Hemingway's Boat (5 page)

The subject's first quote: “It's hard to describe just what there is to killing big game. It's very exciting and—uh—it gives you a fine feeling. It's the sort of the same thing as any killing; that is, it's fine, if you do a clean job of it and it's lousy if there's bad sportsmanship.” Toward the end: “The pursuit of game having renewed his enthusiasm for life, he returned home ‘to work like hell and make enough money so that I can go back to Africa and really learn something about lions.' ”

It must be the
Herald Trib
's account that E. B. White of
The New Yorker
catches on his way to work on the morning of the fourth. The
Herald Trib
is the highbrow newspaper of choice in Manhattan, and these quotes are apparently just too much for a domesticated literary man. Because the following week, a three-stanza Hemingway send-up titled “The Law of the Jungle” appears on page 31 of
The New Yorker
. White's final lines:

Seventeen years from now, on the publication of Hemingway's weakest novel,
Across the River and into the Trees
, White, great American humorist, never a white hunter on the dark continent, will bring down Hemingway again in the magazine with a parody titled “Across the Street and into the Grill.” By then parodying Hemingway will have become a cottage sport and pastime in America. White's piece will particularly enrage the author, perhaps because he instantly understands that it will get into anthologies and live way past his own death.

What was Ernest Hemingway's interior state when he stood at the
Paris
rail with his petite and affluent spouse on the eve of acquiring
Pilar
? (Pauline's uncle, Gus Pfeiffer—a New York businessman, part of whose fortune had been derived from his interests in a Paris and Manhattan perfumer named Richard Hudnut, and who liked Ernest a good deal, at least then—had staked the safari somewhere to the bottom line of about $30,000. The safari had lasted just a little over two months, not three, as was reported. Hemingway had been in Africa for nearly three months, but not in the bush for that long, and for about a week of the actual safari he was confined to a hospital bed in Nairobi, having suffered an attack of amoebic dysentery that necessitated evacuation by light plane.)

A whole lot of his state of mind can be glimpsed in his writing, not least his letter writing. Hemingway wrote somewhere between six and seven thousand letters in his life, by hand and by typewriter and by dictation, usually in free-associative bursts, often after a day's writing, to relieve tension, more or less in the way you'd speak in a conversation. This is particularly true of his letters to friends and to certain family members. “The desire to get to the man behind the work can be sometimes overwhelming. I always go back to the letters,” Patrick Hemingway told me in 1987, a sentence that seems only truer with time.

Hemingway's momentary high spirits in early April 1934 must have had at least two prongs: he was back from his excellent safari adventure; and now, before heading home by train to Florida, he hoped to go to a Brooklyn boatyard and put in an order for his own longed-for fishing machine. And yet, what his letters, cojoined with verifiable facts of his life just then, suggest is that what might have seemed so clear in a photograph and in what he told some shipside reporters didn't nearly reflect what Hemingway was generally feeling inside. Every good photograph has a secret, a
critic named Mark Stevens once wrote: “Something mysteriously and tantalizingly withheld, even when the world seems laid out as plainly as a corpse upon a table.”

One verifiable truth is that the monarch of American letters had been riding through rough critical seas for the last few years—and much more rough going was up ahead. Somehow, nothing seemed quite as locked as it once did, and that included owning the reviewers. Not quite a year earlier—on June 13, 1933—the author for whom things had once seemed to come so effortlessly had written to his book editor: “I am tempted never to publish another damned thing. The swine arent worth writing for. I swear to Christ they're not. Every phase of the whole racket is so disgusting that it makes you feel like vomiting.… And it is a commonplace that I lack confidence that I am a man—What shit—And I'm supposed to go around with your good friends spreading that behind my back—And they imagine they will get away with it.” He'd been referring specifically in this instance to his former friend Max Eastman (a fellow Scribners author), who'd just written a half-joking and belated review of
Death in the Afternoon
for
The New Republic
titled “Bull in the Afternoon.” The Hemingway style, Eastman said, was that “of wearing false hair on the chest.” In Hemingway's reading, and in the reading of some of his close friends, the piece wasn't trying to be humorous at all but rather was making overt suggestions to the effect that Hemingway must feel sexually inadequate. Well, he'd break Eastman's jaw the next time he saw him, and sell tickets to the event.

