I have read most of Hemingway’s fiction.  Not all of it, but most of it.  I love his writing.  At its best it may be the best writing in America in the 20^th Century.  But even though I have read most of his writing I didn’t know that much about him as a person.  I knew the public persona, the tough guy big-game-hunting Cuba and Key West living drinking ambulance driving fisherman.  But I had never read a biography of him.  Still haven’t.  I did though just finish Hemingway’s Boat, Everything He Loved And Lost, 1934-1961, by Paul Hendrickson.  I now have that difficult tension with Hemingway that I have encountered with some other great writers or musicians; great works do not necessarily come from great people.

Hendrickson’s book does not claim to be a biography. It is a recounting of certain stories, attitudes, letters, and damage, related—some directly, some very very indirectly—to the 1934 custom boat Hemingway bought and took to Florida and then Cuba (where it still sits on blocks).  It tells of the friends and guests Hemingway took to sea with him, almost always to fish for marlin.  It tells of how he mistreated almost everyone in his world, including his “friends” from his impoverished days in Paris struggling to establish himself as a writer, to his wives, sons, and editors.  He was the trail blazer for so many Hollywood personalities of today, who have no lines and no rules, and literally do whatever they like, regardless of the impact it has on others.  The poster boy of narcissism.

Hemingway slept with his friends’ wives while they were topside on his boat.  He cut (personally) and died the hair of his own wife and the girlfriend of another friend to have more of a boyish look, and blonde rather than brunette, because he liked that better.  He wrote scathing letters to his editor, frustrated that he couldn’t use profanity in his novels.  He wanted to shoot everyone in the publishing industry (and said so in writing) when one of his books received poor reviews.  

In summary, he was self consumed.  He and his wives seemed disinterested in raising his three sons.  They would travel to Europe for three months leaving them in the US with a nanny.  Gigi, the son who gets the most attention in the book, was raised by a nanny, almost entirely.  In New York, nowhere near his parents.  A nanny who terrorized him.  And this is the son who started wearing women’s clothes when he was seven and died in his sixties in a women’s prison. 

The book is amazingly well researched, but has flaws.  Hendrickson injects himself into the narrative repeatedly.  “When I was able to locate him, I immediately flew to the west coast to interview him.”  Or after a gap is defined in what happened, he launches into speculation.  “Could it be that he was there?  Or that he came later?  Could it be he didn’t care enough to even consider going?”  It becomes tedious.  It feels unprofessional for a “biographer” to speculate and speak in the first person.  It’s off-putting.  But worse for me were two other things.

Hendrickson has fallen into the trap that haunts many non-fiction writers.  When they have researched something for years, and accumulate amazing amounts of information, they feel compelled to put that information in the book, in detail, regardless of whether it moves the narrative along or sinks it.  So we learn about the boat builder, the street it was on in New York, the wood, the building, the workers, the grandson of the boatbuilder, and on and on. 

But worse are the diversions into internal mini-psychological biographies of a long lost witness (we learn what walks he takes every day, still missing his wife), and Hemingway’s youngest and transvestite son (who ultimately had a sex change operation), Gigi.  I don’t know how many pages are dedicated to trying to understand Gigi, but far too many.  I wanted to hear more about Ernest Hemingway, not Gigi.  Gigi’s detailed and sordid story in fact comprises the last ten percent of the book.  And it causes the main narrative to run off the rails.  Hendrickson tries to show that to understand Hemingway one must understand Gigi; but it doesn’t work.  It comes off as a side show that adds little to other stories in the book.

Ultimately, Hemingway’s Boat is just a way for Hendrickson to tell stories about Hemingway; but they’re not told chronologically, and many aren’t necessary.  As someone who didn’t know much about Hemingway, I learned a lot, and understand him much better than I did.  But if this book was shorter and better organized, it would have been much better read. 

Posted in: Uncategorized You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.