Soldier. Big-game hunter. Misogynist. Greatest American writer. Most overrated American writer. There is no shortage of labels attached to the name Ernest Hemingway.
The critical and popular analysis of Hemingway and the minimalist, beneath-the-surface writing style he brought to prominence has become so saturated that the man himself has become nearly cliché since he invaded the literary scene in 1926 as the 27-year old author of “The Sun Also Rises.”
The canon of Hemingway biographies is so comprehensive it seems redundant for the world to be given another book about the lion slayer, the gin drinker, the womanizer.
Yet in “Hemingway’s Boat”, Paul Hendrickson unearths, seemingly from plain sight, a new frame from which to interpret the life and writings of the literary giant. The context needed to fully digest the Hemingway legacy is structured around his 27-year love affair with Pilar—a fishing vessel that constituted his most reliable partner until his suicide in 1961.
Hendrickson, a Washington Post feature writer for 24 years before joining the University of Pennsylvania’s English department, creates a comprehensive (if sometimes apologetic) vision of Hemingway through the lens of a 38-foot yacht that spent nearly three decades in the waters between Key West, Fla., and the shores of Cuba acting as a respite for its oft-tormented master.
As one of the most scrutinized American writers, Hemingway—a celebrity author when writers were still prominent—is often portrayed as untouchable, a lion-hunting, woman-wooing alpha-male.
But, unlike other Hemingway scholars, Hendrickson uses Hemingway’s time aboard Pilar to humanize him.
During his first few days as Pilar’s captain, a vagabond-aspiring-writer-Hemingway-zealot named Arnold Samuelson knocks on his door in Key West and instead of shooing him away, Hemingway takes a liking to him. Hemingway hires him as his first mate and tutors the young man on the discipline of writing. It is a year-long stewardship and Hendrickson details the relationship from beginning to end, highlighting the mercurial nature of Hemingway—the man who never missed an opportunity to cut down his close friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, but would nurture a stranger.
In addition to Samuelson, Hendrickson gives several detailed, authoritative sketches of friends and acquaintances with insight into the complex personality of Hemingway. These anecdotes work to fill out Hemingway’s personality beyond the legend.
Hendrickson uses Pilar as a launching pad to detail Hemingway’s bravery, like when he dives into the ocean to rescue his secretary from sharks. Pilar is the inspiration for many sea and boat metaphors in Hemingway’s writing. Pilar is a hideaway from the critics. Pilar is a platform for Hemingway to repair (or try to, at least) the frayed relationships with his sons.
Hendrickson, who has written two other biographies, including “The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War,” spent seven years reporting and writing “Hemingway’s Boat.” He admits, however, to a long-time obsession with the author of such renowned works as “A Farewell to Arms”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Old Man and the Sea.” And it shows.
Hendrickson’s writing style could not be more different than Hemingway’s. Whereas with Hemingway the story was not in what he wrote but in what he didn’t write, Hendrickson’s style is descriptive and full of dependent clauses gracefully strung together—and above all, he is comprehensive. His reporting is thorough, and he knows it. He elaborately explains his many sources in both an appendix and in first-person accounts inserted into the Hemingway narrative. He brags, in a way, that he took a boat that was born on Copsey Avenue in Brooklyn and was retired as a monument in Cuba, and created a unique prism in which to view one of America’s most influential writers.
But he deserves credit. “Hemingway’s Boat” distinguishes itself by focusing on Pilar as a sanctum. When he needed a respite from his often-messy personal life, Pilar was there. The book hints that with Hemingway’s failed relationships—those with his wives, his sons, his profession, his thoughts—weighing on him at the end, that’s when Hemingway needed Pilar the most. Yet, while thoughts of suicide were rattling around his brain in Idaho, Pilar—the only thing that gave him solace, his most enduring love—was rotting in Key West.
Hemingway’s relationship with Pilar, Hendrickson seems to suggest, is a metaphor for Hemingway’s life and the people he loved but couldn’t keep.
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