Hemingway's Boat (75 page)

Early in the New Year, the Hemingways went to dinner at the home of old Ketchum friends, Lloyd and Tillie Arnold. Powder was drifting down in saucer-size flakes and the foursome watched it from the windows. Hemingway saw the lights on in the local bank. “They're checking our accounts,” he said. “That's just the usual cleaning women,” Tillie Arnold said. “They're trying to catch us,” Hemingway said. “They want to get something on us.” Mary Hemingway said, “Who's they?” Hemingway answered: “The FBI.” This story is in
How It Was
. Of course, anybody would have said it was an insane notion that FBI agents were going through Hemingway's bank accounts on a January Saturday night. (They weren't.) Totally paranoid—except in some weird, other clairvoyant sense, not so paranoid an idea at all.

Unreasonably plagued by his bullfight article, Hemingway became convinced he'd work better at his old standing place (using the top of the bookcase in his Havana bedroom), so, having only recently come to Idaho, he and his wife packed and rode the train back across the country to Miami. His boat would be there in Cuba to ease the writing strains—except all that spring, the weather was lousy (“peevish,” Mary called it), and the fish didn't come, and, anyway, it was as if, with all his work, which he felt so behind on, he could barely find the time to take her out. Too much energy required.

Hemingway paid for nineteen-year-old Valerie Danby-Smith, whom he'd met in Spain the summer before, to come to Havana to help him on his bullfight article, swelling beyond all control. “How's it going?” his wife
asked one afternoon. “It's hell. I can't get it all down,” he answered. “Could you summarize, or digest, or something?” He said, “I don't see how I can do it.” Again, this is from Mary's memoir.

On March 31, he wrote to Charles Scribner Jr.: “We are finally getting some decent weather here and I am going to try to fish two days a week to get some juice back.” But he didn't fish two days a week and the juice in him was all of the wrong kind. By summer, a
magazine
article had grown to twelve times the length of what he had initially agreed to write. The goiter-like thing was at something like 120,000 words. “Fishing been lousy due heavy rains from two tropical depressions. Haven't been in boat since May 19,” he said in a June letter to George Saviers. (Saviers had visited in April to fish and to check on his patient, but there had been only a few afternoons on
Pilar
.)

He had to get at least 70,000 words out of the article—and managed 530. At the end of June, Hemingway pleaded with A. E. Hotchner to come down from New York to try to help him with “The Dangerous Summer,” as he'd titled the piece. Hotchner took the first hundred pages of the 688-page manuscript and began to read it in a terrible heat and a kind of terrible panic: so much of it was numbingly repetitious. The following afternoon, he gave Hemingway a list of eight cuts in the first hundred pages. The next morning they conferred in Hemingway's bedroom. On a lined pad of paper Hemingway had jotted his reasons for rejecting each of the proposed cuts.

Finally, though, over the next several days, the two got the manuscript down by 54,916 words; Hemingway had caved. The
Life
editors paid him $90,000 and ran portions in three installments that fall. The issues sold well; the name “Hemingway” was attached.

Before this, on July 6, he'd written to Scribner that he'd “not had a day off from work nor been out in the boat from May 19 to July 4.” The final sentence of this letter: “The big fish have not come yet but are over-due and I would like to pull on a couple of big ones before I leave.” He didn't pull on them. There is no record I can find that suggests Ernest Hemingway was ever out on his boat again after May 19, 1960.

The Hemingways were foreign residents in a nation held in increasingly hostile regard by their own country. Hotchner had helped find a small rented apartment at 1 East Sixty-second Street in Manhattan. Hemingway told his wife he would not consider the idea of leaving the
finca
for good—Cuba was their home. He was insistent on returning to Spain to write codas and postscripts to the manuscript he'd already surrendered to
Life
's
editors, and to which they'd already allowed a greater length. Mary refused to accompany him. On July 25, the Hemingways and Valerie Danby-Smith got on the ferry from Havana to Key West. From
How It Was:

She might have added to the list
Pilar
. He would never see his boat again; he would never see Cuba again.

On August 15, in Spain, he wrote to his wife about his panic of a “complete physical and nervous crack-up.” It was as if she didn't hear him, not to judge by most of her correspondence. Five weeks later, from Madrid, he told Mary in a letter he needed her “to look after me and help me out and keep from cracking up. Feel terrible and am just going to lie quiet now and try to rest.” Two days later he wrote and said, “Must get out of this and back to you and healthy life in Ketchum and get head in shape to write well.” Mary quotes from these letters in
How It Was
and says, “I failed totally to evaluate the importance of these successive warning signals.” A couple of weeks earlier she had tried to evoke
Pilar:

In October, back in the States, in the apartment on the Upper East Side, he stood at the door of the kitchen and watched as his wife made supper, as if for the first time. She tried to lure him out to the zoo in Central Park. “Somebody waiting out there,” he said. As soon as she could, Mary got him west; she was praying the Idaho air would renew him. George Saviers met them at the train station in nearby Shoshone. Two men in overcoats came out of a café across the street. “They're tailing me out here already,” Hemingway said.

In late November, he was taken by air to Mayo Clinic, where he registered
under the name George Saviers. The covering story was that he was being treated for high blood pressure. He was being looked at for everything. The shock treatments began. We now know that his attending Mayo psychiatrist, Howard Rome, talked about him to the FBI. On January 13, 1961, the bureau's Minneapolis SAC (special agent in charge) wrote a report to Hoover. That declassified document still has its redactions, but it's clear that Rome was the agent's source. He told the bureau that his patient was “worried about his registering under an assumed name, and is concerned about an FBI investigation,” and “inasmuch as this worry was interfering with the treatments of Mr.
HEMINGWAY
, he desired authorization to tell
HEMINGWAY
that the FBI was not concerned with his registering under an assumed name.” It was as if a doctor was taking orders from men in overcoats.

