Hemingway's Boat (53 page)

Two days later, he's typing a letter to Charlie Scribner on a piece of plain white paper. There's concern on his publisher's part whether some of the “fictional” things he's said in the new book about his third wife are actionable. Listen, Charlie, Miss Martha would be well advised not to try to pick a fight with me, he writes—I hit too hard. She's a phony who tried to run in the social register, he says, who neglected to tell him before they got married that her insides were gone for childbearing, who lied about the fact of her Jewish blood. Let's drop it there, Charlie, he says, before I get really serious. “I would fix her up for posterity, or whatever they call the place, like a trussed pig on a wheel-barrow in China.” He ends: “Better stop writing this.” He means before he really gets worked up. He signs it in a smeared hand, “Yours always Ernest,” and writes beside his signature, “Broken pencil lead.” Was he jamming down so hard that he snapped the pencil itself?

Seven weeks later, no page proofs, goddamn it. He's out on the boat. Through May and June he's soothed himself with short vacations on
Pilar
. He and his wife and one of his Havana hangers-on, Roberto Herrera, intend to stay out again for a couple of days. Late in the day, they put in behind the reef at Rincón, east of Bacuranao. He's climbing the ladder to the flying bridge to relieve Gregorio at the wheel. Just then Gregorio swings the boat broadside to enter the channel. The captain, with one leg over the guardrail, pitches backward and headfirst into the hooks and clamps securing the gaffs.
“Yodo y vendas,”
Gregorio is yelling. Iodine and bandages. Mary is trying to stanch the wound with rolls of toilet paper. Hemingway is going woozy. The deck slats are turning red and sticky. While Mary gobs, he's thinking about Adriana. They get the boat turned around and headed home. They have him wrapped in a cashmere blanket on the long cushion on the starboard side in the cockpit. At the wharf, they load him into a taxi. Back at the
finca
, his doctor closes the wound while the rebounding patient drinks a gin and tonic in a leather desk chair. It
wasn't an S.I.W., he'll tell friends in coming days, you know, a self-inflicted wound.

Some of these details are in
How It Was
. What isn't in Mary's memoir is something Walter Houk's wife told her husband not long before she died. One morning, possibly a week after Hemingway's non-S.I.W., Hemingway's young secretary went into his bedroom with a stack of dictated letters ready to be signed. “Oh, daughter,” he said, taking off his belt and sliding his khaki shorts to the knees. “Forgive me for exposing myself, but I wanted you to see what happened to me. Look here at my right thigh.” His thigh was a mass of red scabs. He told Nita how he'd pitched into the clamps, which had not only opened his head to the bone and severed an artery but had done a serious job on his leg, too. Nita put the letters down and backed out of the room. A little later, she encountered Mary in another part of the house. Mary had overheard the exchange in the bedroom. Nita: Terrible, isn't it? Mary, venomously: “He was drunk.” A man in a reeling state trying to take over the wheel of his boat with his wife and others aboard might be thought of as acting out some rage, yes.

July 9. A Saturday. Like a fool, he's waited all morning for proofs to come. No chance they'll be here now till Monday.
Pilar
is in temporary dry dock and he can't even go fishing. Thirty-two years ago yesterday, they blew him up at Fossalta. In commemoration he went into town last night and rounded up Xenophobia and another fond whore, much older, whom he calls Leopoldina. He's writing these things this morning to Scribner, who's been hospitalized with heart problems. He's typing on
finca
stationery. It's a long letter, and he won't finish till tomorrow. You gotta take care of your ticker, Charlie, he says, because we get only one of those in this life. Soon enough Charlie's ticker problems are off the page. He's on to Henry James, and by the way, “fuck all male old women anyway.” Just once he'd have liked to see him on a mean bucking bronc or trying to hit a ball out of the infield. “What did he do when he was a boy do you suppose. Just jerk himself off into Fame and now Fortune like T.S. Eliot.” His mind goes to the general subject of sports and his own kids. Jack's a hell of an athlete and can play anything except baseball. Patrick's a terrible athlete, at least of the kind that involves hand-eye coordination, but such a fine kid. Gigi, well, he can play any damn thing, ride any damn thing, shoot any damn thing. Course, the girls are after the Gig-man now. “But I wish there had never been a divorce and loss of control and discipline (not harsh as I rebelled against when I was a boy) but just sound control.” Much further down (it's Sunday, and he's finishing): “You know that on today July 10th 1950
I have still not received the original duplicate page proofs. I would shoot on that anywhere any time.” The salesmen won't do their job, he says, the critics will have their own time with it, there won't be any copies in the stores. “I would never go with any other publishing house; but Jesus Christ I would like to put yours in order.” Don't let your lousy people fuck my book—this is the refrain. “Sometimes I get discouraged, Charlie. Today is one of the days.” He signs it “Ernest,” postscripting, “How do you like it now, Gentlemen?”

