off Bimini had begun drifting through the world of big-game fishing, he and Hemingway had been talking up a trip to the Bahamas. In a July 1933 letter to Strater, shortly before leaving for the first leg of his African safari (which Strater, like MacLeish, had prudently decided to sidestep), Hemingway had spoken of “the run to beat hell and steadily off Gun Key and Cat Key and Bimini on the other edge of the gulf stream only forty-five miles from Miami. We
must
try them there.” He meant bluefin tuna. The island, according to Hemingway's informants, had a “good harbor, no mosquitoes, lots of wahoo, big and small marlin and wonderful bonefishing if you want to bring your grandmother along.” This last crack was meant to say that
bonefish were all right in their way, hard to catch, spooky as rainbows, silvery flashes in the shallow aqua flats, but it didn't matter, because he was a convert to another church, and it wasn't the church of small.