Hemingway's Boat (6 page)

Insult to injury, his onetime Paris mentor, Gertrude Stein, had also turned on him savagely in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
. Several installments had appeared in
The Atlantic
. Stein had actually called him “yellow.” Well, just like Eastman, he'd get her back in spades. That old fat lesbian bitch.

It was in Paris, just before leaving for Africa, that this alternately gloomy and exhilarated and lashing-out man had written “A Paris Letter” for Arnold Gingrich's
Esquire
. He'd become a contributor to this new (and surprisingly successful) men's monthly, published out of his hometown,
Chicago. In “A Paris Letter”—it appeared in the February 1934 issue, while Hemingway was on safari—the author had talked about Paris not belonging to him any longer and, presciently, about the coming of another war in Europe. It was all very gloomy, he wrote. “This old friend shot himself. That old friend took an overdose of something.… People must be expected to kill themselves when they lose their money, I suppose, and drunkards get bad livers, and legendary people usually end by writing their memoirs.”

And what of Hemingway's marital relationship with the boyish-looking woman in the zebra-striped suit and funny hat standing beside him in this held moment of Manhattan time?

Hemingway had been married to his second wife for seven years, the wedding having taken place within a month of his divorce from Hadley Richardson in April 1927, and there is evidence to suggest that the marriage was mostly over in Hemingway's mind by April 1934. He and the former Pauline Pfeiffer of Piggott, Arkansas, who were the parents of two young sons—and whom they'd been away from for months—would remain together, nominally, for the next five years, until 1939, but by then Hemingway's affair with his next wife-to-be, Martha Gellhorn, would be almost three years old.

In my view, Hemingway's staid, Protestant, suburban, midwestern roots—which he fought against all his life—could never allow him to reconcile his various adulteries and marriages past his first marriage, to Hadley, who was his truest love, or at least his truest marriage. In that sense, his subsequent marriages were doomed from the start. Also in that sense, Hemingway was much like another famous and onetime resident of Oak Park, Illinois: Frank Lloyd Wright. The two geniuses, who spent separate lifetimes flouting middle-class mores, even as they couldn't seem to escape them, overlapped for about a decade in that Republican community of churches and impressive houses and upright families located eight miles west of downtown Chicago. (Wright was born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, and his career in architecture lasted until his death in 1959. In seven decades of work, he designed, if not completed, over one thousand buildings. He was in his early thirties, residing in Oak Park, struggling for commissions, with a growing family, when Hemingway came into the world in the summer of 1899.)

There's no question Hemingway had great passion for his second wife,
for a time. In the beginning of the affair, in Paris, and on the ski slopes of Austria, and at the summer bullfights in Spain, Pauline had made a covert play for him, betraying her friendship with Hadley, just as Martha would make a shameless play for him a decade later—and he would more than willingly, if not immediately, comply. After Hemingway's death, MacLeish—who had known him since the twenties in Paris and who, like almost all of Hemingway's closest friends, had an ugly falling-out with him that would never completely repair itself (the second of two major fights was aboard
Pilar
, or at least began there, when
Pilar
was very new)—said astutely: “I have always suspected that his subsequent detestation for her [he was speaking of Pauline] was in part the consequence of his own sense of disloyalty.” At the close of A
Moveable Feast
—that aforementioned slender, wistful, posthumously published, and often gratuitously mean memoir of Paris in the early days—Hemingway talks so bitterly against Pauline and so tenderly of Hadley, with whom he'd had his first son, Jack, whom he liked to call Mr. Bumby, when Mr. Bumby was small:

In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which is fiction, not memoir, the dying writer, by turns self-pitying and accusatory, says of his older wife: “She shot very well this good, this rich bitch.… She had a great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked her face.” As in all his fiction, Hemingway was making things up from what he knew. His imagination was conflating and rearranging and transposing several women and different events from his life. But it's still hard to read parts of
that story and not picture biographically the woman to whom the author was still married in the late summer of 1936, more than two years after the safari was over, when the story appeared for the first time in print, in
Esquire
, which was also about five months before Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn in the Key West bar named Sloppy Joe's.

Two letters, both written at sea, about a week apart, four months before this pictured moment in New York City, seem to say much about his state of mind. One letter is full of belligerence and prevarication and pridefulness; the other is tender, loving, funny, and boy-adventuresome. The first letter was written late at night to one of his friendlier critics; the second was sent to his middle son. The first letter ran to more than eighteen hundred words and may have been typed (the original is apparently lost); the second was fairly brief and in longhand. The letters were written on a scow of a boat named the SS
General Metzinger
, part of the Messageries Maritimes line, on the front end of the African trip. The
Metzinger
had sailed from Marseille on November 22, 1933, bearing the Hemingway shooting party of three through the Mediterranean Sea toward Port Said, Egypt. The ship then navigated through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, to its landing at Mombasa, East Africa, on December 8, 1933.

