Hemingway's Boat (78 page)

And yet. Although Wheeler's accomplishment in American boatbuilding can never be denied or discounted, consider nonetheless Chris-Craft's numbers. The company existed, in its original incarnation, roughly from 1922 to 1960, and in that time it is said to have made over one hundred thousand wooden boats. A Chris-Craft was ever about eye appeal, about what you could see on the outside, all the high-gleam brightwork. Apparently, Hemingway never wanted or needed that. Two years before Hemingway's death, the chairman of Chris-Craft, Hansen Smith, made the cover of
Time
. By then, spring of 1959, Hemingway's boat was a quarter of a century old and still sturdy as a tree, even as the company that had made her was on its final legs, at least in terms of involvement by Wheeler family members.

Boom to bust: Just recently (as I write), I went by the foot of Cropsey Avenue for yet another look. Alas, the Hopperesque diner sharing the pocked parking lot with the Pathmark Super Center was boarded up and had a chain-link fence around it.

Precede
. In 1991, Michael Reynolds published
Hemingway: An Annotated Chronology
, the first serious attempt by a scholar to calendar EH's life. He cited Wednesday April 4, 1934, as the date EH went to Brooklyn to buy his boat, and so many behind him have followed that lead. But here's why I am convinced the date is wrong: Gingrich wrote to EH, with the $3,000 check enclosed, on Monday the second. The airmail letter wasn't officially on its way until the following morning—the postmark on the envelope says “APR 3, 11 AM.” So before noon on Tuesday (about six hours before EH was entertaining the press at the rail of the
Paris)
, the letter was somewhere between Chicago and New York. It's possible it could have landed at Scribner's by the next day, and that EH was there when it did and opened it and seized on its contents and went straightaway to Brooklyn with his wife. It seems far more likely, though, that it took a minimum of two days for the letter to get into EH's hands. Even that sounds fast, but it's a fact that mail in the 1930s traveled with surprising speed. (Hemingway often received mail in Key West from New York in two days—this can be tracked through his own replies.) EH and his wife couldn't have gone to Brooklyn any later than Thursday the fifth, because we know (from coverage in
The Key West Citizen
, for one thing) that Pauline arrived home in Key West by rail at midday on Saturday the seventh. This means she had to have left New York on Thursday night. (It was always “two nights out” to Key West from New York, as the rail advertisements put it.) So assuming Pauline went with her husband to Brooklyn—and I know of no evidence to the contrary—it could only have happened on Wednesday or Thursday. I say Thursday, April 5, 1934.

And as long as I am disagreeing with esteemed predecessors, I'll point out that Baker, on page 259 of his bio, got three-in-a-row small and yet not-so-small facts wrong as regards the acquiring of
Pilar
. She wasn't diesel-powered, and she didn't have twin screws (but rather double screws), and the down payment wasn't $3,300. (In
Selected Letters
, on page 405, he corrects that figure.)

Chapter
. Both the purchase order and bill of sale are in the
Pilar
papers at JFK. EH letter to Balmer: August 3, 1934. Alfred Kazin's defense of Fitzgerald is in an essay titled “Retrospect, 1932: The Twenties and the Great American Thing,” in his
An American Procession
. Edmund Wilson's quote is on page 301–page 303 of
The Thirties
. Matthew Bruccoli's surmise about Fitzgerald and the notebook entry re “the authority of failure” is in his
Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship
. EH letter to MacLeish re “have to shoot myself” is September 26, 1936. “The Art of the Short Story” is in the spring 1981
Paris Review
.

The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia—in its Ewell Sale Stewart Library—has a lush, if small, Hemingway file, and going there marked the first time I ever had the thrill of holding an original handwritten EH letter. In a glassine
folder there's a tiny, elegant business card, manila-colored, not much larger than a Band-Aid. The card says, in caps, “Mr. Ernest Hemingway.” Below that, in italics: “Key West, Florida.” Re the original telegrams from EH in the library: holding them marked the first time I ever felt the palpable truth of Malcolm Cowley's remark about “cabelese” (as he spelled it) being an exercise for EH in “omitting everything that can be taken for granted.” (Cowley says this in his
A Second Flowering
.)

