Hemingway's Boat (9 page)

He'd dreamed of having his own seagoing boat for about as long as he'd been an ocean fisherman and had fished from other people's boats—which is to say for about six years. Hemingway first saw Key West in the first week of April 1928, and in a sense this is a way of demarcating the beginning of his serious saltwater life, which eventually superseded all other kinds of fishing he'd ever done or would do again. From boyhood on, he'd been a passionate fisherman, and from infancy on—literally—he'd been around steamers and launches and rowboats and other small craft plying the summer waters of Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. When he was eleven, his mother had taken him on a nearly monthlong trip by rail and steamer to Cape Cod and Nantucket Island, where he experienced the ocean for the first time and where he fished for sea bass and mackerel. But up until the Key West years, roughly 1928 to 1939, his fishing obsessions had been primarily of a freshwater and landlocked kind. Wild trout taken in waded streams on delicate equipment, using worms or hand-tied flies—these had seized Hemingway's angling imagination until his late twenties. Even after he owned
Pilar,
he still liked going for trout, in the big mountain streams of the West, but more and more that kind of fishing and those kinds of fish, no matter their wildness and fragile beauty, became too small for his imagination. He needed expanses of water where you couldn't see the other side. He needed fish whose size was theoretically illimitable and which could be triumphed over and brought into shore and strung upside down for documenting with cameras. He needed an environment far less sheltered than a trout stream could afford, an environment where there was implicit danger. As for boats themselves: when you look through Hemingway's letters in the half-dozen years before he got
Pilar,
it's instructive to see how often the noun “boat” comes up. Boats and fishing and salt water, not to say other kinds of fluids: it's as if these overlapping dreams and preoccupations and pastimes frame Hemingway's correspondence in his early Key West years, the more so when he is in some kind of pain and seeks escape
.

For instance, there's the letter—profane, funny, bigoted, homophobic, anxious, watery—he wrote to Thornton Wilder in late May 1929, roughly two months after his mother had mailed the suicide weapon, roughly
five years before he boated his first broadbill aboard
Pilar.
Hemingway had lately arrived in Paris with his wife and children and one sister. The first serial installment of
A Farewell to Arms
had appeared in
Scribner's Magazine.
Wilder had written to say how much he liked it. Hemingway was obsessively reworking the ending of the novel—which would come out in the fall—and he was also reading page proofs for the next magazine excerpt. Wilder, two years older, was the bigger literary name. Like Hemingway with the publication of
The Sun Also Rises
in 1926, he'd become a suddenly famous man with the publication, in 1927, of his second novel
, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(for which he won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes). He was an unlikely celebrity—reserved, schoolteacherish. As a closeted homosexual, he was also an unlikely Hemingway friend
.

Hemingway typed the letter and added in things by hand
.

He wouldn't have shoved off, even if he'd been able to acquire
Pilar
on the spot, because the bite of fame had already chomped down too hard
.

Docks of Bimini, 1935

IF YOU MADE YOUR WAY
now to the hemmed-in wedge of metropolitan New York still referred to as the foot of Cropsey Avenue, you wouldn't find a trace, not a wooden shaving, of Wheeler Shipyard, Inc. So much craftsmanship in oak and pine and fir and cypress and cedar and mahogany—gone from this ground. So much timber that once got bent on this ground, lovingly curved and steamed and hammered and milled and sawed and planed and joined and otherwise coaxed toward improbable shapes and watertight angles on these premises—vanished. Where has it all gone? Oh, say to firewood, collectors of vintage boats, a museum or two, buzzards, a hillside in Cuba, the sludgy bottoms of coastal waterways, the photo albums of Wheeler descendants, the posthumous pages of
Islands in the Stream
, which, true enough, may be one of Ernest Hemingway's lesser novels but is nonetheless incredibly rich for any student of
Pilar
. “The mate shrugged his shoulders and bent down to the second anchor and Thomas Hudson eased her ahead against the tide, watching the grass from the banks riding by in the current. He came astern until his second
anchor was well dug in. The boat lay with her bow into the wind and the tide running past her. There was much wind even in this lee and he knew that when the tide changed she would swing broadside to the swell.”

There's a Pathmark Super Center at Cropsey's foot now. It shares a pocked parking lot with a diner. (I ventured in, and my server said, in response to my question, “Sorry, darlin', never heard of a boat business around here, and I've been a waitress in crappy joints in this neighborhood for a long time.”) Coney Island Creek, where they used to put in the new boats, for their virgin launches, is still here, but these days the creek is an imperceptibly moving slit of diseased-looking water that hardly seems big enough to hold a flotilla of toy boats. But even in Wheeler's boatbuilding days, Coney Island Creek—which flows into Gravesend Bay, which in turn flows out into the Atlantic—was known to be a pretty narrow and impure thing, not something you would have chosen to sit beside for a Sunday picnic with your sweetheart. One of the reasons they stopped making boats at this site after World War II (there were lots of reasons, not least economic) was because there was too much mud in the launching water.

