Hemingway's Boat (42 page)

By the time he took his boat to Cuba at the end of 1939, he had lived in Key West for the better part of nearly thirteen years. A place that was less than four miles long and less than two miles wide had held him all that while—well, if not held him, home-based him. In Key West, or at least in the Key West years, he completed a huge body of work. A partial listing:
A Farewell to Arms
,
Death in the Afternoon
,
Winner Take Nothing
,
Green Hills of Africa
,
To Have and Have Not
,
The Fifth Column
, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” When he motored away on
Pilar
, at Christmas 1939, his marriage over, Key West over, he had one hundred thousand words down on
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, which, the next year, would be taken by the hateful critics as his finest novel yet.

And yet. Many of the critics of his day may well have missed the point of
Green Hills
. That's how it seems now. The book was an experiment, postmodern in nature, in which a too-full-of-himself author wished a platform to discourse—call it
flatulate
—on any number of subjects, not least the state of literature and the tensions of the artist. In many ways, as has been said by several influential latter-day critics, it's as much a book about the pursuit of art as it is about big-game hunting. I think Hemingway himself would have conceded he was serving an experimental literary purpose more than a reportorial or documentary one. In a brief foreword (added, it seems, after he had written the book), he had said: “The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.” Did the experiment work? Did he compete with a work of the imagination, his imagination? Did he locate the shapes of the country and the patterns of action of, say,
A Farewell to Arms
? No one in his right literary mind would argue that. And yet there are unforgettable Africa passages. Max Perkins understood
Green Hills
for the lesser work it was. In a letter to Fitzgerald, a month before the book came out, the editor to both men, who could write to each in a confidential voice about the other's anxieties, had said: “Every writer seems to have to go through a period when the tide runs against him strongly.” At least it was happening “when Ernest was writing books that are in a general sense minor ones.” I prefer to think of
Green Hills
in the way Lincoln Kirstein—an acute critical mind of the thirties—thought of
Death in the Afternoon
, another nonfiction experiment commonly “explained” as a failure, as an early marker on the trail of Hemingway's supposed long decline. To Kirstein, the merits of
Death in the Afternoon
superseded its flaws. Kirstein believed that “however irritating,” the “sum of the book stands head and shoulders above his worst self; it is his best self.” Yes. “In the terms of his limits, he can best be explained.” Yes again. Isn't that a kind of Hemingway epitaph?

In April 1933, a little more than a year after he and his family had moved into 907 Whitehead, Hemingway had written to an old pal from his Paris days, Janet Flanner. “We have a fine house here and the kids are all well,” he'd said. “Also four coons, a possum, 18 goldfish, three peacocks and a yard with fig tree, lime tree. Very fine the way Pauline has fixed it. We have been (and are) damned happy. I could stay here damned near all the time and have a fine time watching the things grow and be happier than I understand.”

There's a term in typesetting known as the “widow.” It refers to a word or two hanging alone at the end of a paragraph. In the old days of newspapers, desk editors were always trying to squeeze the reporter's prose in the lines immediately above so as to eliminate the widow and save a line of type. Sometimes, in magazine work, chunks of white space remain at the end of a page, and so editors will sling in some filler. If it's a highbrow magazine, they might put in a verse. At the end of Edmund Wilson's take-apart of Hemingway in
The New Republic
, on page 136, there was an inch-and-a-half of white space. The magazine's literary editor, Malcolm Cowley, filled it with a recent eight-line poem of his own, titled “Hunter.” Later, when he included it in a collection of his poetry, Cowley altered its form slightly and retitled it “Ernest.” Why be obscure? Why not name his subject, whom he got to know, the decade before, in the cafes of Paris?

The jackals of his mind. Only to grow more jackaled.

The child is standing on the bow of a small, wooden rowboat pulled up into the weeds. It's the summer of 1903 at the family cottage in Michigan. He's about to turn four. Behind him is an open field—so Windemere and the woods and the beach and Walloon Lake itself must be somewhere in the foreground, which you cannot see. What you see is the smiling little boy. He's got on fringed cowboy pants. Pitched on the back of his head is a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. Cradled in his arms is a gun. It doesn't look large enough to be a shotgun. It could be an air rifle. Just the way he holds it suggests a level of confidence and comfort. If it's only a play gun, this in itself would seem a little curious, because Ernest Miller, as his mother often calls him, is all but done with make-believe weapons. He's already been on hikes of up to seven miles through the forest with his daddy, toting a real shotgun on his shoulder. Doctor Hemingway had taken his son into the woods and allowed him to fire a rifle at two and a half—the thing had kicked like a mule but the child had loved it. We know so because the event was recorded in a family album kept devotedly by his mother. She calls them scrapbooks. She's going to fill up five for Ernest Miller, her second born, documenting the story of his life from birth into his high school years
.

This picture and its caption are on page 54 of Album II. Beneath the glued-in image, in her bold, Palmer-perfect hand, with the big loops on the tails of several letters, Grace Hall-Hemingway wrote:

“ ‘Can cock my own gun.' ”

Horton's Creek, northern Michigan, summer 1904. An unidentified family member wrote on the back, “… Ernest Hemingway in Horton's Creek—near Walloon Lake, Mich. 5 years of age.… Taken by his father Clarence Hemingway.”

THERE ARE UNCOUNTED BOATS
and streams and ten-foot Sears, Roebuck cane fishing poles of childhood and boyhood and young manhood that prefigured the life of
Pilar
.

