Hemingway's Boat (2 page)

He could make her do sixteen knots at full-out, and he could make her cut a corner like a midshipman at Annapolis. When she was up and moving, her prow smartly cutting the waves, it was as if she had a foaming white bone in her teeth—which is an expression old seamen sometimes use. When he had her loaded for a long cruise, she'd hold twenty-four hundred pounds of ice, for keeping cool the Hatuey beer and the daiquiris, the avocados and the Filipino mangoes, and, not least, the freshly landed monsters of the Gulf Stream, which Hemingway always thought of as “the great blue river.” Who knew what was down there lurking in those fathomless bottoms—the skeletons of slave ships? Who'd ever caught what was possible to catch in those mile-deep waters of his imagination? “In hunting you know what you are after and the top you can get is an elephant,” Hemingway once wrote in
Esquire
magazine. “But who can say what you will hook sometime when drifting in a hundred and fifty fathoms in the Gulf Stream? There are probably marlin and swordfish to which the fish we have seen caught are pygmies.”

Pilar
's master used to play Fats Waller records and “You're the Top” on a scratchy phonograph while his boat rocked in the Stream and he waited in his ladder-back fighting chair, which had leather-cushioned armrests and was bolted to the afterdeck and could swivel in a 360-degree circle. He said the tunes were good for bringing up the monsters. When the mood was upon him, he'd sing along in his lusty baritone.

In another piece for
Esquire
, also written in the mid-thirties, when he was still trying to decipher the mysteries of the Stream and escaping to it every chance he got, this most riddlesome of men wrote about the hooking of a marlin, always the blue river's greatest prize.

And in a different mood, a few years later, no less in thrall:

He had named her after a shrine and
feria
in Spain that commemorates Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Our Lady of the Pillar. It's in Saragossa, and he'd been to the bullfights there in 1926. But his boat's name was also meant to commemorate the secret nickname adopted by his second wife, Pauline, before she was his wife, when the two were still in adultery. It was the name he would have given his daughter, he once said, if he'd ever been blessed enough to have a daughter.
Pilar
could fit six in her sleeping compartments, two more in her open-air cockpit with its roll-down canvas sides and copper screens for warding off the nighttime bugs. In her prime, she'd been known among Gulf Stream anglers for her shiny black hull, for her snappy seafoam-green canvas roof and topside. A boat with a black hull, riding long and low in the water, can be extremely difficult to sight against a glaring tropical horizon—so, yes, something ghostly.

Her cabin sides and decks were crafted from Canadian fir and high-grade Honduras mahogany, with tight tolerances between the seams. But she wasn't a luxury craft—she was ever and always, her owner liked to say, a functional fishing machine, sturdy, reliant, built to take the heaviest weather, “sweet in any kind of sea.” There's a term old boatmen sometimes use to describe a reassuring boat in a heaving ocean: “sea-kindly.” That was
Pilar
, who'd come humbly out of a factory, and a shipbuilder's
catalog, a “stock boat” of the 1930s, albeit with her owner's list of modifications and alterations for her. Over the decades Hemingway would add other modifications and innovations and alterations, further improving the well-built fishing machine that had already proved astonishingly durable and dependable.

After Hemingway's suicide, the pundits at
Time
wrote that conduct

Yes, that was a piece of the truth about him.

He used to love standing up on his beauty's flying bridge and guiding her out of the harbor in the morning light. Sometimes, he'd be bare-chested. The flying bridge was his name for a top deck, and it wasn't added until 1937, just before he left for Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War (and—not unconsciously—to find a hugely successful novel about it). The sportfisherman, in his raggedy and beltless shorts—or, if he was wearing a belt, putting it not inside the loops but over top of them—would have his tanned, muscular legs planted several feet apart, like a heavyweight braced for a roundhouse or a golfer ready to slam his tee shot. He'd have his white visor pulled low over his blistering nose that was coated with zinc oxide or glazed with coconut oil. (One of the reasons Hemingway grew his iconic white Papa beard of the 1950s was because his fair midwestern facial skin could no longer take the harsh Cuban sun.) He'd be waving to people he recognized on the shore. The flying bridge had its own set of duplicate engine controls, throttles and levers, coming up via several pipes through the overhead of the cockpit. The steering wheel on the bridge—flat as a plate in front of him, the way steering wheels are on the back of hook-and-ladder fire trucks—was out of an old luxury car from a Key West junkyard, polished wood set into a steel casing.

From up there, when he wasn't manning the wheel, he could fight a decent-size fish—not a 450-pound marlin nor an Atlantic sailfish, but maybe a tarpon or a recalcitrant barracuda. On the way to the fishing
grounds, he'd already have a line in the water, with a Japanese feather squid and a strip of pork rind on the hook, which in turn would be attached to a No. 10 piano-wire leader, which in turn would be knotted to a fifteen-thread line. This was for the smaller catches—good eating, good selling. Tarpon and kingfish liked to lie in close to shore and feed around the commercial fishing smacks. Hemingway was after almost any kind of fishing he could get, but he wouldn't get all four rods going on the boat until
Pilar
had reached the Stream. On going out—“running out” is how he sometimes said it, just as coming home was “running in”—he loved watching the motion of the Japanese squid bait skipping on the whitecaps. In 1949, in
Holiday
magazine, when he'd owned
Pilar
for fifteen years and had been living in Cuba for a decade, and was married to his fourth and last wife, who liked going out on the boat almost as much as he did, Hemingway described this feeling in a discursive, lore-filled reminiscence-cum-piece-of-fishing-reportage:

The “slithering, silk-tearing noise” was always a good sign—that the monsters might come that day.

