Hemingway's Boat (76 page)

I cannot list all the librarians and staff historians and audiovisual experts at all the archives and museums and research libraries—from local and county institutions to federal and university ones—who gave of their time and help, but these must be named: Susan Wrynn, James B. Hill, Laurie Austin, and Maryrose Grossman
at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston; Tom Hambright at the Florida History Room at the Monroe County Public Library in Key West; and Gail M. Morchower of the International Game Fish Association in Dania Beach, Florida. I also feel special gratitude to the entire library staff in manuscripts and archives at Princeton.

At the university where I am privileged to conduct nonfiction seminars with very smart twenty-two-year-olds, I wish to thank, for their steadying belief, my colleagues Al Filreis and Greg Djanikian, who run such a fertile creative writing program out of a woody two-story Victorian dream set back from the main campus walk and known as Kelly Writers House. I am also deeply indebted to three former students—Jessica Lussenhop, Allison Stadd, and Jessica Yu—who served as intern-apprentices at various points in my writing and research. It isn't everyday someone gets to go from one world-class institution (The
Washington Post
) to another (the University of Pennsylvania), but that happened to me.

These, too—former students, a friend I have known since first grade, my oldest pal in journalism, Penn colleagues, former
Washington Post
colleagues, a couple of fellow authors, four siblings, and so forth—I would like to acknowledge here, in no particular order, for their support and friendship: Mike Woyahn, Bill Gildea, John Moody, Wendy Steiner, Jennifer Conway, Jim English, Nancy Bentley, Tim Corrigan, Loretta Williams, Elizabeth Anderson, Ann Marie Pitts, Stephanie Palmer, Mingo Reynolds, Gabe Oppenheim, Elaine Wong, Josh Pollick, Jenna Statfeld, Caroline Rothstein, Tom Rankin, Hiram Rogers, Bob Hansman, Douglas Brinkley, David Maraniss, David VonDrehle, Shelby Coffey, Wil Haygood, Mary-Jo Adams, Bobbye Pratt, Claudia Pennington, Dink Bruce, Charlie Clements, Gigi Wizowaty, James Godsil, Kirk Curnutt, James Meredith, Scott Schwar, Robert Coles, Sunita Nasta, Robert Fry, Elaine Chiang, Richard Toof, Kathy Milton, Marty Hendrickson, Eric Hendrickson, Mark Hendrickson, and Jeannie Snider.

With particular thanks: my longtime agents, Kathy Robbins and David Halpern, wise counselors who let me do the work but were ever there at crucial moments of decision.

Also with particular thanks, for all his computer and moral help, whenever I needed it, my Penn colleague and friend Brian Kirk.

At Alfred A. Knopf, I owe my deep respect and gratitude to several floors of gifted book people, but especially to Sonny Mehta, Anke Steinecke, Carol Devine Carson, Peter Andersen, Paul Bogaards, Nicholas Latimer, Michelle Somers, Ellen Feldman, Patricia Flynn, Jenny Pouech, Joey McGarvey, and, rising above them all, my editor, Jonathan Segal. In a business of revolving doors, ours is a relationship, both professional and personal, spanning thirty-two years. Jon waited for this book far longer than he should have; I think I knew before I wrote my first sentence I would dedicate the book to him.

And, finally, my family: Ceil, John, Matt and his dear Jennie. More than any of the above, they were the true sustainers. Over and over, my spouse listened to all the fears as the bedroom lights were going out. As for my now-grown sons, I am prouder than I dare say that they've followed me, each in his way, into the world of working in media. The future is all theirs.

I've long believed books find their writers, more than writers find their books, and sometimes the finding can be a half-alert thing winding on for years. The origins of this book go back at least through three decades and four intervening books. I've told in the text how I met Les Hemingway on the way over to Bimini in a Grumman Goose seaplane in the winter of 1980—perhaps this was the original seeding moment, or splashing one. (My spouse was with me, and all I knew then was that I was trying to write my first book, a seminary memoir.) If we didn't go out in a Bimini boat with Hemingway's little brother that weekend, if the name “Pilar” didn't surface (I don't remember), boats and water and fishing were everywhere around us. Indeed, outsize black-and-white images of
Pilar
and her master were on the walls of the bar and in the iron-gated museum room of the Compleat Angler, that perfect, small, funky hotel, in the center of that perfect, small, funky island, that is, alas, no more—the Angler, that is. Before dawn on January 13, 2006, the twelve-room inn burned to the ground.