To construct EH's trip home, I went to the New York Public Library and found old Havana Special timetables, as well as photographs of that kind of lost American travel.

Re
Tender Is the Night:
If there's a way to think about Fitzgerald heroically as well as tragically, in April 1934, when EH held every emotional advantage, there might also be a way to read the descriptions of the main character in
Tender
and form a mental image not of Gerald Murphy—upon whom Dick Diver is unquestionably modeled—but of EH. I'm not suggesting FSF deliberately painted EH into the shadows of his novel; I'm only saying I have been put in mind of EH when I read passages from that poetic and great and uneven book. “Did you hear I'd gone into a process of deterioration?” Diver says to the young American socialite, Rosemary Hoyt, whom he's falling for, as he is “in love with every pretty woman he saw now.” “Oh, no,” Rosemary responds. But the doctor is insistent. “It is true. The changes came a long way back—but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks.”

Re
The Snows
and the riddle of the “Dark Lady,” as I'll call her: yes, a lot more to tell, and here would be a bit of it: the Whitney family personal papers are held privately within the family and are not for looking into by pesky journalists. And yet, several years ago, when I asked about the possibility of any correspondence between EH and Helen Hay Whitney, Kate Whitney, who is Jock Whitney's adopted daughter, was very gracious and seemed faintly amused by the prospect of it all. (We spoke on the phone on the day she turned seventy—I got the idea she'd lived long enough to be amused by such things.) She said she'd never heard about her grandmother inviting EH to tea, but that the idea was plausible enough on its face. “Not all the stories are recalled,” she said. She told me she'd do a quick check among her father's personal papers. She called back a few hours later to say there was nothing there. As for the papers of HHW herself? Off-limits to researchers. But Kate Whitney did say: “Look, if we had a framed Hemingway letter that was once hanging on a wall somewhere, I think we'd tend to know about it.” HHW died in 1944, at age sixty-eight, in a New York City hospital her family had financed almost single-handedly. I'm wondering if Kate Whitney's rich old eccentric granny didn't choose to take with her to heaven any correspondence between herself and EH, having read
Esquire
eight years before and recognizing herself, unhappily.

I believe Baker knew her identity, and I further believe, even if I cannot prove
it, that the identity was confirmed for him by Buck Lanham, as well as one or two others, and yet for one reason or another, the biographer decided not to name the name. Baker's endnotes relate how EH, during the war, had told the story to Lanham. Wouldn't the spoken accounts, in wartime, have been lubricated by alcohol and thus a tad more indiscreet than the later written ones? According to Baker's notes, Lanham and another World War II officer wrote to Baker in the course of his research to tell him what they could remember of EH and the Dark Lady story. On p. 611, Baker writes of Lanham's memory of the telling: “He [EH] explained that ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro' was based in part on his imagination of what would have happened had he accepted the woman's offer.” Baker cites a particular correspondence: “Lanham to author, June 1963.” I felt sure HHW's name would be in that letter, but when I went to look, the letter wasn't there. There are folders of letters at Princeton between Lanham and Baker, all arranged in chronological order; this one's missing. In 2005, when I queried the curator of manuscripts, Don Skemer, about what might have happened to it, he graciously responded, in part, in an e-mail: “I've heard it said that not all of Carlos Baker's files came to the Library. Carlos Baker's daughter—or at least one particular daughter—is supposed to have retained some files. Acting on this rumor, early in my 15 years as Curator of Manuscripts, I telephoned his daughter and asked if she had any related files. But she said most definitely that she had none—that what she had at home was personal, not part of her father's files, and that she wouldn't let anybody see anything.” That daughter is deceased.

“If I Had a Boat” is the lead track on Lovett's second album,
Pontiac
.

Precede
. “The rooms on the northeast corner” passage is from “Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter,” in
Esquire
's inaugural issue, autumn 1933.