And now Hemingway's boat sat beached and grime-coated and time-stunned in the Cuban sun. There were rips in her canvas topside; little hair-like pieces of fabric stuck up from the roof. Her brass and copper fastenings had gone green with corrosion, her bottom a hideous pink. Someone had reconfigured her power plant: instead of two propellers, there was just the big one, coming down the center of the boat. Where was the other screw? Anyone who's ever paid close attention to Hemingway's boat knows she ran two engines in her day—the big Chrysler
seventy-five-horse Crown reduction gear engine for cruising; the little four-cylinder, forty-horse Lycoming motor for trolling. Many other things were discernibly, puzzlingly off about
Pilar
as well. But she was here, intact, beneath this awning, on this hill, sliced with midday heat and shadow.

When he got this boat—or, more precisely, when he placed the order for her and put down $3,000 toward the full purchase price, courtesy of a hastily arranged loan/advance from the editor of
Esquire
against future articles—on a spring day in 1934, at a shipyard in Brooklyn, just back from safari in east Africa, Ernest Miller Hemingway was not quite thirty-five years old. He was still living and writing in Key West, a sand-bitten and Depression-sagging outpost at the bottom of America. He was rugged, handsome, youthful, trim-waisted, owner of a killer grin and an even more killer ego, the reigning monarch of American literature, a sportsman and sensualist glorying in his life, in the external physical world. And when he lost
Pilar
? It was in that moment when he lost everything, on a summer Sunday in 1961, in a place where the mountains outside his three picture windows in the living room were as jagged as the teeth of a shredding saw. He was nineteen days shy of his sixty-second birthday: prematurely old, multidiseased, mentally bewildered, delusional, slurred of speech, in exile from Cuba, from the Stream, unable to compose so much as one true sentence a day, or so he'd wept on a sofa in his living room. Is it any wonder the most imitated writer of the twentieth century rose sometime after seven o'clock that morning, slipped a red silk dressing robe over blue pajamas, put on slippers, moved past the master bedroom where his wife was sleeping, padded down the red-carpeted stairs, crossed the length of the living room to the kitchen, retrieved the key to the locked storeroom where the weapons were (inexplicably, Mary Hemingway had left the ring of keys on the windowsill above the sink), went down to the basement, took shells from an ammo box, closed and relocked the door, came back upstairs, walked ten steps to the front-entry foyer (one sees him in this grainy mind-movie moving very fast but also methodically, teeth clenched and bared in that sickly smile that he often exhibited toward the end of his life), opened the foyer door, stepped inside, placed the butt of the gun on the linoleum tile, tore open the breech, slammed in the cartridges, snapped it shut, bent over, as you might bend over a water fountain, rested his forehead against the blue steel, and blew away his entire cranial vault with the double-barreled, 12-gauge Boss shotgun with which he'd once shot pigeons?

In Havana, a thirty-eight-foot motorized fishing vessel, framed so long
ago with steam-bent white oak and planked with white cedar, bobbed at anchor, ready to be gassed up, waiting.

This book is largely the story of the twenty-seven years and three months between the first week of April 1934 and the first week of July 1961. It's about the strange, sad distance from Wheeler Shipyard, Inc., at the foot of Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn to a tight, oak-paneled entryway in a bunker-like house in Ketchum, Idaho, when the world went away from a suffering man in fractions of a second. But it isn't meant to be a Hemingway biography, not in any conventional sense, and much less is it meant to be the nautical history of a piece of floating wood. We've had far too many Hemingway biographies in the past fifty years, not to say daffy critical studies and even daffier psychological “explanations” of the man.

My aim, rather, is to try to lock together the words “Hemingway” and “boat” in the same way that the locked-together and equally American words “DiMaggio” and “bat,” or “Satchmo” and “horn,” will quickly mean something in the minds of most people, at least of a certain age.

So it's about such ideas as fishing, friendship, and fatherhood, and love of water, and what it means to be masculine in our culture (as that culture is now rapidly changing), and the notion of being “boatstruck” (a malady that seems to affect men more than women), and how the deep good in us is often matched only by the perverse bad in us, and—not least—about the damnable way our demons seem to end up always following us, even or especially when we think we've escaped them and are out cruising on the Stream.

But the narrative won't always stay between the bracketing and polar-opposite moments I identified above. No human history ever proceeds in a straight line, perhaps least of all Hemingway's. His prose was wonderfully rooted in geography and linear movement. And yet his life, like his boat, beat against so many crosscurrents. So there are more than a few purposeful zigzags and loop-arounds and time-bends and flashbacks and flash-forwards and other sorts of departures from the main frame here, but generally the story is on a trajectory from early spring 1934 to early summer 1961.