Hemingway's Boat (18 page)

“ ‘That would be swell.' ”

He can work on his writing when he isn't scrubbing a deck or standing watch. He'd be fishing, serving a seaman's apprenticeship, learning both craft and trade.

There's something endearing about the dialogue corniness of
With Hemingway
—in and amid its literate cunning. Much of the voice sounds just like the voice of that former rube of the middle border, living in Paris with his wife and baby boy, who wrote excitedly in 1924 to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with the news of having finished a long fish story set in Michigan and “trying to do the country like Cezanne” and how he “made it all up,” and how “it is swell about the fish, but isn't writing a hard job though?”

Hemingway drives him downtown to the jail to get his stuff. He advances him ten dollars against future wages. A cot is fixed up for him in the garage. Isabel the cook brings him a meal that comes out on a tray. Is he living in some kind of hobo dream?

A few days later, Friday afternoon, May 11, Hemingway's boat struts into town, and Arnold Samuelson is at the Key West Navy Yard, along with some of the other greeters, stepping aboard his new home:

If you were born in a sod hut, and were raised on a homesteading wheat farm in the upper Midwest, and had never been to sea, and had ridden horses bareback to school, wouldn't you think to call the thirty-eight-foot shiny new floating thing that you'd just stepped down into a “ship”?

The crowd goes off. The new hire is there alone. That night “I had a soft bunk with clean sheets and a clean blanket, and the cool salt air came
through a screen that kept out the mosquitoes. In the morning, I dove off the stern and had a swim between the piers in the clear green water.” These are Samuelson sentences, but you can instantly hear the Hemingway echoes. It's how any serious-minded writer learns to write—by imitation.

In the morning, Hemingway's roadster “with the sun shining through the block of ice on the rear bumper” rattles over the rough planking of the dock. Captain Bra arrives. Pauline and Charles and Lorine Thompson will be aboard. Here's Archie MacLeish in his big cotton athletic sweater. They're all handing down chairs and the boxes of beer and the lunch baskets and the mullet bait wrapped in yesterday's
Citizen
. The men are aiding the women aboard. Now they've cast off and are purring past the town. Hemingway's at the wheel. “The sea was green and flat over the reef and the boat ran along smoothly”—again, you know where that sentence found its imagistic, economical stroke.

And right from the first, the master seems to be paying special attention to his pupil, pointing out markers, explaining why the colors are different on the water: “ ‘That's the edge of the stream, that darker water. See that glossy path? That's made by the current flowing against the tide from the reef. It's filled with patches of seaweed.' ”

That afternoon, hundreds of dolphins appear. Hemingway, almost frantic, is throwing out teasers and bait to try to keep them close to the boat. “When there was no mullet left, he threw out pieces of newspaper wiped in fish slime and they struck at the floating papers.” But as quickly as the dolphins come, they are gone. This is the first recorded day of fishing in
Pilar
's history: Saturday, May 12, 1934, documented by a writer whom virtually nobody in America has ever heard of.

One more recording. It's high summer;
Pilar
and crew have come to Cuba. Things are still very new for a landlubber, but in another way not so. Pauline has ridden over on the ferry from Key West to join her husband for
a brief stay. The day before, with his wife aboard, Hemingway had reeled in a shark—a “big shark, yellow and ugly-looking in the water, uglier than anything else in the sea, giving you the same feeling you have when you see a snake on land.” When the thing got close, Hemingway had instructed Samuelson to bring him his pistol. “I got the automatic out of its holster in the rubber bag, handed it to E.H. and held his rod while he shot his initials into the top of the shark's head.” The shark was thrashing wildly. When they gaffed and pulled it aboard, blood was everywhere. The hook was so far down the fish's throat that it had to be cut out of its side. They threw the dead animal overboard and then dipped bucket after bucket into the sea to wash away the blood and guts on the decks.

This was yesterday, after Ernest and Pauline had attended Sunday Mass and the deckhand had gone for a walk by himself. Today is not a good day for marlin fishing. It's cloudy and dark, the current is weak, the sea too becalmed. Harsh sunlight's generally best when you're hunting marlin, that and a stiff breeze out of the east or northeast to oil up the sea. The fishing party, small today, has given up on getting a trophy fish and has reeled in most of the baits. A couple of rods with feather jigs on them are still out, but those are for tarpon or whatever else small might come along. Suddenly—

When his rapture is over, the Maestro asks his teacher, “How many would you say there were?”

“Maybe ten thousand” is the answer. “They were spread out two miles wide and at least six miles long and you saw how thick they were.”

The student says, “Do you think we'll ever see anything like that again?”

The answer, “No, and it may be nobody ever will.”