The shooting party of three bound for safari consisted of Hemingway, his wife, and Hemingway's close Key West friend, Charles Thompson, who sold fishing tackle and ran Thompson's Hardware store at the waterfront. Thompson and Hemingway had known each other for close to six years, since the spring of 1928. Both he and Thompson were tall, outdoorsy men, with similar physiques and similar interests, born in the same year, 1899. Thompson, whose family were old-time Key Westers, had a boat, an old-fashioned nineteen-footer. Evenings, when he got off work, Charles would come by and collect Hemingway—who was living with the pregnant Pauline in a sweatbox of temporary lodgings above a Ford Motor garage, working on
A Farewell to Arms
—and the two would troll into Jack Channel or over toward Stock Island to fish for grouper and snapper. They became fast friends. Charles wasn't in the least a literary man, or even a very educated man, but the more telling difference between them was that he had a very soft personality. He was a man you could dominate. Originally, Hemingway had hoped that Archie MacLeish would go on the safari with him, and he had also invited other long-standing friends, including
Henry Strater, whom everyone called Mike, a painter and amateur boxer and graduate of Princeton, who'd known Hemingway since Paris sparring sessions in 1922. Both Strater and MacLeish had known better than to give in to the repeated invitations. Hemingway was a friend you might not be able to live without—as MacLeish would one day say—but he also was a friend with whom you wouldn't chance an extended shooting trip.

The critic to whom Hemingway sent his late-night diatribe was Clifton Fadiman of
The New Yorker
, known to friends as Kip. He'd done a long and serious review of the story collection
Winner Take Nothing
in the form of an open letter (“A Letter to Mr. Hemingway”), in which the reviewer was essentially entreating the author—it was obvious how he admired Hemingway's work—to go on to other themes if he wished to grow as an artist. Hemingway's reply, a month after the review had been published, was written four days after the
Metzinger
had left Marseille for Africa. He put at the top of the upper-right-hand corner on the first page: “A Bord du General Metzinger, le 26 Novembre 1933, One day out of Port Said.” The letter got more rageful and scornful as it went on. It was as if Hemingway was writing to somebody whom he knew was both sympathetic and tough-minded toward his work—and yet couldn't stop himself from sounding immature and churlish. Besides, he told Fadiman lies. They were inconsequential, but they were lies, from a lifelong prevaricator. He said twice that he was thirty-five. (He was thirty-four.) He said he'd gone to war at seventeen. (He was eighteen, about to turn nineteen.)

He said: “You see, what is important, is that you write about what you know—the time is very short—for me especially—and because of having learned too much about too many things too early.”

He also said: “Will be glad to have you come to lunch when I break max Eastman's jaw. Plan to have rather gala occasion.”

He railed against turncoat friends like Gertrude Stein; against such stinking critics as “a merchant like T.S. (Chickenshit) Mathews [who] says it [the material in
Winner Take Nothing
] is all about the war and the others about lesbians, insomnia, castration, syphilis.”

At 11:30 p.m., the steward came in to say that the writing room was closing for the night. The letter writer decided to write four postscripts at the bottom of the letter, one of which talked again of how “the time is short.” Almost certainly he meant his life. The fourth postscript said:

The second letter was written to Patrick Hemingway, five years old. At the top: “A Bord Du General Metzinger Le 2 December.” It was as if the letter writer was speaking to someone his own age—say, about eleven. What boy wouldn't crave to get a letter like this from his dad? If you studied this letter years later and didn't think too much about anything else, it might make you forget that Hemingway—and his spouse—were absentee parents to very young children.

The letter went for a few more sentences and finished with: “Go easy on the beer and lay off the hard liquor until I get back. Don't forget to blow your nose and turn around three times before you go to bed. Your affectionate papa, Papa.”

In Hemingway, early in his life and late in his life, kindness and gentleness and understanding and probity seem never far from his most appalling behavior.

The man entertaining reporters and posing for pictures at the
Paris
disembarkation rail had come triumphantly back to America with his African trophies, all right (slain beasts were on their way to the taxidermist, and there were numerous Kodak exposures and also eight-millimeter film documenting the khaki-clad hunter kneeling beside his antlered or maned or horned prey), but it was hardly all one great adventure. The safari, a huge experience of an outdoor life thus far lived, had suffered its own huge tensions, owing mainly to competitive bile.

Green Hills of Africa
, the loosely factual account that came out of the safari, published in 1935, is almost naked on the page in portraying Hemingway's jealousy at being largely outhunted by his easygoing friend Charles Thompson. Hemingway started writing the book almost immediately upon returning to Key West. He continued working on it through the spring, summer, and fall as he fished the Stream with his new boat in both Florida and Cuban waters. Parts of the book were written, or at least revised, aboard
Pilar
. Other parts got drafted in a hotel room in Havana, and still others—including all the early and late sections—were done in the writing studio above the garage at the author's home in Key West. But wherever he worked on the African book, as Hemingway referred to it, salt water was always close by.