One way to read Ernest Hemingway's life is through the phenomenon of remarkable first luck. He'd become an international literary figure, specifically as a novelist, so quickly—in the second half of the 1920s, less than a decade from when he'd started out. He'd started out with stories—actually, sometimes just intensely felt imagistic fragments of stories. It was almost as if he'd had no real apprenticeship but had sprung full-blown into American consciousness as a serious writer. It wasn't true; it only seemed true. What is true is that, for nearly his whole life, Hemingway had a genius, among his many geniuses, for gathering knowledge inside of him with astonishing speed—lore, know-how, the names of streets in Kansas City. He seemed to learn everything and anything so early, almost as if to defy the word “learn.” The statement can apply as much to the intricacies of big-game fishing as to the art of shaking daiquiris as to the craft of writing fiction: he simply found out, and lodged it inside him very fast. In so many instances, he seemed to mutate from eager novice to acknowledged expert
with barely any larval stage in between. The pattern was to learn from his betters—betters at the time—and then to lap them on the track as if they were standing still.

The Sun Also Rises
, Hemingway's slim and enduring first novel about world-weary expats doing the bullfights in Pamplona, sixty thousand lyric words, was published when he was twenty-seven. He completed the first draft in eight weeks—really, almost the whole novel was there in that first manic burst. It was as if the world had a new kind of writing on its hands—laconic, ironic, dialogue-driven, painterly in the way of an Impressionist canvas. Only the opening section was badly off in its tone, self-conscious and affected. (“This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins, she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story.”) His new friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, three years older, convinced him to drop those opening pages, and Hemingway quickly did, and after that the pitch of the book was nearly perfect (that is, if you were willing to overlook its casual anti-Semitism), and possibly the extremely grateful author never quite forgave Scott for his critical acuity. Certainly, he would begin condescending to him as a fellow artist almost the minute he was able to—another verifiable fact.

Fitzgerald had gone out of his way to help bring Hemingway to the prestigious American publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons, where he was a star. He'd written to his editor, the esteemed (if not yet quite legendary) Maxwell Perkins: “This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemmingway, who lives in Paris (an American), writes for the transatlantic Review + has a brilliant future.” That was early October 1924, even before Fitzgerald had met Hemingway. (Their first meeting came six months later, early spring 1925, at the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse, right after the publication of
The Great Gatsby
.)

Soon there would be a new Scribners star edited and soothed by Perkins. You can pick up almost any page of
Sun
today, and at its center, the story of a war-wounded man, seeking to conceal his softness with cynicism, will seem as fresh in its language and feeling as it must have seemed to cognoscenti on both sides of the Atlantic in 1926. “It is awfully easy to be hardboiled about everything in the daytime,” Jake Barnes confesses, “but at night it is another thing.” The famously war-wounded man has been wounded in his genitals. He's incapable of making love.

As for the short stories, which Hemingway learned how to do before
the long-form fiction: it was as if these, too, had sought their own level of near perfection without real apprenticeship. It only felt as if modernism in prose had begun with a young husband and father out of the Midwest—a rube, really, no matter that he'd glimpsed war and suffered wounds—sitting down at a table in La Closerie des Lilas in Paris in August 1924 and finishing a long “fish story” (in two parts) and, in the bargain, creating a new kind of American language. On the surface, nothing seems to be happening in the story. Its setting is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The stream he is fishing, as well as the title of the story, are given the musical-sounding name, “Big Two-Hearted River.” A young man named Nick, who seems vaguely to be troubled, has gone camping alone. He leans over a railroad bridge in a burned-out town and watches trout far down through “the glassy convex surface of the pool.” In a meadow, not far from the glinting river, he makes his camp, slitting off “a bright slab of pine” from a stump and chinking it into tent pegs. He fixes cheesecloth across the “open mouth of the tent.” He crawls in and already there is “something mysterious and homelike.” He climbs out. He places a wire grill over a fire and with his boot forces the four legs down into the ground. Now the beans and spaghetti are warming. They're “making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface.” “ ‘Chrise,' Nick said, ‘Geezus Chrise,' he said happily.” The story is proceeding in such inconsequential fashion, with attentions being paid to the smallest rituals of camping and fishing, as if this is all the story were about.

