Hemingway's Boat (17 page)
Authors: Paul Hendrickson
A few days ago, on the roof of a middle boxcar, his rags turning sooty with coal smoke, but feeling kingly and free as air, he'd looked down over the side and saw the sun lighting the clear shallows of the ocean floor. Schools of fish were sunning themselves. He'd watched their dark shadows. He'd wondered if they were sharks. He was on his rackety perch forty feet above the Atlantic and the Gulf, and the trainmen weren't after him with their headache sticks. After eighty miles or so, as he would later write in his memoir, “I could see a patch of land floating on the water up ahead. It looked bigger than the other keys and there were buildings on it, far off but coming closer.” He'd made it to Hemingway's town.
How does he know Hemingway's even in town? He doesn't. What he's going on is a photograph from a newspaper along with the accompanying story that quoted the subject of the piece as saying he was on his way home to Florida to start a season of intensive writing. It's enough.
There's one more fact, a pretty sad one, you need to know about Arnold Morse Samuelson's life just now. On October 16, 1931, Samuelson's older sisterâshe was twenty-four and her name was Hedvig, though everybody called her Sammyâwas murdered, along with another woman, in her lounging pajamas in a female love triangle gone wrong. It happened in Arizona. Sammy was shot in the head at close range, and her hacked-apart body was stuffed into a trunk and a suitcase and shipped to Los Angeles.
The little brother, in his last year of college, was working for his keep in a Twin Cities fire department barn, and he was also moonlighting for the
Tribune
. He was in a corner of the newsroom, hunched over a story, when the first late-night dispatches began to come in. “News Wires Tell Student Reporter His Sister's Slain” was a headline the next day, followed by this subhead: “You'll Want Pictures, I Suppose, He Says to City Editor As He Stifles Grief.” From its first moment, the tabloids and even America's mainstream press couldn't get enough of the story.
Minot was the closest North Dakota city to the Samuelson farm. The day after the bodies were found, the
Minot Daily News
sent a reporter out
to White Earth to try to speak to Sammy Samuelson's parents. The reporter's paper had already published its first story, with “Mutilated Bodies” in the headline. The reporter knew that pieces of Sammy had been put into one of the trunks and other pieces of her into the suitcaseâbut he couldn't bring himself to say that to seventy-one-year-old Anders Samuelson and fifty-nine-year-old Marie Samuelson. It was the family pastor, from the next town over, who'd delivered the news to the parents that their daughter was dead, but he, too, couldn't say the worst: “A representative of the News, calling at the Samuelson home in company with the Stanley minister, was pressed for further details, but the parents still are unaware that their daughter's body had been dismembered and mutilated by the slayer.”
The person eventually convicted of this double homicide was a soft-spoken, five-foot-two, blue-eyed, one-hundred-pound woman named Winnie Ruth Judd. All around the slaying have swirled unproven tales of adultery, abortion rings, narcotics, lesbianism.
If you understood your vocation as that of a serious writer, and if one of the hacked-apart bodies in a foul-smelling metal trunk and leaky suitcase that got opened and peered into on a train platform in LA by railway dicks holding handkerchiefs to their noses, if this corpse turned out to be your own sibling, wouldn't you have to face it in a piece of writing, fiction or otherwise, if not now, someday?
On October 16, 1931, Ernest Hemingway and his much-pregnant wife were newly arrived in Kansas City by train, where they planned to wait out the birth of their second son. (Gregory Hancock Hemingway was born, by cesarean, on November 12, 1931.) Fourteen Octobers before, in 1917, an unknown and impecunious Ernest Hemingway, newly graduated from Oak Park High, had come to this city and signed on as a reporting cub at
The Kansas City Star
. He'd worked at the paper for seven months, a crucial apprenticeship to the writer he'd become. His old paper, which Hemingway would almost certainly have been reading as Pauline's time neared, put the murder on page 1 on October 20. The following day, the
Star
devoted four columns to it on page 3.
Thoughts not only of birth but death as well would have been much on Hemingway's mind, for the thirty-two-year-old author was just then working on the final chapters of his documentary-like bullfight book,
Death in the Afternoon
. There were two chapters left to write, plus a glossary and some back matter, but before going ahead, he wanted to tighten what he'd already written. Near the end of chapter 18 in the finished work, Hemingway writes of making the mistake of telling his three-year-old son
Patrick about the gory death of a small bullfighter that he'd recently witnessed in the ring.
“I don't like it that he's dead,” the boy said.
The next day he said, “I can't stop thinking about that man who was killed because he was so small.”
“Don't think about it,” I said, wishing for the thousandth time in my life that I could wipe out words that I'd said. “It's silly to think about that.”
“I don't try to think about it, but I wish you hadn't told me because every time I shut my eyes I see it.”
“Think about Pinky,” I said. Pinky is a horse in Wyoming.
In chapter 19, which Hemingway worked on while awaiting his son's delivery, and while Winnie Ruth Judd was helping to sell newspapers in America, the word “kill” or “killed” or “killing” occurs seven times in the first three sentences.
Arnold Samuelson was just one of maybe five hundred people, famous and otherwise, who stepped down onto Hemingway's boat in the twenty-seven years he owned her. In very many of those first photographs aboard
Pilar
, he appears so uncomplicated and carefree. Photographs lie, or often do. Samuelson couldn't really have been those thingsâor, better said, he had to have been so many other things in addition. There must have been deep wells of grief and melancholia inside him, not unlike the nearly lifelong melancholy stuffed down inside the man into whose employ he'd lucked himself. At nineteen, in Minnesota, on a late night in October, Hemingway's eventual apprentice had to have suffered an acute shock to his central nervous system. Anyone who knows anything about the life of Ernest Hemingway would know of the even greater shock, to both his body and spirit, that he suffered, on July 8, 1918 (it was thirteen days before his nineteenth birthday; he'd quit the
Star
a few months previous), shortly past midnight, at the Piave front, in a forward listening post near a village called Fossalta, while passing out tobacco and chocolate bars and other canteen supplies to Italian troops under the auspices of the American Red Cross. It was an Austrian trench mortar shell, and when the shrapnel from the canister exploded into his legs and scrotum, it was as if he was wearing rubber boots filling with warm water.