Chapter
. The April fishing log is in the
Pilar
papers at JFK. EH letter to Waldo Peirce is circa May 26, 1934. (He didn't date.) If the item in
The Key West Citizen
is to be trusted (and I do trust it), then EH departed for Miami to collect his boat on Tuesday afternoon, May 8. (In the mid-Depression, rail service between Miami and the Keys was down to two runs a day.) The May 9 item doesn't say Pauline and Bra Saunders were with him, but they were. (It's referenced in various letters of Pauline's and EH's.) On April 30, EH had said in a handwritten postscript at the end of a long typed letter to Max Perkins: “get the boat May 9—Then I can
work in the morning and go out in the boat in the pm.” This supports the May 8 departure timeline. The three must have slept over at a Miami hotel and gone excitedly on Wednesday morning to collect the boat—EH the most excited. We know from various sources that
Pilar
and company arrived back in Key West late on Friday afternoon. It's a fairly easy two-day cruise from Miami to Key West—roughly 130 nautical miles. The actual “driving time” would have been about thirteen hours, based on a steady-as-she-goes ten knots. My guess is EH and Bra and the Wheeler rep spent Wednesday getting the boat in the water, checking out her equipment, running her around Miami a bit—and then on the tenth began steering her south. Pauline, meanwhile, rode the train home ahead of them, and late on Friday was waiting at the navy yard with her children and friends when
Pilar
tooted round the bend. The reason I am going into this at all is because it's one more example of the way Hemingway researchers disagree on dates. These struggles for timelines are almost always compounded by the contradicting testimony of witnesses—in this instance, Les Hemingway and Arnold Samuelson, both of whose memoirs have been crucial to my own research, but neither of which can be really trusted for its chronology.

Precede
. The “If you go” dictum, which I've tried to live by, belongs to the late Shirley Povich of
The Washington Post
.

Chapter
. I couldn't have done it had Dian Darby not taken a leap of faith and offered family letters, journals, diaries, photographs, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, tapes. Even more, she gave so much of her personal time. Several others in the extended Samuelson family also helped, notably Sunny Worel, in St. Paul, Minnesota, who has a library background and thus a natural archival sense; she made available Arnold's journal from the summer of 1932. I am also indebted to the residents of Robert Lee—only two are named in the text, but a dozen or more people on my three visits added little bits.

The epigraph from
Death in the Afternoon
is on page 506. “Road brings in every son of a bitch” quote is in EH letter to Thomas Shevlin, April 4, 1939. The passage about Pinky is on page 228 of
Death
. Fitzgerald's remark about a writer not writing is quoted in Andrew Turnbull's bio,
Scott Fitzgerald
. “Just start with the canoe” passage is on page 77 of
Islands
. Robert Lacy's “Icarus” essay is in the Fall 2003
North Dakota Quarterly
. EH's desperation to Hotchner is quoted by Hotchner on page 285, page 297 , page 298 of the updated 1983 Quill edition of his
Papa Hemingway
. “As full a life in seventy hours” quote is on page 166 of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. “I did nothing” passage is on page 148 of
Green Hills
.

Would the Maestro have ridden a rail to EH's door had someone offered him
a crystal ball about the rest of his life? I'd bet yes. In a letter I quoted from in the text, written on April 28, 1936, little more than a year after he'd left EH and
Pilar
's company, the lost boy, already sounding lost, said: “It is Sunday morning and it makes me drowsy listening to the church music on the radio.” That strangely moves me, like all of his life.

Precede
. I suppose it's fair to say that these several pages represent what I've learned, physically, about
Pilar
after some seven years of riding her in my head as metaphor and motif and storytelling structure. Would that I could have had one real ride on her and felt her under me in a wholly different way.

As I noted in an earlier part of the text, the handwritten manuscript of
Green Hills
resides at the University of Virginia—at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. “I saw the faces” passage is on page 211 of
A Farewell to Arms
. “Loosening” letter is to Arnold Gingrich, June 21, 1934.