Many years later, no longer a young or well man, in a Paris memoir as elegant as it was often cruel, the author would say of that story, without naming it: “I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote. When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it.” The author remembered that he wrote the story, with everything beneath the surface, at the café table in blue-backed notebooks, with two pencils and a dime-store sharpener beside him—to sharpen your writing instrument with a pocketknife was too profligate. When his so-called fish story was finished, the excited young husband and father, twenty-five years old, who lived with his wife and baby boy above the sawmill on rue Notre Dame
des Champs, wrote to his bohemian literary friends, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, sounding exactly like the rube of the middle border he essentially still was. He told them he'd been “trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about the fish, but isn't writing a hard job though?”

A Farewell to Arms
, coming three years after
The Sun Also Rises
, a longer, more mature, more moving novel (Hemingway's finest sustained literary achievement, in my view), was published in September 1929, two months after he'd turned thirty. He'd started the novel in Paris, had worked on it in Key West; in Piggott, Arkansas; in Kansas City; on a ranch at Big Horn, Wyoming—other places, too. His wife gave birth to his second child by difficult cesarean section while he worked on it, and also his father killed himself. “I remember all these things happening and all the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year,” he once said. “But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been.” Living in that book, making the country, a man still so young had written a passage so immortal as this, about a retreat from a place called Caporetto:

From a beginner at long-form fiction to a master of it inside of three years—this was the impression that the world had formed of him, and it wasn't altogether wrong. “Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty: / Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master—” the poet Archibald MacLeish would say years later in a poem, but also saying, in the line immediately above: “And what became of him? Fame became of him.”

But now it was the thirties, and
his
thirties, and suddenly the critical “swine” were attacking his books. It was as if the reviewers had secretly gotten together at a club in New York and voted to pile on—certainly in Hemingway's view. They'd done it firstly with his nonfiction meditation on bullfighting in Spain,
Death in the Afternoon
, published in 1932, and even more with his third volume of short stories,
Winner Take Nothing
, published on October 27, 1933, when Hemingway was in Europe, about a month before the trip to Africa. Individual stories in the fourteen-story work certainly had been admired—“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “Fathers and Sons,” “A Way You'll Never Be,” “Wine of Wyoming.” But as an aesthetic whole, the book was judged by some of the country's most prestigious reviewers to be tedious and anti-intellectual and boorish in its subject matter. Louis Kronenberger of
The New York Times:
“One reads a story like the first and finest in the present book, a story called ‘After the Storm,' and one regrets that in the main such incomparable equipment as Hemingway's goes off so many times with a proud and clean report—and hits nothing.” T. S. Matthews of
The New Republic:
“Some of his current subjects are the kind of abnormalities that fascinate adolescence but really have very little to do with the price of our daily bread.… This may sound like an attack on Hemingway, and it is. I think he is one of the few exciting writers we have, and that consequently we ought to see, if we can, what all the excitement is about. And I think that what it is about is adolescence.” H. S. Canby of the
Saturday Review of Literature:
“When you are bored by Hemingway, as I frankly am by a half dozen of these new stories, which are repetitive with the slow pound, pound of a hammer upon a single mood, there is nothing to revive you except flashes of excellent observation.” Max Perkins had tried to send a pacifying letter to Hemingway in Paris, along with half a dozen of these reviews, while Hemingway was engaged in last-minute errands for the safari. He would not be pacified by his editor, even though the book was selling well enough.