A year following that 1980 encounter with a living Hemingway, I purchased at a discount bookstore in a strip mall on Rockville Pike in suburban Washington, DC, a copy of the just-published
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961
, edited by Carlos Baker. This couldn't have been accidental—all that Les had told me, including incredible-sounding stories about his nephew Gigi, was still jouncing around inside. I still have my beat-up brown copy of Baker's 948-page book—the Princeton scholar had brought into print the door-stopper letters volume twelve years after he'd brought into print his door-stopping
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story
, which I've now run out of ways to describe, in terms of its being first and being essential. Reading the letters book, was I making dim connections to the idea that Hemingway's boat might serve as some sort of structural frame and organizing principle for my own Hemingway book? I don't know, but I will say it seems almost impossible to read the letters book—at least from about page 404 onward—without registering the name
Pilar
. At page 404 he's had her just days and is raving her beauties to Arnold Gingrich—I've quoted from this letter in the text.

Six years from the letters book, in the early summer of 1987, I searched out the three Hemingway sons and wrote about them for
The Washington Post
, my employer. By then, I think the idea of something on Hemingway between hard
covers was actively taking hold, not that I yet recognized it. I remember thinking at a later date, when I did recognize it as a possible book, and one involving
Pilar
, that if the project actually got launched, I wouldn't want it to be a story only about
Pilar
's owner. And further, I'd want it to be far less a biography than an interpretation, an evocation, with other lives streaming in. I'd worked this way previously, and what was the point of another biography after so many—the good, the bad, the ugly—having marched before?

The material for
Hemingway's Boat
has been gathered in three ways. First, from my own interviewing and reporting. Since I come proudly from a journalistic rather than an academic background, the notion of being able to go out and talk to sources, which is to say anybody and everybody who might know something about the central subject, has always provided immediate and stabilizing comfort. Here, given Hemingway's birth date, I understood there'd not be that kind of ballast. Sure, there would be plenty of people to talk to, from Walloon Lake historians to restorers of vintage boats to old Key West hangers-on, but no one, or almost no one, who'd ever known the man himself. So I am only stating again my gratitude for having stumbled, all but blind, on Walter Houk.

The second way I obtained information was from documents—letters, manuscripts, old
Pilar
logs, photographs, newsreels, eight-millimeter films, tinny wire recordings converted to audio recordings. There are Hemingway repositories—or repositories of Hemingway-related materials—all over this country. I have written books about civil rights and Vietnam, but the sea of Hemingway documentary materials still seems deluging, no matter my gratitude that they exist. I have been in most of the Hemingway or Hemingway-related archives (and will name some of them as I go along here), but the archive where I have spent the most time in these last seven or so years of research and writing is Firestone Library at Princeton. The university is an hour and ten minutes from my front door; the car knows the way. I doubt I would have been able to complete this project at all were it not for the Carlos Baker papers, properly known as the Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway at the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts. The Baker-Hemingway archive, along with the university's Scribner's files (its proper name is the Archive of Charles Scribner's Sons), became my centripetal research force. Nearly all the letters I quote from or make reference to in this book I have sat and held and read in the chapel-like Dulles Reading Room at Firestone, in most cases a photocopy, but sometimes the original document.

The largest Hemingway archive in the world, of course, is at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston; its Hemingway Room is banked by windows looking out onto wind-whipped Dorchester Bay. I always felt welcome there.

There were other, more specialized kinds of museums and archives I traveled to—those having to do with boats and boatbuilding or big-game fishing—and some of them I will also name in their relevant places.