Two days later, Hemingway dictated a note to his old high school pal Ray Ohlsen, with whom he'd once canoed to Starved Rock, that he'd be “out of here soon,” and that it was almost worth having gone to Rochester just “to hear from you, kid.”

He did get out. He went back to Ketchum. Briefly, he seemed better. But the irrational fears returned, and the writer who, a few months prior, couldn't control his writing now felt incapable of writing one sentence. He was taken back to Mayo in the Piper Comanche, and while there he wrote a letter of 210 words to a heart-diseased child, who was the middle son of his family doctor in Idaho. He convinced his Mayo doctors to release him again. He got home on a Friday night, on the last night of June, and on Sunday morning, before the sun was fully over the mountains, he was dead.

If you study original Hemingway manuscripts from the thirties through the fifties, you'll see numbers written above the lines on certain sheets. I first saw Hemingway's letter to nine-year-old Fritz Saviers many years ago, framed and hung in a hallway at Sun Valley Lodge. I never go to Ketchum that I don't take time to drive to the lodge and stand in the hallway and read the letter again. Amid so much ruin, still the beauty. There are no numbers written above the letter's lines, but I have counted the words many times. I say 210, but it's actually 219 “words,” if you count the return address, and the numerals “15” and “1961” in the date, and even the number “2” written at the top of page 2. I've studied the letter with a magnifying glass—the way he made tiny x marks for periods in several places; the way he put that “2” with a not completely closed circle at the top of the second
page; the half parenthesis after the “Mister” of “Mister Papa”; the second signature after the postscript, forgoing the Mister. Fritz had a dispensation to call him just Papa, and so I'm thinking that the desperately ill man remembered at the last second.

A month and a half after Hemingway's death, in its issue of August 25, 1961,
Life
ran a photocopy. The story, “Last Words Hemingway Wrote,” told how, on the day before he killed himself, Hemingway put his arm around the nine-year-old and said, “Be a good scout.” Dr. Saviers was about to take his child back to the hospital in Denver. The editors published a picture of the buzz-headed child. He's holding a .22 rifle, a gift from Mary Hemingway. He's in a short-sleeve white summer shirt, and his right arm is wrapped in gauze above the elbow. The watch on his other arm is sliding down his forearm—he's losing weight. Fritz gazes skyward and holds the gun with both hands.

On a recent trip to Ketchum, I read the letter and then went into town and sat for an hour talking to Fritz's brother, Pierre Saviers. It was a bright, blue, cold winter day, and the hard-packed snow of the day before squeaked on the sidewalk under my boots. Pierre Saviers is a psychotherapist. George Saviers had three sons, and Pierre, the youngest, is the only one alive. He's in his late fifties. There was a woven Indian rug on the floor, soothing light, classical music, framed photographs. The therapist sat facing me with his lanky legs crossed. I asked him about the letter.

“It's layered,” he said. “My dad would have told Hemingway how congenitally sick Fritz was, that he wouldn't live long. Fritz couldn't run and exercise like other kids. He was angry about it. My dad would drive him regularly to the specialists in Denver. My dad had gone to Cornell and Berkeley, but he was a small-town doctor. He had a dying child. There's no question Hemingway liked and trusted my father, and there's no question my father knew Hemingway was a sick man beyond any power my father had to help him. Hemingway? He knew he was done. And he knows Fritz is done. But he still wants to save him, even as he wants to save himself. You know about the damsel in distress tied to the railroad tracks? Well, that's us. You recognize yourself there, and you want to save yourself.”

He stood up. He was tired of talking about it. He had other things to do. “It's all layered. The way I see all this is that part of what we do in this life is conscious. And the rest of it is unconscious. Maybe this is the best we can ever say.”

In the following Essay on Sources, and also in parts of the text, I have tried to name as many of those as I could who aided on this project, and to whom I am very grateful. Here, I'll express my gratitude to a narrower and simultaneously more arcing group of individuals: those who helped keep
Hemingway's Boat
afloat for these last seven or eight years, more than they knew, and even when I wasn't in touch, and in some cases in ways that don't even relate to books and book-making.

The Hemingway Women, as I like to think of them. Almost from the start I was struck by the fact that I seemed to be gaining more from female Hemingway scholars than from their male counterparts. It was the first cue things would not necessarily be as they seemed with the famous misogynist, Ernest Hemingway. There are many such female Hemingway authorities I could name, but the two who've become close associates—and I hope friends for life—are Sandra Spanier and Linda Patterson Miller. The best of what these two Penn State university professors have taught me has come by indirection—a chance remark dropped (which must not have been so chance at all), a piece of writing (not necessarily their own) passed on at a timely moment.

Brewster Chamberlin, to whom I made reference in a footnote. He and his wife, Lynn-Marie, live and work in Key West. Once we lived unaware of each other on the same block on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. We found each other through our separate (then informally joined) research on Hemingway. For the last half-dozen years, Brewster has been compiling and wonderfully annotating and continuously updating what amounts to almost a daybook calendar of Hemingway's life. No other previous Hemingway chronology comes close to what is now well over 150,000 words of manuscript—and cries out for publication by a major publisher.

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. Every time I went back to Hemingway's hometown, both to do research and to touch a spiritual base with my own Illinois roots, I found myself treated with midwestern kindness by Barbara Ballinger and Ginie Cassin, but most especially by Redd and Mary Jo Griffin. They, and other foundation members, just opened the doors—and drawers. In northern Michigan, members of the Michigan Hemingway Society were similarly welcoming, though none more so than president Michael Federspiel.