Hemingway's Boat (52 page)

The first mate on
Pilar
now was a native Canary Islander, born in 1897, who'd come to Cuba with his parents when he was ten. Gregorio Fuentes, who spoke little English, was going to live through the entire twentieth century and serve Hemingway and his boat loyally from 1938 to the Idaho
suicide.
^‡
When he hired out on
Pilar
, he was forty-one, two years older than Hemingway, almost two decades younger than Carlos.

He and Hemingway had met in 1931 in the Dry Tortugas. (Max Perkins had come down from New York to be part of that fishing trip.) They'd run out of Bermuda onions for the sandwiches. Hemingway had gone aboard Gregorio's fishing smack to see if he could get some. Gregorio had refused money, and gave Hemingway rum as well. Hemingway remembered. He'd also been impressed by the shipshape boat Gregorio kept.

In October 1944, when Hemingway was overseas reporting the war, Gregorio had stayed with
Pilar
during a hurricane that, according to Hemingway, “blew 180 mph true, and small craft and Navy vessels were blown up onto the harbor boulevard and up onto the small hills around the harbor.” Hemingway loved his loyalty.

Now, in 1950, Gregorio was fifty-three and hale and earning $155 a month—three times what any Hemingway household employee got paid. He was the mate and cook and all-around best hand. He knew his place. When he didn't have work to do, he liked sitting alone at the bow, amid the anchors and throw-off lines, staring into the sea, with a smoke. Like Carlos, he was a bony welterweight, only instead of wearing ball caps with the brims turned around, he favored old straw or felt fedoras.

One more piece of
Pilar
's myth from the decade that had flowed beneath her hull. For approximately fourteen months in the wartime forties—from late November 1942 to late winter 1944—
Pilar
got converted by her master into a patrol boat, armed with light machine guns, hand grenades, bazookas, and satchel charges of explosives. In the early stages of the war, German subs had been sinking tankers in the North Atlantic convoy routes almost at will. The Gulf Stream and its surrounding waters had fairly crawled with U-boats. The idea—authorized by the new American ambassador to Cuba, Spruille Braden—was that
Pilar
and her crew might be able to lure a Nazi boat to the surface and get in the first blasts before escaping.
Pilar
would be disguised as a scientific vessel conducting experiments for the American Museum of Natural History. A wolf
in sheep's clothing, she'd patrol with her concealed armaments along the north Cuban coast. If Hemingway and crew could draw a U-boat close, they'd pull the covers off their weaponry and open fire and even try to get a grenade down the sub's conning tower. Nothing like this ever happened. Hemingway's Q-boat (as such civilian decoy vessels were known in World War I) never encountered an enemy ship, although there was one occasion when a U-boat was in sight. (The boat was going too fast in the other direction, and
Pilar
couldn't close on her.) Hemingway's motley and revolving band of volunteers consisted of a local jai alai player, a merchant seaman, a wealthy playboy sportsman, a machinist, and military men on loan from the government. (Gregorio Fuentes was also involved.) The whole enterprise earned the contempt of Hemingway's third wife, Martha Gellhorn, who was convinced her husband was trying to avoid, or at least delay, going to the war in Europe as a correspondent, as well as trying to get in some free fishing with his hangers-on, meanwhile burning up gasoline courtesy of the American government. (Briefest recap of his briefest marriage: After nearly four years of adultery, Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn had wed on November 21, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, before a justice of the peace, in the dining room of the Union Pacific Railroad, sixteen days after the divorce from Pauline was finalized. Not quite three years later, early fall of 1943, when Martha left to report on World War II, the marriage was all but done, even if the actual divorce didn't come until December 1945.)

