Hemingway's Boat (51 page)

OPENING A DIFFERENT TRUNK
, not camphor scented:

On Thursday September 7, 1950—three months and one week before Walter Houk met Ernest Hemingway for the first time—Charles Scribner's Sons published
Across the River and into the Trees
, its most important author's first novel in a decade. The cover price was three dollars, and the first printing consisted of seventy-five thousand copies. If all his novels were autobiographical, this one was Hemingway's most autobiographical, more than any critic could know.

To say a lot was riding on the moment would be like saying that whenever
“the great DiMaggio” came up with the bases loaded and the score tied in the bottom of the ninth, it was a big moment.
^*
Everything
was riding on the moment, or at least it seems hard not to make that conclusion after you've read Hemingway's letters and tracked his day-to-day movements of this period. He was poised at a near-equidistant moment: a little less than ten years since his triumph with
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, a little more than ten years before his shotgun destruction.

In the previous decade, Hemingway had been divorced (from his second wife), married (to his third wife), divorced (from his third wife), married (to his fourth wife)—indeed, all of this had occurred in the first half of the 1940s. (He and Mary Welsh were married in Havana on March 14, 1946; on their wedding night, they got into a terrific row at the
finca
, causing her to pack her bags, only to relent the next morning.)

His stomach, like his face and fame, had grown round now—florid, you could say. (Despite the full belly, his waist was surprisingly slender.) He wasn't a tight end anymore, as he'd looked in certain photographs at certain moments in the early and mid-thirties; rather, an overweight fullback, with very tanned calf muscles, and with that old and still very visible pulpy welt on his forehead above his left eye (his right, as you look at him in photos), about the size of a Brazil nut, caused by that accident in Paris in 1928, when he'd come home from dinner with Pauline and had gone to bed and had risen at 2:00 a.m. and had stumbled into the loo and yanked at the cord for the opened skylight instead of the cord that controlled the flush box, thus pulling the entire faulty thing down on top of him, the glass shards breaking over him like crinkling cellophane or maybe like the ocean opening up when a huge fish comes to the surface. Anyway, nine stitches, sewn in by an intern at the American Hospital at Neuilly at three o'clock in the morning.

He drove a royal-blue Buick Roadmaster convertible with a red leather interior now—or rather a member of the household staff named Juan Pastor drove it for him. His coat size was a 48 now, although he still liked to try to fit into a 46. He was “half a hundred years plus one” now, as he liked saying on the eve of publication of his fourteenth book (depending on how you counted), which he professed to be his best yet, a three-cushion shot, slow poison, higher math, capable of breaking “my fucking heart” every time he let himself sit down and read it in page proof. “But I have read it 206 times to try and make it better and to cut out any mistakes or injustices and on the last reading I loved it very much and it broke my fucking heart for the 206th time,” he told a reviewer-interviewer for
Newsweek
two weeks before
Across the River
appeared.

He combed his hair straight back now, on both the sides and the top, not quite in the way of a Roman senator. His hairline had receded, but on top his hair was still fairly black and thick. (At the back of his head, where he wore it long, his hair tended to curl up in silvery ringlets.) He wore a mustache, as he'd worn one through the years, except that now its color was something like salt-and-pepper. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, as he'd long worn them, only now, funnily enough, at least judging from photographs, there always seemed to be a wad of paper stuck in their nosepiece. He wore a wristwatch with an expandable gold band now—sometimes well up his left arm.

Max Perkins was gone now—heart attack and pneumonia and overwork taking the good man down, at not quite sixty-three, three years before. The reserved and blue-blooded Charles Scribner III, who'd headed the firm since 1932, and who'd become, by default, his new Max, had cabled on the day it happened (June 17, 1947), and that evening Hemingway had wired back with a thirteen-word response. Eleven days later, he'd written to Scribner and said, “Dear Charlie: Don't worry about me kid.… The bad was for him to die. I hadn't figured on him dying.… One of my best and most loyal friends and wisest counsellors in life as well as in writing is dead.”