The third way I gathered material was from so-called secondary sources, which in many ways became primary. I've stood on the shoulders of a lot of giants (and some pygmies, too). I am referring to the authors of books, monographs, theses, dissertations, magazine articles, newspaper pieces, studies in scholarly journals. Once again, the amount of Hemingway literature in all its forms and guises felt swamping, and often I knew I had to get out of a library almost as soon as I got into one, no matter if I had just journeyed some distance.

There was also the Hemingway-related material held privately. To cite three über-sources: What would I have done had Arnold Samuelson's daughter, Dian Darby, in Austin, Texas, not been willing to share what she had of her father's life with a stranger who came knocking, just as the Maestro had once come knocking at Hemingway's door? (I have never been able to talk to Dian's brother, Eric Samuelson.) Same with Wes Wheeler: when he took me down to his chaotic basement in Stamford, Connecticut, I knew I'd hit documentary gold on the proud, defunct shipyard his father and grandfather and uncles had run for decades. And Walter? Yes, there was a sense in which he had all the Hemingway-related paper and miscellany in the world waiting inside 21439 Gaona Street in Woodland Hills, California. But the real thing Walter had waiting, it goes without saying, was his own life. Paper is only paper next to human beings. (I am happy to report Walter has recently given his entire collection of Hemingway materials, including his own writing, to Princeton—it's there for future Hemingway scholars.)

The two biographies I carried like talismans over the length of the project were those of Baker and Michael Reynolds; the full citations of their books appear in the selected bibliography. Reynolds's work, rigorous and novelistic (in the way Baker's is exhaustive and academically straitlaced), is in five volumes; it stretches over something like twenty-five years of scholarship, almost right up until his early death in 2000. I am indebted to his widow, Ann Eubanks Reynolds, also now deceased, who allowed me into her Durham, North Carolina, basement to open boxes and boxes of her husband's research. I found several key things connected to
Pilar
.

If Baker and Reynolds (pride of place always to Baker) are the gold standard, I'll pay tribute to four other biographers and biographies I regularly consulted, and roughly in this order: Bernice Kert's
The Hemingway Women;
Jeffrey Meyers's
Hemingway;
Kenneth S. Lynn's
Hemingway;
James R. Mellow's
Hemingway
. (Again, for full citations, see the Selected Bibliography.) I should also add Denis Brian's quirky
The True Gen
and Mary Hemingway's
How It Was
. The first is oral history, the second—well, I am not entirely sure what it is. Memoir, biography, inadvertent confession, score settler: all of that, and then some.

And as long as I'm making lists, and using the word “quirky,” the following books and articles and critical studies and popular essays rose up out of the great sea of Hemingwayana to speak in a particular way—call them my private Hemingway satchel. Baker and Reynolds are again on the list, namely Baker's
Hemingway: The Writer as Artist
and Reynolds's “Ernest Hemingway, 1899–1961, A Brief Biography,” which is what its title indicates: a thirty-five-page piece charting the arc of the life. (It appears in
A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway
.) The other works, in no particular order: “Hemingway: the Old Lion,” in Malcolm Cowley's
A Second Flowering;
“A Quarter-Century Later, the Myth Endures,” by Lance Morrow, in the August 25, 1986,
Time
magazine;
Coffee with Hemingway
, by Kirk Curnutt;
Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way
, by Nelson Algren; “Reading Hemingway Without Guilt,” by Frederick Busch, in the January 12, 1992,
New York Times Book Review; Letters from the Lost Generation
, edited (and wonderfully annotated) by Linda Patterson Miller; “Hemingway the Painter,” in Alfred Kazin's
An American Procession;
“Last Words,” by Joan Didion, in the November 9, 1998,
New Yorker; Classes on Ernest Hemingway
, by Matthew J. Bruccoli; “Braver Than We Thought,” by E. L. Doctorow, in the May 18, 1986,
New York Times Book Review; Ernest Hemingway and His World
, by Anthony Burgess; “Punching Papa,” in Norman Mailer's
Cannibals and Christians;
“Pressure Under Grace,” by Frederick C. Crews, in the August 13, 1987,
New York Review of Books;
“For Ernest Hemingway,” in Reynolds Price's
A Common Room
. These are the ones I always came back to, when I wasn't coming back to the writing of the man himself. (Again, see bibliography.)