In the cold Illinois spring of 1917, two months before their high school graduation and in the same week America entered World War I, Ernest Hemingway and a stubby five-foot-six-and-a-half classmate named Ray Ohlsen took a five-day camping-and-canoeing trip down the Des Plaines River and the Illinois River to Starved Rock State Park. Hemingway sat in the stern, his mate in the bow. In three months the stern paddler would be eighteen. In six months he'd be a cub on
The Kansas City Star
. In fifteen months he'd be blown up on the Italian front.

The Des Plaines River was a mile and a half west of the Hemingway front porch, straight out Chicago Avenue. Oak Park historians, with forgivable hyperbole, like to say that the “river of the prairies”—sluggish,
sediment-filled, home to carp and bullhead, paddled by Marquette and Jolliet in 1673, known to native peoples for something like ten thousand years—is where the eastern woodlands of America meet the western grasslands. Winters, Hemingway skated on the frozen sloughs of this river. In the spring he hunted jacksnipe in the forest-preserve woods along its banks. Once—it's a well-known incident—he illegally shot a pheasant at a game farm just north of the North Avenue Bridge of the Des Plaines. Years later he wrote about this poaching moment in
Esquire
, of how “you can feel the bulk of him still inside your shirt with his long tail up under your armpit, walking in to town in the dark along the dirt road that is now North Avenue where the gypsy wagons used to camp when there was prairie out to the Des Plaines river where Wallace Evans had a game farm and the big woods ran along the river where the Indian mounds were.”

If the Des Plaines was never an aesthetic thing—nothing like the alder-banked, swift-running, icy trout streams of northern Michigan—it was nonetheless Hemingway's “home river,” the one a suburban teenager could get to fastest when he was dreaming his escaping dreams in the middle dormered room wedged under the eaves on the third floor of the big house at 600 North Kenilworth Avenue. It was a link, vital link, in that great chain of “highways” in the middle of landlocked America that rolls right down to the sea. Which is to say: the Des Plaines merges with the Kankakee River southwest of Joliet, Illinois, to form the Illinois River. And the Illinois traverses most of the state for which it is named before emptying itself into the Mississippi River above St. Louis. And the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico, collecting so many other rivers as it goes. If you lived on the fringe of Chicago in the shank of the century, and were mad for the outdoors, and were squirming in your confinements, parental and otherwise, that thought might well thrill you. The yearning for the short-water route to freedom, wide-open freedom, that would have been there. Call it Huck's yearning. To go riding on the spine of time, toward salt water.
Pilar
one day would provide the means.

The explorers left on a Monday, first day of their spring vacation, from the North Avenue Bridge. The temperature was in the mid-forties; the trees on the bank didn't yet have a leaf on them. In Washington, DC, Woodrow Wilson was asking Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, because the world had to be safe for democracy. “WAR RESOLUTION READY” ran the eight-column banner head on page one of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. Someone took a photograph as they shoved
off. On the back of the image, the doctor's son, with his mother's sense of history, and the impulse to record his place in it, would later write: “Start of Oak Park–Starved Rock canoe trip. April 2, 1917. Stern Ernest Hemingway (Stein). Bow Ray Ohlsen (Cohen).” It's what they called each other, Stein and Cohen. It was a running joke that had to do with a pretend pawnbroker business conducted out of their school lockers on the ground floor at Oak Park and River Forest Township High School. Actually, the two are said to have made
real
small-time book on local sporting events with their schoolmates and with students from other area high schools, collecting and paying off under an arc light half a block from their school's grounds, never getting caught. For the rest of his life, the one in the stern would keep up his unthinking Stein name-joke, referring to himself in letters and conversation as Hemingstein or Stein the Antique Brute or the Great Steinway or Hymenstein or the Stein or any of a half dozen other variants.

They were in their mackinaws and long underwear. In their borrowed canoe (Hemingway owned his own canoe, but for some reason they weren't using it on this trip) were tallow candles, army blankets, toilet paper, Swiss Army knives, a mess kit, extra pairs of socks, a lean-to tent, and cans of pork-and-beans. Their destination, several counties downstream, was a state monument thought to be home to humans as early as 8000
BC
. The rock from which Starved Rock gets its name is a sandstone outcropping on the Illinois River. Once, peoples of the Potawatomi and the Fox, subtribes of the Ottawa nation, trapped their enemies from the Illinois tribe atop this cliff, starving them to death.

That first day out was pretty miserable. So was the second. Because of dams and shallow water, no matter the spring runoffs, they had to make numerous portages. There were boulders in their path that sent them hopping out of the canoe and into the cold, brownish water to try to protect the sides of the boat. Near a town named Riverside they climbed a local landmark called the Hoffman Tower. They came down and took pictures on the bridge. Hemingway, wearing a couple of shirts and an outer jacket, has a large pack on his back. In his right hand is his blade—if they would have left their paddles in the canoe, somebody might have come along while they were in the tower and stolen their boat. He's taking some of the weight off his shoulders with a tump-line harness at his forehead—he could almost be a French voyageur from the old fur-trading days on the river, no matter that he's still in the clutch of suburbia. Seven years from now, in Paris, nursing his
café
, his baby
boy in the pram beside him, a voyager in literary modernism will write: “Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by learning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line.” That's from “Big Two-Hearted River.”