The porpoise ecstasy comes in the middle of
With Hemingway
. About ninety pages later, in the last chapter, back in Key West, in the late winter of 1935, the luck-struck boy, about to turn twenty-three, is getting set to say good-bye. The February issue of
Motor Boating
magazine is out, and he has a story in it—his first-ever piece in a national magazine. It's a journalistic account of some of the events of the summer and fall. He's written the story on the boat, with his mentor's guidance and personal edits, even as he's worked on his other and more serious fiction writing. Hemingway seems almost as proud of the piece as if it were his own. Those crisply printed words on the smooth paper bearing your name at the top of the first page—do you ever really get complacent about such a feeling?

But the protégé knows in his bones he must move on. On his last morning, he's putting away the blankets, locking the boat, gathering his things. He goes up to the house to find Hemingway. Hemingway leads him up to the workshop. They sit facing each other, just as they had ten months previous. Hemingway tells him that he must find a way to keep up his courage, his moral courage. He's too inclined to get discouraged. There'll be so many times up ahead when he'll feel incapable of writing a single word. In terms of his fiction efforts, which Hemingway has been looking over as the months have passed, well, frankly, he has to tell him that he may be as far behind right now as he was in journalism when he first showed up. But for crissakes, don't get downhearted, E.H. says. Just keep going. And, listen, try not ever to worry about the writing when you're not actually doing it, because that'll only tire you out and make you impotent. either man can know that they'll never see each other again.

It's page 181. A book, as we will posthumously know it, is over. Except that a man's actual life has forty-six and a half years remaining to it.

The hitcher and rail rider left town somewhere around the end of the first week of February. He kept notes all the way, hoping for stories. When he wasn't making notes, he struggled with
The Brothers Karamozov
—the mentor had put it on the reading list. After he reached Minnesota, Arnold sent a letter to Key West, and on February 26 Hemingway answered: “Glad to hear you got home all right. Ten days was good time.” He filled him in on the latest news, which included getting a new exhaust pipe for the boat and doing a minor repair and paint job on the engines. “[S]he looks swell and we have discovered how to fix a black paint that won't blister.”

The returnee worked on a fishing piece that turned out badly, and then spent two weeks writing another fishing piece that he felt was good enough to send out—but it was quickly sent back by two sporting magazines. “When you don't look it over the stuff doesn't seem to go so hot,” he told Hemingway in a letter that May. But in the same letter Samuelson had some good news: another fishing piece, with his mentor at the center, had been accepted by
Outdoor Life
. The editors said they'd pay him one hundred dollars and publish it that June. He could scarcely believe it. (When he saw the piece in print, he could scarcely believe how much they'd changed some of his sweated-out sentences.)

He went out to North Dakota and built a dugout tar-paper shack into the side of a hill. When the doors and windows were closed, the shack smelled like a dirt cellar, but it was a place to be alone and think and try to write. He came back to the Twin Cities and worked on construction projects for his brother, the Minneapolis doctor who'd dropped him off at the north side of town four years before. It was summer now, and in the mail came sixty dollars from Key West—payment on an old promise. “Dear Ernest,” he replied, “The maestro is always happy a long time after he gets a letter from you, and for the last one with the check in it I'm especially grateful. I'm sitting pretty now. I had left fifty bucks out of the
other dough, after a couple months dissipation like a rich nigger in Minneapolis, building the shack, buying a rifle and a few months of good living in the country. The hundred and ten I have now will carry me through very comfortably until next summer.… It is damned marvelous being able to live the way you want to live and doing the work you like even if it doesn't sell.” He was going to Dakota again, to try to get the writing started again. Eleven days later, from White Earth, he wrote: “I couldn't get at ease in the city where most of the people I knew thought a great deal about making money and spending it.” He added, “I'll start writing again tomorrow on some new stuff.” He added, “Out here a fellow can write a little every day and if you keep visiting with the neighbors you don't feel like you're going dry.”

In the fall, Arnold rode the rails down to Arizona and on to Mexico. He kept filling up the notebooks, hoping to find stories. Once, he played the fiddle over a Mexican radio station. In the spring, he came back to Minnesota, bringing some horsehair ropes and belts and two rawhide lariats. “Just blew in yesterday in a cold wintery rain,” he wrote to Hemingway on April 28, 1936. “Wish to hell I could be down there chewing the fat with you now.”

The trip into Mexico did yield up a piece, and he was able to sell it to
Esquire
. It can't be said whether Hemingway midwifed it into the magazine, which by now was considered by writers to be one of the top publishing venues in the country. “Dear Mr. Samuelson,” wrote Gingrich's secretary. “Enclosed is our check for $125 in payment for North American rights on your manuscript,
MEXICO FOR TRAMPS
, including pocket size digest rights for which you will be given additional compensation, if and when sold.” The story appeared in the November 1937 issue of the magazine and was labeled “Article,” although some of it sounded made up. It had a snappy beginning and the usual clear Hemingway echoes: “When they saw me yawn and knew I was getting sleepy the cook led me through the kitchen out the back door to a shed built of shipping boxes, the thin boards shrunk so there were half-inch air spaces between them for the wind to blow through.”