Hemingway's Boat (4 page)

No one knows for sure, but these seem to be the last real sentences Ernest Hemingway set down on paper. Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.

In March 1929
,
Ernest Hemingway's mother, Grace Hall-Hemingway, a boat of a woman whose guts he famously hated, or claimed to, sent him a crate by Railway Express. The twenty-nine-year-old son, working on revisions of the World War I doomed-love story that would make him a literary figure on the world stage by the age of thirty, received the crate in Key West. For a week or so, it sat unopened in the corner. “Ernest, open the box,” friends and family members said. Finally, Pauline Hemingway pried it open with a claw hammer. In the crate were some of Grace's recent mediocre paintings (she was hoping her writer-son might place them for her on his upcoming trip to Paris); a large chocolate cake that had gone runny and leaky through the crate's canvas packing; and the .32-caliber Smith & Wesson “Long John” Civil War revolver with which Hemingway's father, Dr. Clarence E. Hemingway, had killed himself several months earlier, on a weekday morning, shortly before Christmas, in an upstairs bedroom of the family home in Oak Park, Illinois. The gun had been impounded by the Cook County police department, but Grace had gotten it back. At his father's funeral, Hemingway had asked his mother for the gun. At first Grace seems to have resisted the idea. But then, a few months afterward, her son had written her a letter with some implied threats about maybe one day writing a novel concerning various members of his family now that his father, whom he had admired up until the suicide, was gone. The crate arrived in Florida not long afterward. Grace followed up with a letter saying that she would like the pistol back eventually. “I will take care of it for you,” she said, which could be read as a loaded statement
.

On page 337 of a later and even greater-selling novel, also about war
, For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Robert Jordan has taken the Civil War pistol with which his father killed himself and has leaned out over a rock in Wyoming and dropped it into a deep, high-mountain lake, where he “saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in that clear water, and then it was out of sight.” Did Hemingway do that? He said he did, but that doesn't particularly mean anything. He liked to say that what makes literature is “inventing truly from honestly acquired knowledge, so that what you make up is truer than what you might
remember.” All the meanings of this story aren't clear. “I know why you did that with the old gun, Bob,” a character in the novel says. “Well, then we don't have to talk about it,” Jordan replies. As essayist Lance Morrow of Time once wrote, the fable of the gun and leaky cake and forgettable paintings is “minutely savage in its details and haunting in its outcome: perfect Hemingway. And of course, there is the water.”

Ernest and Pauline Hemingway at the rail of the SS
Paris
, New York City

APRIL 3, 1934
. The temperature in Manhattan got into the high sixties. G-men shot an accomplice of Dillinger's in Minnesota; the Nazis were running guns to the Moors; Seminoles were reviving a tribal dance in honor of alligators in Florida; Lou Gehrig had two homers in an exhibition game in Atlanta. And roughly the bottom third of America was out of work.

According to “Steamship Movements in New York,” a column that runs daily in the business section of the
Evening Journal
, nine liners are to dock today. The SS
Paris
, 34,500 tons, is just sliding in after a seven-day Atlantic crossing, from Le Havre via Plymouth, at Pier 57 on the West Side of New York City.

“Expected to dock: 5:00 P.M.,” reports the newspaper. And she does.

If this were a Movietone News item about Hemingway the big-game
hunter, arriving home after eight months abroad, and you were in a darkened movie palace of the thirties awaiting the feature, you'd see ropes being thrown off, gangplanks being lowered, steamer trunks being unloaded, and passengers starting gaily to stream off. You'd see the New York press boys with their rumpled suits and stained ties and skinny notebooks and Speed Graphic cameras clawing for position. The blocky white lettering superimposed on the flickering images would announce: “Back from Lion Hunt in East Africa!” They'd bring up the sound track—something stirring, to suggest the march of time. And then would come the voice-over—wouldn't it be Ed Herlihy's?—with its electric charge: “Famed author Mr. Ernest Hemingway, just back on the French liner
Paris
with Mrs. Hemingway from conquering the lion and the rhino and the wildebeest and the greater kudu, says that death in the afternoon is far less engrossing in a Spanish bull ring than on the African veldt.”

The press boys clotted at the bottom of the gangplank badly want Hemingway, and they want Katharine Hepburn (she is on the boat, too, and makes wonderful copy, when she deigns to speak), but apparently none of them knows (for none of their papers will have it tomorrow) that an even bigger trophy has just berthed at Pier 57: Marlene Dietrich. She's going to give them the nifty slip. Publicity? Who needs it? Maybe Dietrich's hiding out in her stateroom. She might have registered under a different name—glamorous figures routinely do this. In fact, Hepburn is on the manifest as “Miss Katherine Ludlow.” (Her husband is Ludlow Ogden Smith.)
She
has decided not to hide from the pack.

The famous and close and long-lasting Dietrich-Hemingway friendship dates from this Atlantic crossing. For the rest of his life, Hemingway mostly called her the Kraut, when he wasn't addressing her as “daughter,” the latter being how he liked to address women younger than himself, famous or otherwise, whom he'd not—apparently—taken to bed. Dietrich was two and a half years younger. There is a well-traveled story about how she was stepping into the ship's dining room to join a dinner party. Every open-jawed man at the table rose to give her his chair, but just as she started to sit down, the international flame with the statuesque body and lusty voice counted the mouths and saw that there were twelve diners. “Oh. I'm the thirteenth. You will excuse me if I don't join you. I'm superstitious about thirteen at dinner,” she said, starting to withdraw. But just then Hemingway blocked her way. “Excuse me,” he said. “I don't mean to intrude. But I'd be glad to be the fourteenth.”

Afterward, they supposedly strolled the decks arm in arm and told each other—maybe like Bogart and Claude Rains in
Casablanca
, except that the movie hadn't been made yet—that this was going to be the start of a beautiful friendship. At least this is the legend, and Dietrich herself greatly helped it along in 1955 in a first-person cover story in the Sunday supplement of the
New York Herald Tribune
. The piece was titled “The Most Fascinating Man I Know.” She talked of how she and Hemingway had depended on each other through the years, how she'd protected his deeply personal letters to her in a strongbox. Actually, Dietrich may not have even written the piece—according to Mary Hemingway, it was ghosted by journalist and scriptwriter A. E. Hotchner, one of Hemingway's last confidants, or toadies, depending on your point of view, for the two-decades-younger Hotch, as Hemingway often called him, has been described as both in the vast, roily, envy-ridden sea of Hemingway studies. In any case, among smaller errors, Dietrich or her ghost got the name of the boat wrong; she said it was the other (even grander) star of the French line, the
Île de France
.

But this is a newsreel of the imagination. Hemingway's poised at the
Paris
's rail with his spouse. He's intent on purchasing a boat, but right now he's allowing photographs to be made, and he's popping quotes. Freeze the frame. Stop time in a box.

Pauline Hemingway is in a zebra-striped suit and an almost dowdy hat, curled at the brim, tilting right to left. Her right shoulder touches her husband's left. She is so small beside him. Her hair is cropped like a boy's. She has a boyish physique and is known for her disinclination to use makeup. (It's true she likes to keep her fingernails and toenails manicured for her husband, often lacquering them in light pink.) Her body is turned a few degrees away from the rail, as if she might decide to walk off any second now. She's probably not getting a word in edgewise. She isn't a beautiful woman, but she isn't unattractive, either. She is four years and a day older than her husband, who is leaning forward, right into the middle of things, as if right into the middle of reporters' notebooks. Both his arms are on the rail, and his right hand is holding the brim of a fedora that has a wide, dark band. He's wearing a suit and tie and there's a sliver of handkerchief visible at the top of his vest pocket. No matter his dress, he's unmistakably a man of the outdoors, with the body of an athlete. His hair looks Brylcreemed
and newly cut, although a strand or two at the back of his head are out of place. Around his seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck, inside his dress shirt, is a scapular: he's a convert to Catholicism, which is his wife's devoutly practiced faith. (She's a “cradle Catholic,” while his on-again, off-again devotions are reputed to have arisen out of the shocks of World War I.) He's known to wear his scapular unfailingly in these years. It's got an image of Christ on it, suspended from a brown, shoestring-like loop. At home, in Key West, friends have observed him with the scapular, and how he'll make the sign of the cross before he goes in swimming.

That smile: hobnailed and hard-boiled all the way, just this side of aggressive. The more you study the photograph, however, the more you see that both Hemingways are holding a pose.

This picture, or versions of it, is going to get picked up and run in many hinterland places, including in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where winter still has the earth in her grip, and where a young, self-styled, Hemingway-like character will see the photograph and tear it out of the
Pioneer Press
and fold it into his pocket and pack his knapsack and hop a freight to Florida, in hopes of meeting his writing idol. The young man's name is Arnold Morse Samuelson, and he is in for the ride of his life. But that's running out ahead.

Not every city editor in New York—there are something like nine dailies in the city in 1934—has sent a reporter to the docks today to shag quotes and to compose deathless passages on deadline about the return of the native. (In the old days of the news business, these pieces were often known as “brights.”
Go get me a Hemingway bright
, some pale, overweight editor at the
Times
surely growled at a reporter on the city desk.) And what is the “fascinating man” saying to the press boys? He's telling them how he gives first honors to the leopards, “because they strike the fastest.” But the lion is such a noble beast, too, he says. “He is not afraid or stupid. He does not want to fight, but sometimes man makes him, and then it is up to the man to shoot his way out of what he has got himself into.” With the lion and the leopard, “you're either quick or you're dead. I saw a lion do one hundred yards in three seconds flat, which may give you an idea.” The hunter saw ninety-six lions altogether and at one point he photographed twenty-nine lionesses “preening themselves like a group of finishing school girls.” He made a moral bargain with himself to bring down only animals that were utter strangers to him; the lions that he'd stalked with his camera he could somehow not force himself to shoot. But now he intends to return to his home in Key West and resume his
vocation. His season of intense writing, he hints, may or may not concern Africa.

The
World-Telegram
will have a seven-grapher tomorrow, page 11 (“Jungle Praised by Hemingway”). The lead:

The
Herald Tribune
's subhead on its Hemingway bright (eleven paragraphs, page 4): “Author, Back from African Hunt, Says He Never Shot Beasts Trailed for Camera.” The lead: “Ernest Hemingway, enthusiastic over the three months he had passed in East Africa stalking big game with rifle and camera, returned yesterday on the French liner Paris with Mrs. Hemingway, who shared his adventures. Mr. Hemingway was in such high spirits that he granted an interview, something unusual for him.”