Ten days later, July 19, the same laments and rage: “My dear Charlie: Your fucking page proofs (first series) turned up yesterday. That ought to be almost a record.” Eight paragraphs down: “The hell with it all.” Next paragraph: “There is nothing for me to do now. The horse is under the starter's orders.” I am a bad boy, Charlie, and not proud of it. “You are older than me and I should be respectful.” Toward the end: “We are going fishing today.” He and Mary will leave in an hour. At least he's got
Pilar
.

On August 3, a hurricane passes through—the
finca
was on its eastern edge. Another storm is due in four days. He's scared for the boat. “Send me any reviews you have,” he writes. “They won't bother my nerves.”

On August 9, he writes again to Scribner, the first part of it by hand. He can't sleep, he says. He logs in the time at the top: “0415.” He's still waiting to receive the first finished copy. “It's all sorts of things wake you. This morning it was bad cramps in the left leg and bad nightmares. Detailed nightmare in which gigi had killed seven people and then himself. Waiting now for the morning papers to see it isn't true.” Sorry about my bad handwriting, Charlie, he says—no clipboards are handy, they're on the boat. “Maybe I can get some sleep now it is daylight.” He doesn't finish the letter until afternoon. “Book didn't come.” Shit on hope.

But finished copies do come, within two days. Even in the fourth decade of writing books, there is the wild thrill to tear open the lid and pull the first one from the box. That afternoon he signs a copy for Marty Gellhorn and dictates a letter, which his secretary neatly types: “Quite a few people came into Venice from the country to see you when you were in that town. The summing up was; ‘She must have been quite beautiful then. So you can't really blame Ernesto for having married her.' They also read your articles and found them without style nor much talent; but conscientiously and honestly written.” Nine days later he writes to his old army pal, Buck Lanham. “Am scheduled to be on the cover of Time.” Six days later, another letter to Buck: “Believe the reviews will be mixed. Cover stories
are off.” It's August 26, 1950, twelve days before publication. His fucked horse is in the gate. He has so little idea—or maybe he does.

Here's what the
Saturday Review of Literature
was putting on the presses. (Their review would come out on Saturday.) “It is not only Hemingway's worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and it throws a doubtful light on the future. It is so dreadful, in fact, that it begins to have its own morbid fascination and is almost impossible as they say, to put down.” Here's what
Commentary
was getting set to run. (They were a monthly, so it would be a few weeks.) “The first thing to be said about this novel is that it is so egregiously bad as to render all comment on it positively embarrassing to anyone who esteems Hemingway as one of the more considerable prose-artists of our time.” Here's what
The New Yorker
had in the can. (It was by Alfred Kazin, it was called “The Indignant Flesh,” and it, too, would come out that weekend.) “[I]t is hard to say what one feels most in reading this book—pity, embarrassment that so fine and honest a writer can make such a travesty of himself, or amazement that a man can render so marvelously the beauty of the natural world and yet be so vulgar.… [I]t is held together by blind anger … a rage that is deflected into one of the most confused and vituperatively revealing self-portrayals by an American I have ever seen.” Even so lowly and obscure a publication as
The Yale Review
(certainly lowly and obscure in Hemingway's eye) would chirp in with the
E
word, although not immediately: “In spite of some good writing, it is an embarrassing book to read.” Embarrassing? When was the last time the chicken-shitters used that word to describe his stuff? You mean because he had written such sentences as “ ‘Oh you. Would you ever like to run for Queen of Heaven?' ” (The dying soldier is tête-à-tête with Renata in the bar of the Gritti Palace.) Or: “They stood there and kissed each other true.”? Or: “The Martinis were icy cold and true Montgomerys, and, after touching the edges, they felt them glow happily all through their upper bodies”? Or: “ ‘I love you and I love you and I love you' ”?

