Hemingway's Boat (56 page)

Motoring from Havana Harbor, August 26, 1951. Twenty-six-year-old Walter Houk is at the stern with his foot up.

HE WAS BORN
to working-class folk in Mission Hospital, on June 14, 1925, in a little nondescript community on the eastern edge of Los Angeles called Walnut Park. That was the summer of
The Sun Also Rises
—its seeming miraculous, falling-out-whole, first draft, which in effect was the final draft. Another story of that summer, not nearly so well known, might be thought of as the first node of connection between someone destined to be very famous and someone who'd achieve a startling lot in his life, even if none of it was destined for the front page, which is only the story of all the rest of us.

Two days before Walter Houk was born, and half a world away, on the Left Bank of Paris, twenty-five-year-old Ernest Hemingway and thirty-three-year-old Hadley Hemingway, who lived so reputedly broke and happy with their baby boy above the high whine of a sawmill, had gotten into their gladdest glad rags and gone to a major art opening. It was the first one-man show at the Galerie Pierre for the Spanish Catalan surrealist painter Joan Miró. Hemingway got seized that evening to own a canvas called
La Ferme
(
The Farm
). For some months he'd glimpsed the painting as a work in progress in the artist's studio. The next day, saying that he wished it as a birthday present for his wife, he put down a five-hundred-franc note as a down payment, with the balance due in the fall. A small complication was that the gallery owner had already promised the painting to Hemingway's friend Evan Shipman, the sometime American poet and lover of the horses at Longchamp and Auteuil. The day after that, at Shipman's urging, the two nonheeled writers decided to do the sporting thing and roll the dice. Biographers disagree on whether the painting's full price was thirty-five hundred or five thousand francs, but either figure would have represented something mountainous to Hemingway. (The lower figure would have been $175; the higher, $250.)
^*
In another two weeks, he and his wife would leave for Spain and the festival at Pamplona, and within little more than a year he'd no longer be poor or unknown or living with Hadley—one of the self-admitted biggest mistakes of his life. But the connecting point here is that he'd thrown the dice and held his breath and won his Miró on the same day that Walter was born—and twenty-five years later, in an impromptu tour of his home, Hemingway would be showing off that painting to Walter, whom he'd met about twenty minutes before, and who, in his own way, would feel transfixed by
The Farm
, as he'd be struck by the other modernist oils hanging casually throughout the house: the Paul Klee, the Juan Gris, the Georges Braque, the André Massons. But most especially the Miró, hanging on the south wall of the dining room. “You see,” Walter said once, knowing nothing of the dice story, “I'd never met anyone before who owned paintings of this quality. And since I was a
painter myself, doing it in my spare time, trying to put together a show at a small gallery in Havana, this was eye-opening. Looking at those paintings with him that first day, listening to him talk about them with such pride, especially the Miró, with its technical precision, may have been my first real clue that there was some other kind of man here.”

His father, E. J. Houk, was a draftsman and master machinist out of Ohio with an incurably restless bone—which made him perfect for the rootlessness of California, but especially of Los Angeles, a place that seems always to have been invented yesterday. In the 1920s, Los Angeles was the fastest-growing city in the world. In Walter's boyhood, his family—it was just himself and his parents and one brother sixteen months older to whom he would never really be close—moved something like nine times, in and around greater LA. At first, the family lived in rental apartments, and then in cheap little stucco bungalows without any shade, and finally in some substantial dwellings on modest lots. His folks would buy a fixer-upper, fix it up, apply for the next FHA home loan late at night at the kitchen table (it was his mother, Philippina “Bena” Houk, who was the brains of this operation), move to the new place in a slightly leafier neighborhood. The family's path of migration was generally westward, toward the ocean; and northerly, out toward the San Fernando Valley, for this is the way the city was growing in the thirties and forties. “I grew up with no sense of roots or extended family,” Walter wrote once, in an unpublished memoir, which qualifies as an understatement. He said once, “I guess all that early dislocation is the reason I've never been a joiner—and pretty much of a loner.”