Many other literary friends as well as enemies were gone now, too. Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein. Scott's last letter to Hemingway, in November 1940, had thanked him for the inscribed copy of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. “I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this,” he'd said. He'd died two months to the day after Hemingway's book had come out, and by then sales were at 189,000 copies and the movie deal had closed for a big number.

Although at fifty-one he still projected much virility, Hemingway was not a well man now. In truth, he was in a deep holding action, and had been for four or five years, against ringing ears, migraines, hypertension, diabetes, kidney problems, depression, and paranoia—and all these ailments, and others, were not only aging him at what seemed a far faster rate than his chronological age, but each was prone to balloon up wildly and almost virally before subsiding again. It was as true of his high blood pressure—it could surge like that to 225 over 125—as of his bouts of paranoia. The insomnia was always simmering below his surface, like malaria, kept at bay by bottles of Seconal. When the insomnia was on him, everything seemed lost. “Shit on hope,” he'd said one night to his wife not long before the first finished copy of the book had come into his hands. “I'm just a desperate old man.” The next morning he and his wife had gone down the coast on
Pilar
, to the place he and Mary called Paraíso. The fishing in paradise was lousy.

To add to his history of strange illnesses and accidents: The year before, 1949, while at the back end of an extended sojourn in Europe, the corner of one eye began to feel funny. Was it a dust infection in a small scratch at the cornea? There was some belief he'd been accidentally hit by the end of an oar by a hired boatman while going into a duck blind in the marshes of greater Venice. Later he'd say the dust-mote infection had stemmed from riding in an open car over gravelly roads. Later still he'd blame fragments of wadding from his shotgun that had come powdering up into his eye—that was the explanation he favored. Whatever the cause, the results were spectacular: Both eyes swelled shut and his already meaty face puffed up like the Elephant Man's. His neck began to bulge. He broke out in a rash. Doctors diagnosed erysipelas, which is a contagious disease of the skin and subcutaneous tissue. They told him they were worried that the infection might spread to his brain. He entered a hospital at Padua and stayed for ten days. They slathered his face in ointments. He tried to tape one eye open so he could write some letters—he did, and it was as if the characters were standing up three inches high on the page. Along with penicillin, he took many sulfa drugs, and this made his kidneys nearly shut down. Several million units of penicillin got injected. (He'd later claim sixteen million.) Somehow, though, the old capacity for bouncing back had bounced back. The fever subsided, the neck and facial swellings went down, the rash disappeared. The erysipelas, streptococcus, and staphylococcus hadn't been fatal.

He'd been going so good at his writing when it happened, working
on what he'd imagined to be only a fairly concentrated short story about a Venetian duck hunt and an embittered infantry army colonel who's been busted down from brigadier general. But between his recovery and the journey homeward by sea to Cuba, the piece had grown longer and fuller in his mind—the old pattern. “I couldn't stop it,” he later said. For six months in Cuba, he had put aside his on-again, off-again work on the so-called trilogy of war novels that had been tormenting him through the postwar forties so that he could work in a headlong fury toward this new thing. In the end, the Venetian duck shoot became the framing device, a pair of bookends, for a love story about the demoted fifty-year-old Richard Cantwell, fatally ill with heart disease (he has survived four heart attacks when
Across the River
opens), and an eighteen-year-old Italian contessa named Renata. If Colonel Cantwell seemed almost a dead ringer on the fictional page for the man of the same age who'd been creating him, in the spring and summer and fall of 1949, then the countess seemed a dead ringer for the real-life Venetian teenager whom the author had met only a few months before his erysipelas and Padua hospital stay, and with whom he'd become foolishly, wildly, infatuated. Her name was Adriana Ivancich. In real life, as in the fiction, the author had met her about two and a half weeks before her nineteenth birthday. In real life, as with her counterpart in the modest-size novel just now showing its face to the world (and which those lice-crawling angleworms feeding in their New York literary bottle were going to treat as though it had Elephant Man disease), she had pale, almost olive skin, green eyes, a thin Roman nose, jet-black hair falling down over her fair shoulders.

