Hemingway's Boat (68 page)

He answers, “No.”

“You are changing,” she tells him. “Oh you are. You are. Yes you are and you're my girl Catherine. Will you change and be my girl and let me take you?”

He answers. “You're Catherine.”

She answers, “No. I'm Peter. You're my wonderful Catherine. You're my beautiful lovely Catherine. You were so good to change. Oh thank you, Catherine, so much.”

The sentence that follows is the most significant in the whole passage: “Please understand.” Couldn't it be a son's cry, from real life? Or a father's?

In light of these passages—and there are others—it might reasonably
be asked: How did we, meaning the world, read Hemingway's work so wrong, for so long? How did we read the man himself so wrong, for so long? Well, he misdirected us with the mask. The mask wasn't false, a lie, a fraud, as so many detractors have wished to say. The hypermasculinity and outdoor athleticism were one large and authentic slice of him. But beneath the mask was all the rest, which is why his work endures, why his best work will always have its tuning-fork “tremulousness,” as it's been called. And, incidentally, where did this beautiful nervousness come from in the first place? No one will ever answer that definitively. Maybe everything goes back to the foot and feet of Grace Hemingway in Oak Park, and maybe it doesn't. “Pressure under Grace” is a too-clever phrase that was the headline on a rather brilliant piece some years ago in
The New York Review of Books,
by a critic named Frederick C. Crews. He was reviewing Kenneth S. Lynn's psychoanalytic (and often ridiculous) biography of Hemingway. All the essay lacked, no less than did Lynn's nearly six-hundred-page text, was a sense of compassion—for how much someone suffered in his life
.

Hemingway was working on the semi-secret and cross-gendering manuscript of
The Garden of Eden
in the period, the early and mid-fifties, when his bitched baby son, with all his recklessness and irresponsibility and manic behavior, was disappointing and embarrassing and worrying and angering him most. “Please understand.” Could you think of not just that sentence, but a passage like that, a whole book like that, as a father's testament of sympathy, support, love, for his child?

One more thought: If Hemingway's therapeutic release from all the things he felt inside was in his writing, where was Gigi's? Could you say he was writing out his novel with his
life,
that it was what he had?

Gigi in the fighting chair, Paraíso Key, July 1945. His brother Pat is behind him.

AT 8:55 A.M
. on February 11, 1952,
Pilar
eased out of Havana Harbor and turned westward with fifteen hundred pounds of ice and newly laid Philippine mahogany planking on her outsides and insides. Running to port as she chucked against the sea, with Hemingway at the helm, was Mary Hemingway's launch,
Tin Kid
, manned by Felipe, the skilled but unlikable
joven
. Another
joven
was tending to his duties that Monday at the American Embassy; in thirty-four days he'd be proposing marriage to Miss Nita. Still another
joven
, Gigi, in whose head had to have been echo-chambering five words (no matter when exactly they'd been uttered), was back in LA, following a recent visit to his father's home in the wake of his mother's death.

The plan was for Hemingway to spend a couple of weeks recharging the batteries down at Paraíso Key—this is how he put it in letters. “All I have
is over-work and over-worry,” he'd say in a letter ten days later, after the battery-charging had been aborted.

There weren't any mosquitoes on that first night, at Bahía Honda. The next morning, coming past Punta Gobernadora Light, Mary Hemingway watched a loggerhead turtle devour a Portuguese man-of-war. She and her husband marveled at three dolphins—they guessed them to be papa, mama, child—sunning on their backs in a kind of dolphinesque dog paddle. That evening, having made it to their private vacation island, they had a supper of soup, watched the moon roll up, drank moderately, read, turned in at nine. They woke with the sun. “Papa sweet and happy,” Mary entered in her diary. As she wrote in
How It Was
, the source of many of these details:

In the next paragraph, she tells of how her husband seldom invited her to his own (and larger) bed belowdecks during their extended cruises—“and I thought I understood why. In our mutual sensory delights we were smoothly interlocking parts of a single entity, the big cogwheel and the smaller cogwheel, I felt, with no need for asserting togetherness. Maybe we were androgynous.” Maybe so.

Six days out, the outside world broke in—with news of the death of Charlie Scribner. He'd died of a heart attack on the day they had left Havana. But it wasn't until Saturday the sixteenth, when Mary and Gregorio went with the skiff, after a morning's fishing, to buy ice and gas in a village called La Mulata, that they found out. Mary had telephoned the
finca
to see if things were okay with the staff and the property. René the houseboy read her the telegram. Mary and Gregorio motored back to
Pilar
before dark with the supplies and bad news. “We'll have to leave here,” her husband said. But he'd heard on the shortwave a norther was coming, so they remained for a few more days.

That Monday, Hemingway wrote a letter to Scribner's wife, Vera, at the family estate in Far Hills, New Jersey. “At sea,” he wrote at the top.