Those nine relocations during Walter's growing up were
in
greater Los Angeles. But there were other uprootings—of a transcontinental kind. Before he was even five, Walter and his brother, Lawrence, had been transported by their parents from LA to Northern California (there was shipyard work for E.J. up there), back east to Akron (where their folks had started out their married life), and back once more across the country to the city of Walter's birth (where the new Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant was promising steady work for the family's breadwinner). That return to Southern California, on the eve of Walter's fifth birthday, in the late spring and early summer of 1930, was made in a Dodge sedan, green with black trim and a flat black roof that needed coating every now and then to keep it from springing leaks. The car had a push-out windshield, to allow a breeze to get in, and you could adjust the angle and degree of tilt to suit conditions. The windshield got secured on either side of the window posts with two clothespin-like hinges. Once, when he was looking at
some photographs of
Pilar
—Hemingway was standing at the wheel in the cockpit with no shirt on and his stomach popped out and his hair looking quite greasy—Walter pointed at one of the popped-out windshield panels, secured with clothespin-like hinges at what looked like a 45-degree angle. “See, Papa's letting the breeze come in on his boat, just like we'd do with our old Dodge sedan, minus all the dirt and grime, when we were coming across America that time in 1930.”

He began talking excitedly about that trip. There was a terrible heat wave. The Dodge broke down in Garden City, Kansas. The two-day forced stopover had allowed the family to take in the big Decoration Day parade, where firemen pitched toy whistles and candy bars at the kiddies from the tops of their hook-and-ladder trucks. When I got back to my room that night, I consulted my Hemingway chronologies, and, sure enough, it turns out that the Hemingway family, in the early summer of 1930, about five weeks behind the Houk family, had made its own heat-choked transcontinental motor trip. Only instead of aiming south by southwest, from Ohio to California, the Hemingways (Ernest, Pauline, Bumby) had gone north by northwest, from Piggott, Arkansas, to the Yellowstone country of Montana and Wyoming. And, as opposed to traveling in a Dodge with a leaky roof that had been purchased on the installment plan, the Hemingway trip was made in a Ford roadster that had been presented as a gift by Uncle Gus Pfeiffer two years before. En route to the mountains (it was his first trip to that country, which he'd make his own in one way or another for the rest of his life), Hemingway had written several perspiring letters about the infernal temperature of the plains. The Houks would have come through Kansas City just before the end of May. Hemingway and his family were in KC over the Fourth of July weekend—where they took in the big parade. Hemingway gave an interview to a reporter for his old paper. Not much of an interview, not much of a story—five paragraphs on page 3, no byline. “The novelist, who was a member of the editorial staff of The Star prior to the war, in which he was wounded while in the service of the Italian army, will leave tomorrow for Wyoming to continue work on his next novel, which will have bullfighting as its background,” the story said.
Death in the Afternoon
wasn't a fiction, but maybe he'd said so, or the reporter had scribbled it wrong.