The screened double doorway at 907 Whitehead has just filled with Ernest Hemingway's bulk. From
With Hemingway:
[H]e came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinting with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn't recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit. He had a heavy jaw and a full black mustache, and his dark eyes, which were almost closed, looked me over the way a boxer measures his opponent for the knockout punch.
It was obvious he needed no bouncer to keep tramps off his property. He could handle that job himself.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I bummed down from Minneapolis to see you,” I said, very ill at ease.
“What about?”
“I just want to visit.”
You can almost guess what happens next. Far from getting clocked, the nobody seems to have struck some kind of unwitting and almost instant chord. But he's busy now, Hemingway saysâcould you come around tomorrow about one thirty? The door-knocker starts to step backward.
“Wait. I'll drive you downtown.”
Oh, he can walk.
“Â âI was going down for the mail anyway,'Â ” he said, falling into step beside me. “Â âWait a minute. I forgot my keys.'Â ”
In the Model A Ford roadster (it's bright yellow, with oaken running boards), there is already talk about writing, advice about writing. Even advice about life. The man at the wheel keeps peppering the nobody with questions. Where would Samuelson like to be let off? How's he fixed for dough?
We shook hands and I watched him drive off to the post office. He left me with that damned marvelous feeling you can have only once in a lifetime if you are a young man who wants to become a writer and you have just met the man you admire as the greatest writer alive and you know instinctively he is already your friend.
The next day. E.H. is in bedroom slippers and khaki pants, drinking whiskey and going through
The New York Times
. He's leading the nobody
to a shady spot on the north porch. The hobo takes a seat in a padded wicker chair. He watches the peacocks pluming their tails out by the fence, sticking their heads through the bars, trying to get out. Again, Hemingway offers fatherly-cum-brotherly writing counsel.
“The most important thing I've learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don't wait till you've written yourself out. When you're still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what's going to happen next, that's the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don't think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.”
They go up to the studio. It's got a tile floor and shuttered windows and its own bathroom and shelves of books. Hemingway takes a seat at a big antique flat-topped desk in the middle of the room. He's writing on a sheet of paper.
“It's hard for me to tell, but you seem to be serious,” E.H. said at last. “Seriousness is one thing you've got to have. Big-time writing is the most serious business there is, and imaginative writing is the peak of the art. Another thing you've got to have is talent. Some people never can write fiction. What would you do if you found out you couldn't write fiction?”
“I don't know. How can a man know if he's got talent?”
“You can't. Sometimes you can go on writing for years before it shows. If a man's got it in him, it will come out sometime.”
The sheet Hemingway has been writing on contains a personal reading listâthe essential books any serious fiction writer must read, works by Joyce, Flaubert, Stephen Crane, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Henry James. Hemingway hands it over. The bottom of it is signed “Ernest Hemingway.” From a shelf Hemingway pulls down a collection of Crane's stories and a personal copy of
A Farewell to Arms
. He hands them over, but says he'd like them back, especially
Farewell
, since it's his last copy of that particular edition.
What explains the way Hemingway took to himâwas it some vision of his own earlier, Nick Adams, alter-ego, midwestern self? Perhaps. More likely, it was the seriousness that won the hobo the day, without his quite
knowing it. Hemingway suggested as much a year later, in
Esquire
, in “Monologue to the Maestro,” which is a piece far less about Samuelson than it is a treatise on the craft of writing, with Samuelson employed as the organizing principle and gently mocked storytelling foil. Hemingway never identifies Samuelson by his real name, but “Monologue to the Maestro,” published in October 1935, about eight months after he'd departed
Pilar
and Hemingway's company, assured the luck-struck boy of his wee place in American literary history.
Hemingway tells the reader of how he'd been “both flattered and appalled” at the prospect of someone having come all the way from Minnesota to ask “a few questions about writing.” He writes of how he gave Samuelson his nickname and his dollar-a-day job. He pokes fun at his apprentice's slow-footedness and general clumsiness, calling him a “calamity” at sea. He speaks of his “incurable tendency toward sea-sickness and a peasant reluctance to take orders.” But Hemingway also says:
He was a tall, very serious young man.⦠It seemed that all his life he had wanted to be a writer.⦠He wanted to be a writer and he had good stories to write. He told them very badly but you could see that there was something there if he could get it out. He was so entirely serious about writing that it seemed that seriousness would overcome all obstacles.⦠I thought, perhaps, that this was modesty until he showed me a piece he had published in one of the Minneapolis papers. It was abominably written. Still, I thought, many other people write badly at the start and this boy is so extremely serious that he must have something; real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
The day after Hemingway loans him a personal copy of
A Farewell to Arms
, the tramp is at the door again. His intention is to drop off the books (he has read them, or at least read
in
them, overnight) and to thank Hemingway and then to hop a freight northâhe cannot possibly expect any more largesse. Hemingway is down getting the mail and the papers on Duval Street. Pauline asks him to wait. Shortly, Hemingway appears.
“Â âI've got a boat being shipped from New York. I'll have to go up to Miami Tuesday and run her down and then I'll have to have someone on board. There wouldn't be much work.'Â ” Would Samuelson like the job?