The only review he saw on the day of publication was
Time
's, and they, too, spoke of his book as an embarrassment. Hemingway was a subscriber to
Time
, and his copy nearly always arrived on Thursday, having been published four days earlier in New York. He'd have liked going out on the boat to celebrate the day with a fish or two, but he'd stayed home to see what
the bastards would say. In his gut he must have known, since there'd been that earlier talk of a cover story, now quashed. I picture him turning to page 110 and seeing the small blocky head (“On the Ropes”) and reading the sarcasm of the first line (“Hemingway was the champ all right”) and jumping into the second column (“never wins a round”) and then flipping to the end (“a bore who forfeits the reader's sympathy”), and then tossing the rag down, all of it happening in eye-blinks of time, about as reflexively as some jerk of an amateur angler might jerk from a marlin's jaw an 8/0 Mustad hook with a Japanese feather squid and strip of pork rind on it.

Beneath the review was an interview the editors had recently conducted with him via telegram. It was bordered in wavy red lines and immediately drew the eye. They'd asked him in a phone call to keep his replies tight—to about twenty-five bucks worth of international cable tolls. So wasn't the hero of his book a pretty bitter man? And weren't the colonel's personal history and even his characteristics startlingly parallel to the author's? And might he be willing to concede he may have rushed things a little to get this one out? “We concede nothing, and what we take we hold” was one of his answers, and “Hemingway is bitter about nobody” was another. At the end, the editors included this: “Anything Mary told you over the phone I deny.” Mary Hemingway used to be a reporter for
Time
. What a double cross.

He went into town before noon, hoping airmail letters from in-house friends at both
The New York Times
and
Newsweek
might be at the post office and he could get them before Friday's delivery. The letters weren't there. Nor did any telegrams of support from his publisher arrive that day or the next or the next. Mary Hemingway wasn't around—she'd recently gone over to the States to help get her aging parents settled into a new residence in Gulfport, Mississippi. Xenophobia had contracted some kind of crud in her chest and was on penicillin—couldn't even distract himself sexually. Did he wander the
finca
, take laps in the pool, kick at an underfoot cat or two?

On Saturday he got up and went to his desk to write to his publisher. Reviews were appearing everywhere in the country (and also in England, where
Across the River
was being published simultaneously), and some weren't half bad and a few were damn good—although he knew nothing of them. On the day of publication, both
The New York Times
and
The New York Herald Tribune
had run prominent, if hedging, notices, and his publisher had done right by him and placed large ads. But the only thing he knew of so far was that dirty double cross in
Time
.

“Dear Charlie: When the hell you been, boy?” (He had to have meant “where,” perhaps the smallest index of his distracted fury.)

Eighth paragraph: “I'm going to take a dry martini now and the hell with it.” Next sentence: “Later: Got the Newsweek review which they sent me; also Times daily and Sunday which Juan, the chauffeur bought in town.” He means
brought from
town. What apparently happened is that he took the martini and in the meantime Juan arrived from town with the airmail packets from New York. The
Times
Sunday review, which wouldn't be out until the next day, was a rave from fellow novelist John O'Hara. About a month earlier, he'd been tipped by his friendly inside source at the
Times
(it was a critic named Harvey Breit) that O'Hara was doing it. The editors had put the review on the cover. “The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel” was the first sentence. That's about all he needed to see.
Newsweek
published—on the same day as
Time
's review—a long and mostly admiring piece, a kind of feature-cum-review. It was written by the magazine's book editor, Robert Cantwell, whom Hemingway had known casually from years before, in Europe. No double cross there. “I don't think you backed the wrong horse: if you backed him,” he told Scribner, when he took up the letter again later that afternoon.