Gellhorn was wrong. While Operation Friendless (Hemingway had named the reconnaissance patrols for one of the cats at the
finca
) often got polluted in the usual Hemingway manner with far too much alcohol and ego, there were, at base, courageous motivations at work. Hemingway and his boat performed needed—and dangerous—picket duties, keeping watch on uncounted inlets, bays, uninhabited keys. This, the director of the FBI (never mind Gellhorn) could never buy or stomach. The abstemious and paranoid J. Edgar Hoover had little use for Hemingway, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, when he became convinced that Hemingway was either a Communist or a sympathizer—and no question a drunk and womanizer. In the early forties, Hoover had his agents in the American Embassy in Cuba monitoring Hemingway, and indeed Hoover himself, as evidenced from an FBI file on Hemingway that's nearly as long as your arm, was writing his own paranoid memoranda about Hemingway from his desk in Washington. Hoover's and the bureau's paranoia about Hemingway—and Hemingway's paranoia about Hoover and the bureau—
would keep up for the rest of Hemingway's life, right to the locked doors of Mayo Clinic.

In the long history of Hemingway's boorish behavior toward other human beings, the middle and late months of 1950 mark a special moment. The anger just flamed outward, a kind of spectacular shining of his rage, in the weeks and months leading up to the publication of
Across the River
, and in the weeks and several months immediately following—which was right when a young embassy officer was coming to know him and experiencing him as something wholly opposite.

If, on the front end, this rage was tied chiefly to his anxieties over the quality of what he'd produced, after so long a publishing absence, then, on the back end, it was linked mostly to his rejection by the critics, which was a rejection unlike anything he'd yet suffered. But the rage was also connected in more general ways with mortality, dropping broader and broader hints, as well as connected to his idealized love for a green-eyed Italian girl whom he knew he'd never have, not sexually, for lots of reasons. He was more than twice Adriana Ivancich's age, and he wasn't even half a decade into his own fourth marriage, which, for all its shipwreck, would be the marriage he'd stay in, for better and worse, through much sickness and occasional patches of health, until that morning in Ketchum, when he'd leave behind, for his spouse to be the first to find, running from her bedroom at the sound of it, what you might regard as his last and most splattering expression of anger.

Some glimpses of these electrified displays, fore and aft.

On Friday May 5, four months and two days ahead of official publication of
Across the River
, Hemingway, having lit himself up with frozen double daiquiris at his favorite Havana bar-restaurant, the Floridita, collected a nineteen-year-old whore, whom he'd nicknamed Xenophobia, and brought her down to the boat to have lunch with his wife and her sixty-five-year-old visiting cousin, Bea Gluck, a reserved Chicagoan. Xenophobia was crisp and beautiful, but the trouble was she didn't like going to bed with her clients—so he liked to say. The occasional client who owned
Pilar
claimed she wouldn't have eaten that day if he hadn't invited her to the boat. That morning, Mary Hemingway and her cousin had gone out for a short cruise in and around the harbor with Gregorio. They'd come back at noon and tied up at the Club Náutico and were waiting for Hemingway to arrive so that the three could sit down to a prearranged
lunch on board. He showed up more than an hour late, with the tart on his arm, rocking and reeling down the boards, doing introductions all around. Mary's cousin had never met a designated whore before and tried to see the humor in it. The next morning, Mary handed her husband a lengthy typed letter. He went back to his own bedroom to read it. “As soon as it is possible for me to move out … I shall move,” she said. Further down: “If there were any sign of remorse after such bouts of behavior on your part, I could believe we might try again and make things better.” In
How It Was
, quoting her letter, Mary records no apology from Hemingway. “Stick with me, kitten. I hope you will decide to stick with me,” she says he said. She goes on to say that he kept her so busy with beautifying projects at the
finca
that she sort of plumb forgot she intended to leave him.

On the same day that his wife handed him the letter, he was banging out several of his own on his old portable Royal. One was to his publisher. He told Scribner he was in the doghouse again, in part because he was dead on his ass from work on the galleys for the new book. Okay, his Italian girl, too. “I miss who I miss so badly that I do not care about anything,” he said. “Loveing two women at same time is about a rough a sport as you can practice.” (In subsequent days, he'd reprise the bit with Xenophobia. To Scribner: “I wouldn't do it again. But I would do something worse, I hope.”)