Scribbling and tromboning through Walter's history: In high school, he used to usher at the Hollywood Bowl, and so got to see—and hear—Rubinstein and Barbirolli and Rachmaninoff in the flesh. At Manual Arts High, he came under the spell of a literature teacher named Edna
Joy Addison. Miss Addison led him to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and T. S. Eliot and the Brontë sisters—not to Ernest Hemingway. In the fall of 1940, when Walter was an eleventh grader, with
For Whom the Bell Tolls
outselling every novel in the country, Miss Addison took a look and pronounced the book trash. (Too much sex in a sleeping bag.) The following year, Miss Addison, a Victorian spinster, took her favorite pupil down to the Olvera Street Market in Los Angeles where you could buy authentic Navajo and Mexican crafts. It was a one-on-one outing, lunch included, with the gloved Miss Addison piloting her black Buick with the dignity with which she controlled a classroom. She told Walter she just wanted him to have the experience of other cultures. That day his eye fell on a tiny sterling silver box with an ornately worked and hinged lid. It was about one inch by one inch. He said he wouldn't know to what use he'd ever put such a receptacle but that he loved the look of it. “Then you shall have it, you don't need to use it for anything, it can just
be
,” Miss Addison said. It took Walter almost seven decades to find a practical use for this piece of saved art, whose silver is now tarnished but whose hinged lid still has a clean snap to it. Walter keeps the box in his left front pants pocket. Before he goes to bed, he puts into the box four large yellow pills, so that the next day he can swallow them, one at a time, with a glass of water, two before lunch, two before supper. They're a hedge against what he has been told by his doctors is no longer a general old-age “forgetfulness,” but rather an advancing Alzheimer's disease. The four gelatinous, horse-choking yellow pills fit perfectly inside the Navajo jewel. “I haven't started putting the mail in the refrigerator or watering the plastic plants yet,” he said one evening at dinner, in a deflecting shrug.

On nearly the day he turned seventeen, Walter graduated from high school (he had skipped a grade in elementary school), and a week later he was enrolled at UCLA. The war was on; everything was at double time. After six months, he joined Navy ROTC and soon became captain of about a five-hundred-man brigade. The midshipmen lived in a converted dorm and wore brass-buttoned uniforms and marched every morning to class. Attending class year-round, and excelling, Walter completed three years of academic work in less than two. He majored in the sciences, with a minor in art, bonding (just as he had with Miss Addison) with an internationally known abstract painter of patrician cast named Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who told Walter that he might have a future as an artist. (He was wrong.) On summer sailings, clad in navy dungarees, the science-cum-art student learned steering, sextant-reading, knot-tying,
deck-swabbing, watch-standing. The pull of the sea had always felt magnetic to him. As for the pull of Ernest Hemingway, not so magnetic. He read
A Farewell to Arms
and a few of the short stories, and thought them okay, but, clearly, Miss Addison's shadow was lingering. “I can hardly believe it now,” Walter once said, “but I'd never heard of
The Sun Also Rises
when I was in college—and I was a pretty damn literate fellow. I'd read
Ulysses
and a whole lot else. How did I miss
The Sun
?”

The literate fellow, athletic, with his shock of dark hair, not quite nineteen, on the short side, but with a way of projecting both confidence and jauntiness, decided to take the national examinations for an appointment to the United States Naval Academy. He won one of the ten seats. Essentially he'd be starting college all over again, which was fine by him, since he loved learning and wasn't especially keen to go to war. He left Union Station for the East Coast on the
City of Los Angeles
on the day before D-day, June 5, 1944.

Annapolis now. An even larger gaining of cockiness. “The academy conditions you to think that way about yourself,” Walter told me once. For the first time in his life, he's older than his peer group. He's a two-pack-a-day man now—Chesterfields, “short and mean,” as he likes to say. He likes to roll his sleeves up well past his elbows. He's thinking of taking up a cigarette holder to combat the tar in nicotine. His mates have nicknamed him Vladimir. Vladimir barely goes anywhere without his gunmetal-gray Zippo lighter, which he can flick into fire on the first try. Walter's is the last of the academy's sped-up, three-year wartime classes—he and his mates of 1948A (the
A
stands for “accelerated,” and they will finish in June 1947) have to cram it all in. Summers are given over to a short leave home and then six weeks of classes and six weeks of cruises. One summer, he's out on the
Savannah
, a light cruiser with six-inch guns; the next summer, he's a gun captain on the
North Carolin
a, a big battleship from the recent war, whose artillery pieces had bombarded Iwo Jima to soften up the dug-in Japanese before the marines got there. Walter gets to see the Panama Canal Zone and Cap Haitien and Guantánamo Bay, where he marvels at the idea of cactus and desert on a Caribbean island.