Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He
Loved in Life, and Lost
by Paul Hendrickson
Penguin Random House $21
Paul Hendrickson is a craftsman of letters who knows his work the way a master shipwright knows the grain of wood he fashions into planks and spars. Hendrickson’s engrossing tale, as its title indicates, is about a boat, Hemingway’s boat, a fast, commodious, 38-foot cabin cruiser built by Wheeler Shipbuilding, Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1933 and used by the famous author as a platform for writing, drinking, womanizing and deep-sea trophy fishing in the Gulf Stream between Cuba and Florida.
At the same time, Hemingway’s Boat is more than a treatise on naval architecture. It offers a fresh slant on the rise and fall of a huge bear of a man and father figure of American literature. In the 27 years that he sailed his beloved yacht, Pilar, he wrote some good books. He also wrote A Moveable Feast, a brilliantly structured act of remembrance by an aging author, writing about his youth in 1920s Paris. He knew that death was near, though not that it would arrive by suicide in 1961. It begins as an idyll of optimism and ends in torment and despair.
The notion of a cruising yacht as symbolic of a damaged man will not be lost on readers of Hemingway’s Boat. In 2005, Hendrickson traveled to Cuba to see the vessel. What he found was a decaying wreck (since restored) – “her insides having long ago been eaten out by termites” – propped on blocks next to Hemingway’s erstwhile home on the outskirts of Havana.
“A man who let his own insides get eaten out by the diseases of fame,” notes Hendrickson, “had dreamed new books on this boat. He’d taught his sons to reel in something that feels like Moby Dick on this boat … He’d fallen drunk from the flying bridge on this boat … He’d propositioned women on this boat … He’d acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat … She’d lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize and all his ruin.”
Hendrickson’s new book is told in a series of vignettes linking Hemingway with the people who had known him intimately over the years and who had sailed as his guests aboard Pilar.
Hemingway, a convert to Catholicism, had named his yacht after the patron saint of Saragossa, Spain. In later years Hemingway renounced religion and took the title of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, from the biblical lesson of Ecclesiastes. The book tracks the fortunes of a group of nihilistic American expatriates in Paris and Spain after the First World War. To Hendrickson, “It was as if the world had a new kind of writing on its hands … laconic, ironic … painterly in the way of an Impressionist canvas.” The novel propelled Hem-ingway to instant fame.
A candid portrait of a tragic genius emerges from Hendrickson’s study. “It’s heartbreaking to read Hemingway’s letters of his last few years and see how Pilar and the sea were slipping from him, no less than his mind was,” Hendrickson says.
And so, in his sixty-second year, delusional, no longer able to write and no longer wishing to live, Hemingway one day pointed his shotgun “just above the eyebrows and nothing went awry.” n
Alan Littell