It was certainly true he'd been exhausting himself on the galleys. They'd just come at the top of that week. He'd started in on them by first light on Monday, May 1, and by that Saturday he'd finished number seventy-seven, out of a total of eighty-eight. His plan was to make all the corrections, to write his inserts (three pages of inserts got written on Saturday and Sunday) and then to get the package back in the mail to New York early in the next week so that the typesetters at Scribner's could send first-pass page proofs to Cuba by early summer.

The galleys had been waiting, along with the stack of other mail, on Sunday night, when he and Mary had come in from a three-day weekend on
Pilar
. Since February, a paler version of the novel had been appearing in installments in
Cosmopolitan
, but this was the one for keeps. He'd even slept well that Sunday, although some of that must have been owed to how bushed he was from fighting a big marlin the day before. He described it to Charlie Scribner on Monday afternoon. “Am tired from yesterday. Fought two marlin, one big, and the second one whipped the shit out of me. He threw the hook when he jumped and it caught just under his fin and he could then (being foul hooked) keep his mouth shut and pull sideways
like a nine foot sea anchor. He could also sound, run and do anything he wished. He never had it better except when he was a free fish.” As for his wife, quite beautiful and browning up with the sun, well, “truly I do not mean to be a shit about Venice and all.” He meant Adriana.

He'd also spoken in his Monday letter about something else, which goes a long way in explaining his need to humiliate his browning wife at week's end: Lillian Ross's lengthy profile of him in
The New Yorker
. It, too, had been waiting, along with the galleys and the rest of the mail, when he and Mary had walked into the house on Sunday night. The piece wasn't a surprise in that sense—the author had sent it to Hemingway ahead of time to check it for factual error. And yet to see the story in its published light in arguably the best literary magazine in America had to have been a different experience, its own small shock. Hemingway liked Ross a lot—she was another “daughter”—and he would keep up a correspondence and friendship with her for years. All the same he had to have known she'd made him out—he'd made himself out—to sound like a horse's ass, not to say a drugstore Indian in a Hollywood B movie. (“Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can't stand it, then we level off, so we won't have to provide oxygen tents for the readers.”)

The previous November, Ross, who was one of the magazine's star reporters, still in her twenties, had followed Hemingway around Manhattan for two days. The Hemingways were en route to Europe and had stopped over at the Sherry-Netherland hotel with fourteen suitcases. The manuscript of his novel, now on its “jamming” back end, was in his battered and travel-stickered old briefcase—sort of spilling out of it, in fact. Ross goes shopping with Hemingway at Abercrombie & Fitch. She's in his hotel suite when room service arrives with caviar and champagne, and then here comes the Kraut. That's Marlene Dietrich. “The Kraut's the best that ever came into the ring,” Hemingway tells the reporter, who is gimlet-eyeing it all. One of his tics is the way her subject raises his fist to his face, like a fighter, and rocks in silent laughter.

So much has been written over the last six decades about Ross's profile, a precursor to what we think of as New Journalism. It ran on May 13, 1950, and is titled “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” which is what Hemingway keeps saying aloud in the story—but to whom, and why, it isn't wholly clear. Horse's ass—yes. Hemingway used that term in his letter to Charlie Scribner of May 1. Four days later, the horse's ass, beat from the galleys, wishing to even the score for some public embarrassment he
has just suffered in
The New Yorker
, parades a prostitute in front of his wife.

Three days later (the finished galleys are either in the mail or about to be), Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin is the target. McCarthy is in his moment of fame as the great Red-baiter of America. Hemingway dictates the letter, and his young secretary, Nita Jensen, types it. “[Y]ou are a shit, Senator, and would knock you on your ass the best day you ever lived,” he says. Some of his sentences don't quite track. “[I]f we can take off the part of the uniform you take when you go outside, and fornicate yourself.” He signs it twice. (This letter may never have been sent.)