A week later, at home, Hemingway wrote to Vera and Charlie's son, Charles Jr., who'd now be coming out of the navy to take over the firm: “Since he had to die at least he has gotten it over with.” It's what he'd said, seventeen years before, to Gerald and Sara Murphy, when their son Baoth had died:
he has gotten it all over with
. That's the letter with the elaborate
Pilar
metaphor: “It seems as though we were all on a boat now together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know now will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad.”
Pilar
was so new then.

A couple of days before his letter to Charlie Junior, Hemingway had written to his own sons—Nita Jensen typed the letters from the talk machine. He'd been back on shore for two days. Patrick's was longer and kinder. In the five months since Pauline's death, Hemingway had been talking about many business matters to both his children by Pauline. One of these was the question of selling or renting out the Key West property, whose ownership had reverted to Hemingway and also to his sons. At least on paper, his sons had become well-off young men. Why should he be obligated to pay further child support to Gigi? “If Gregory is receiving the amounts of money which you told me you were receiving, or had received in the month of January, it seems a little incongruous for me to send him $100 a month,” he told Pat. “It seems almost hopeless for me to write a letter to Gregory, since he does not answer them. But I will write one anyway.” He did—it's the next letter on the tape belt, two paragraphs, mailed to Doreen Place in Venice. “This type of letter probably bores the shit out of you but it certainly bores the shit out of me to have to write them. Charlie Scribner died a week ago Monday and so it will be rather difficult for me to borrow money from him against my loan account paying two percent to send you a monthly check until you attain the age of 21 years.”

Gigi wrote back four days later, using the bottom half of his father's letter:
“I am not only tired of this type of letter but offended by everyone you write. If you were a shit as this type of letter would lead anyone to believe, I wouldn't mind, but I don't think you are and I love you very much and this is why I am offended.”

Hemingway read it and wrote right back: “For your information I never took or received a dime from my family from the time I was 16. I paid my father's debts and supported various relatives and have supported Mary's father and mother since we were married. I do not relish being called a shit by any teenage delinquent at the safe distance of several thousand miles.”

Two weeks later, the vacation got taken up again. The day before, on March 9, trying to repair relations with his son, Hemingway wrote: “Charlie Scribner dying so suddenly made things pretty complicated.… I was trying to skip burdening you with any of this when I wrote you that I would omit personal problems or whatever the phrase was. Have been busy trying to work them out and I have them worked out so that there is money for your hundred dollars a month until you are 21. So please never worry about that.”

He and his wife were heading down the driveway on the morning of the tenth when Juan the chauffeur said, “
¿Has oído lo que pasa en La Habana?
” Have you heard what's happening in Havana? Fulgencio Batista was happening. Hemingway (he always sat in the front seat, Mary in the rear), reached over and switched on the radio. The army had surrounded the presidential palace. The road to town was clogged with convoys of canvas-roofed trucks, with soldiers sitting on the rims and riding on the running boards. But they got to the harbor and aboard
Pilar
and out to sea and rode against the wind to Bahía Honda. From
How It Was:
“One night we set the bright gas lantern on the stern fishbox, watched sardines in droves congregate toward it just below the surface.” Gregorio netted them for bait—which, the next day, netted for the fishermen some tasty Nassau grouper and turbot and rock hind. They stayed out until March 29 and then came home with the fish hold loaded to its brim. Two days later, an awkward, giddy couple drove out to see them to tell them of their news—and, to their surprise, got offered on the spot the use of the
finca
for their wedding reception. “It will add a romantic touch to the formalities,” Walter put in his journal entry of March 31, 1952.

It's later that same summer, nine months since the death at St. Vincent's, two months from publication of
The Old Man and the Sea
. Gigi's finishing
premed exams at UCLA, hoping to be admitted to the university's med school. In four months he'll turn twenty-one. He's seeing a psychiatrist. This letter's date is July 3. At its end: “Give my love to Miss Mary and tell her if I see her again I sure as hell would like all to be forgiven. I did a terrible thing in lying about that clothes business and I make no excuses for it (except to say that the whole business is my least rational aspect) but everyone's life is not simon says.” He's talking about the French underpants theft from Mary's closet—six years ago. Has it swum upward in some recent therapy sessions?

Listen to the rage of four months onward, right around the time of his birthday: “You ever write another letter like that and I'll beat the shit out of you,” he says to his father on November 3, nine days before his birthday. Several paragraphs later: “When Mother died and I first called, you accused me of killing her.… If we see each other again and you act nastily, I will fight and I will beat the shit out of you.”

Ten days later, on the thirteenth, the day after he turns twenty-one, he calls his father a “gin-soaked abusive monster.” He tells him he “will die unmourned and basically unwanted unless you change, papa.” He says, “When it's all added up, papa it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons—Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centered shit, the stories or the people?” He says, bringing up his mother: