Hemingway's Boat (7 page)

About a quarter of the way into the story, two rhinos are taken. The narrator gets one. Charles Thompson—who's known as Karl in the story—gets one.

On the last day of the hunt, Hemingway kills two huge kudu bulls. The horns are magnificent. He can't wait to get back to camp that evening to show his trophies. “Karl” (Charles Thompson had an older Key West brother whose name was Karl) has just gotten a greater kudu, too. He comes back into camp from a different stalking area.

Two pages later: “But I was bitter and I was bitter all night long. In the morning, though, it was gone.” Yes, by first light, the bile has passed off. “I had accepted the big one now and was happy to see him and that Karl had him. When you put them side by side they looked all right. They really did. They all were big.”

I don't know whether Hemingway the artist understood precisely what he was doing in portraying his unsportsmanlike spirit so transparently—or if he somehow didn't get what many of his readers and reviewers saw so quickly.
Green Hills
—a work greatly undervalued by many Hemingway scholars; critically dismissed in its own day by such major critics as Edmund Wilson—will come up more fully in a later chapter of this narrative, at the chronological point when the author was working on the book; and when, still raging over Gertrude Stein's attacks on him, Hemingway
would write, without naming his antagonist, nor needing to, and in another way just describing himself: “ ‘It's a damned shame, though, with all that talent gone to malice and nonsense and self-praise.' ”

And so the safari had ended. Had the anger of recent months—toward hostile critics, former friends, a good-natured hunting partner who'd bettered him—passed? Yes and no. He did seem happy and relaxed. The hunting party had sailed back up to France, via some deep-sea fishing in the Indian Ocean. Charles Thompson's wife, Lorine, who'd come over on a liner from New York, had met them midway. She had showed Pauline pictures of the two young Hemingway sons bearing glum expressions. (Pauline kept a diary of her time on safari. There's no mention in it of missing her children.) In Paris, the Thompsons and Hemingways had checked in again at the Hotel Dinard, on the Left Bank, where the shooting party had stayed on the outward leg of the trip. But the Thompsons left for home quickly. The Hemingways stayed on for nine days. They had gone to dinner one night with James Joyce and his wife; on another day Hemingway had met the American novelist Katherine Anne Porter at the legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company. On still another he'd visited Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare's proprietor. She showed him an essay about him by the critic Wyndham Lewis. It was titled “The Dumb Ox” and took him apart for his anti-intellectualism. Hemingway had become so enraged that he smashed a vase of tulips on Beach's table. All this has been told before, in other books about Hemingway.

But what hasn't been told quite as fully was how unsuspectingly decent and generous Hemingway was, in those days before sailing homeward, to a young journalist and novelist named Edgar “Ned” Calmer. The story is key to Hemingway's character, to the notion of when it was good with Papa—the writing, the fishing, the drinking, the eating, the talking, the palling around—few things on earth seemed better.

Ned Calmer was a reporter for the
Paris Herald
. He'd first come to Europe on the payroll of the
Chicago Tribune
. He and Hemingway met during the several weeks that Hemingway had spent in Paris before the safari. They'd been introduced by another Paris newsman and friend of Hemingway's, Guy Hickok of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
. Because Hemingway had been a Paris newspaperman himself, he was partial to those who toiled for lousy wages in exotic places and were trying at the same time to be more serious about their craft. But he was especially partial to Calmer,
because the journalist had a chronically ill wife and an infant daughter to support. On the side, he'd been trying to write fiction. “From the beginning,” Calmer remembered years later, “it was obvious in many ways that Ernest was generous and kind, with time and loans of money and patience, to other writers, of whom I was one.” When they met, Calmer had just completed his first novel,
Beyond the Street
. Priscilla Calmer was in a sanitarium in Switzerland, being treated for lung disease. Hemingway wished to give her a book and had gone all over Paris until he finally found a copy of
Winner Take Nothing
, so that he might sign it.

After the safari, back in Paris, Hemingway called up Calmer to take him to lunch. He learned that Priscilla Calmer had been released from her Swiss sanitarium and was at home with her husband. He also discovered that their daughter, Alden, had not yet been baptized. As Calmer remembered years later: “Ernest … seemed genuinely concerned. The attitude was: this will never do! He came along to the church of St. Sulpice in Paris as sponsor at the ceremony.”

One day he took the Calmers to eat at Chez Weber in the rue Royale. Hemingway knew that
Beyond the Street
had just been published by Harcourt, Brace in New York. At lunch, Hemingway “slipped a cheque across the table to me,” Calmer recalled years later. The check was for $350. “It was the ship fare home for myself and my wife and little daughter—totally unsolicited.… Years later I was able to pay him back and he thereafter liked to refer to me as Honest Ned, remarking that few others he had helped had ever bothered.… After his death, the estate lawyer sent me one of my cheques made out to Ernest which he had never cashed.”

That day at Weber's restaurant, the astonished and grateful newspaperman had presented Hemingway with a signed copy of
Beyond the Street
. Hemingway read it coming home on the
Paris
. He had agreed to read and react to some of Calmer's shorter fiction. On May 28, 1934, back in America, he wrote to Calmer about his novel, apologizing for the delay: “I've been working like a what the hell should you call it.… I read it on the Paris—so did Pauline. We both liked it. That was not quite two months ago.… The faults of it were the faults everybody has in the first one but the virtues of it were not first novel virtues i e glamour, freshness etc. No, bo. The virtues were understanding, sympathy and a certain cleanliness of handling.” For the rest of his life, Calmer (who published a dozen or so novels and had a significant career in broadcasting for CBS Radio News) would remain grateful to Hemingway. The two renewed their friendship during World War II, when Calmer was reporting in war-blitzed London with Edward
R. Murrow and other CBS newsmen. If they were never intimate friends, they managed to stay loosely in touch. Calmer apparently never dined out on it. He came to know all four of Hemingway's wives, especially Martha Gellhorn. This was after her divorce from Hemingway, when she was living in Rome and he was working there as a correspondent. No bitter thing Marty Gellhorn could ever have said against her former husband—whom she liked to call Pig, and not only in response to his bathing habits—would have changed Calmer's estimation.

Priscilla Calmer died of emphysema in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1955. Calmer wrote Hemingway a note about her death. He didn't hear back. The next time they saw each other, Hemingway blurted an apology: “I never was any good at wakes.”

Ned Calmer died at age seventy-eight in 1986. He'd had three wives and two children. Several years ago, when I spoke at length to his son on the telephone about his father's relationship with Ernest Hemingway, Regan Calmer said: “I never heard a lot about it growing up—and I also never heard a bad word about it. Mostly, he kept it to himself.… I don't know, I guess it was just the fact that my father had such a high respect and even love for such a great writer like Hemingway who did him these unsolicited favors at a critical time. He could never forget it.”

In late April 1934, Ned Calmer wrote to Hemingway. He was in America with his family. He was promoting his first novel. “It was a great thing you did for me,” he said. “Hope you acquired that boat.”

There's a passage in
Green Hills of Africa:
“If you looked away from the forest and the mountain side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away, across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of Lake Manyara.” I've wondered: months before he composed this landscape-painting sentence, when he was actually staring at that blue shine of African lake, so far from the Gulf Stream, did Hemingway squint and see a thirty-eight-foot Wheeler skimming on it? Did
Pilar
already have her name? One pictures—I do, anyway—a hunter seated by a campfire in a canvas-back chair, a million stars out, wide-brimmed Stetson safari hat pushed back, bush trousers hiked up, sleeves of his sweat-soaked shirt rolled past his thick forearms. The fire gives his unshaven face a kind of orangy glow. His wife is sleeping under mosquito netting on a canvas cot in a tent a few feet away. He sips tin cups of whiskey and soda. Earlier, he'd dined on roast guinea hen. He's not bent on dominating man or animal. Somewhere in his mind is the greater kudu he might get to steal up on tomorrow at the salt lick. With his weak eyesight, the big-game hunter, who is even more of a big-game fisherman, is poring over fine print in a thumbed catalog for a twin-cabin cruiser, thirty-eight feet in length, offered by a manufacturer in Brooklyn. He's studying all the specs, calculating the various price arrangements. “If you are looking for a fine roomy cruiser with lots of comforts, and ability for long offshore cruising and fishing trips, we suggest that you look this boat over very carefully.” In the price column: “Afloat at the plant. For rail or steamer deliveries add $175 for cradle and cover.”

Pilar
and master, before her flying bridge was built, circa 1935

IT'S VERY LIKELY
that somewhere in Hemingway's dozen suitcases were catalogs and circulars and fold-over mailings from Wheeler Shipyard, Inc., whose listed address was “Foot of Cropsey Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y.” If Hemingway did have this clutch of boating literature with him, then it had traveled through Spain and France and Africa, through the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, through Babati and Kiunga and the Ngorongoro Crater.

A small, fold-over pamphlet had been mailed to him the previous summer from the Wheeler firm. It was postmarked July 14, 1933, which suggests Hemingway would have received it about three weeks before he left the States on his long journey, first to Europe, then to Africa. He may have had literature from other boat makers, too, since buying a motorized fishing cruiser had so long and lately preoccupied his thinking. (The brochure, with its still readable postmark, is among Hemingway's papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.) The founder of the company, Howard E. Wheeler, had Palmer-perfect
handwriting, pork-chop sideburns, wild eyebrows, a walrus mustache, and five grown sons working by his side in the family enterprise in Brooklyn. Howard had addressed the mail-out himself to “Mr. Ernest Hemingway, Box 406, Key West, Florida.” There was a one-and-a-half-cent stamp affixed to the document, which described in typical inflated advertising rhetoric the company's wares. It was a flyer for the 1933 model year, since catalogs for 1934 boats hadn't yet come off the presses.

The Wheeler firm designed and built cabin cruisers, sea skiffs, yachts, and motor sailers (a boat combining the features of both a motorboat and a sailboat). The company's signature model, known throughout the boating industry, was the Playmate, which came in many lengths and sleeping configurations and price arrangements—twin screw, single screw, diesel power, gasoline engine, sedan, twin cabin, stateroom cabin, enclosed bridge. For several years Hemingway had been studying such vessels in the cabin-cruiser style, and by the time he arrived back in America on the
Paris
, he seems to have known exactly the size of boat he wanted, and he wanted it from Wheeler.