In the middle of the Depression, New Yorkers thronged to the national boat show every January at Grand Central Palace. They wished to gape at the new models: cruisers, streamliners, racers, V-bottoms, hard-chines, runabouts, sedans, cigarette boats, sea skiffs, salons, sportfishermen, twin-cabins, bridge-cabins, trawlers, luxury yachts.

It seems like such a historical disconnect. How did the companies making these luxuries manage to stay in business? The short answer is that many didn't. The more complex answer is that even in terrified times, life goes on, weekend leisure goes on. No question that pickings were far slimmer for Depression boat manufacturers than in the previous decade—or than they would be, in the years following the war, when the idea of a modest-priced boat sitting on a trailer in a suburban garage seemed part of the middle-class dream and bargain. (This was part of Chris-Craft's marketing genius and strategy in the 1950s.) But even, or especially, in the Depression, there were still boat dreamers who wanted to be out on water, beyond sight of shore and its anxieties, and some of them even had the means to negotiate that dream.

Dream. You could be in rags and still dream. In the Sunday paper, you'd see a picture of a beautiful girl, her hands gripping an enormous steering wheel, her hair streaming back, her head tilted toward the wind in what
looked like sexual pleasure. She was churning through open water in a nineteen-foot runabout. Where was this—Lake George? Northern Wisconsin? That part didn't matter; it was the feeling that you got from looking at the girl making whitecaps in the boat that she was piloting alone. Her racer, with its long inlaid snout, had a windshield that looked like something on a British convertible sports car. There was a flag whipping at the stern. The leather seat that the girl sat on looked as plush as a banquette at a Hollywood restaurant. You saw this photograph in the depths of winter, with its goofy caption (“All Hands on Deck”), and all you wished was to pull on your ratty old overcoat and woolen hat with the earflaps and go out the door to catch the first subway or bus or streetcar you could find to the Palace. Maybe you barely had carfare and gate admission. Maybe you'd left the snarling missus and the bawling kids behind. But there was that picture in your brain of the girl in the nineteen-foot runabout. (I am describing an actual newspaper photograph published in
The New York Times
in the Depression. It's in the Chris-Craft collection at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia.)

Some of the staying-in-business had to have been accomplished with smoke and mirrors. The Gar Wood firm in Marysville, Michigan, liked to promote itself in advertisements as “The Greatest Name in Motor Boating.” According to C. Philip Moore's
Yachts in a Hurry
, Gar Wood's boats “were considered the Buicks of Jazz Age mahogany runabouts, with Chris-Craft products being the Chevrolets.” In the summer of 1929, a couple of months before the stock market crashed, Gar Wood employed something like 150 master carpenters. By 1933, the company was down to three employees—but you wouldn't have known that from looking at its ads in the boating journals. Gar Wood's major biographer is a cultural and boating historian named Anthony Mollica Jr. For both Moore and Mollica, the study of boats, not just in the Depression, is a kind of social lens on America itself. “I had no idea when I started out my research that they had shrunk like that,” Mollica told me. “It's really what happened to a lot of those venerable companies.… You see, when a boat business goes bad, when it dies, the owners just walk off. It's the failure of it all. I think it's even more true for boat companies than for other companies.”

One Wheeler offspring I tracked down, in his upper seventies now, never wanted anything else for himself but a career in boats and marine engineering. He got it, too. His name is Wesley D. Wheeler, and he is the son of Wesley L. Wheeler, and is the grandson of company founder Howard E. Wheeler. He was born the year before Ernest and Pauline Hemingway
came to his grandpop's boatyard. His own dad, who was close in age to Hemingway, was, for many years, the firm's chief naval architect—so he's the man who would have designed
Pilar
and so many other Wheeler pleasure craft. “You could ask anybody, Wheelers were known as the Cadillac of the industry,” Wes Wheeler told me, with understandable pride if not razor accuracy. “The World's Finest Yacht Construction” was the corporate slogan Wheeler used to run on its catalogs in the fifties. When I asked Anthony Mollica (along with some other boating historians) what he thought a Wheeler was closest to in automobile paradigms, he said without hesitation: “A Wheeler is a Packard. A prewar Packard. Big and strong and comfortable and sturdy. Beamy. Sea-kindly. Very well thought out. Extremely well made. Some sly, deceptive speed. Its own form of beauty. In other words, not a tug, but not a racing boat, either. It's got eye appeal, but of a subtler kind. The price structure would be right, too.”