And
Pilar
, that other narrow beauty and deepest material love?

She was more than sixteen years old now. His hard-worked fishing cruiser might be thought of as having entered her late middle age. Hemingway's love for her had only deepened. They'd come this far together. If
Pilar
wasn't a named presence in the new book, she was nonetheless there. No one would say
Across the River
is a story about boats and the sea—and yet the word “boat” appears nine times on its first page. Early in the novel, there's a passage when Colonel Cantwell arrives by water at Venice's Gritti Palace Hotel. “The motor boat came gallantly up beside the piling of the dock. Every move she makes, the Colonel thought, is a triumph of the gallantry of the aging machine. We do not have war horses now like old
Traveller.… We have the gallantry of worn-through rods that refuse to break; the cylinder head that does not blow though it has every right to, and the rest of it.” Isn't that really about
Pilar
rather than about some old Venetian service boat?

She'd undergone uncounted overhauls and several engine replacements now. She'd survived many squalls and tropical storms and full-blown hurricanes. She'd endured uncounted stays in dry dock for repaintings and rescrapings of her bottom. (In
How It Was
, Mary Hemingway wrote that
Pilar
's “care and feeding,” in the early 1950s, “reached to about three times the maintenance costs of the Finca.”) She had a different registry number lettered in black on a little wooden plate on both sides of her bow now. A high-tech swivel fighting chair had come to
Pilar
, bolted and centered aft at her stern. She had a new pair of Samson posts on either side of her stern. (These are strong square bitts to which lines can be tied for mooring or for towing a dingy.) She had a new pair of sockets in the corners on either side of the transom for holding fishing rods. She had a new searchlight with a blinker device for sending Morse code—it was up on the flying bridge. She also had a one-foot-long board up there next to the wheel, with two holes cut into it, to hold her master's tumblers of tequila while he steered through the swells.

Although she still possessed no ship-to-shore radio,
Pilar
now had a portable shortwave Zenith receiver usually balanced on a ledge in the cockpit near the stuttery phonograph. She also had a second-generation set of outriggers, just installed. They were sturdy and dainty and quite beautiful all at once—they looked a little like the varnished ribbings of an airplane wing, and they gave the old girl a little extra glamour as she glided out of the harbor toward the fishing grounds. When the riggers were in use, they slanted out to the sides, like gull wings.
^†

Pilar
's first mate now was Gregorio Fuentes.
Pilar
's original mate, Carlos Gutiérrez, had been gone since 1938, when Hemingway had replaced him with Gregorio. The received story about the aging Gutiérrez (whose name has seemed to slip into the folds of Hemingway history) is that Jane Mason (Hemingway's reputed lover from the early and mid-thirties) had
been furious over Hemingway's love affair with Martha Gellhorn, and that she thus stole Carlos away from
Pilar
to be the mate on her own boat. It happened while Hemingway was off at the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway himself aided and abetted this version of the story in vague ways through the years, but I think the closer truth, as with almost every Hemingway truth, is more ambiguous. I think Hemingway was psychologically ready to cut Carlos adrift not too long after he had employed him. Yes, he arranged for his mate to come to Bimini in the second summer of the boat (where on at least one occasion Hemingway had reduced him to tears in front of others on the boat), and, yes, he continued to praise him in print for a good while after. But to paraphrase Les Hemingway, in that line from
My Brother, Ernest Hemingway:
he loved everything for a small time, and then nothing was any good anymore.

It was Carlos who told Hemingway the real-life story that became the basis for the fictional
The Old Man and the Sea
. In the eighteenth paragraph of his October 1936
Esquire
piece, “On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter,” Hemingway gave us the germ of his novella. The actual writing was still a decade and a half in the future.