TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums:
Lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe and WBUR.
In his stories about Nick Adams, Hemingway's fictional alter ego, we read these words: "Nick loved to fish and to shoot exactly as much as when he had first gone with his father. It was a passion that had never slackened, and he was grateful to his father for bringing him to know about it. All the love went into fishing in the summer, and he had loved it more than anything."
In his new book, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961, author Paul Hendrickson uses the Pilar, the 38-foot motorized fishing vessel that Hemingway owned for 27 years, as a metaphor to offer a fresh slant on the life of the Nobel Prize-winning Laureate.
The story begins in 1934 with Hemingway, who Hendrickson describes at the time as the reigning monarch of American literature, a sportsman and centralist, glorying in life, as he returns to New York from his first African safari, intent on purchasing a new boat. Six years earlier, while in Key West, Hemingway discovered the thrill of salt water fishing, which superseded all other kinds of fishing he had ever done or would do again.
The book overflows with fascinating anecdotes and insights. Allow me to mention just one little known fact, apropos to this magnificent setting. Hemingway's initial introduction to the Atlantic Ocean was just off these shores when, as an 11-year-old, his mother took him on a month-long trip by rail and steamer to Cape Cod and Nantucket Island, where he fished for sea bass and mackerel.
The book, of course, is about much more than fishing, chronicling all aspects of the last years of Hemingway's personal and literary life with stories about friendship, fame and fatherhood, and how, behind it all, the natural world served as Hemingway's refuge.
Paul Hendrickson is an award-winning author and former Washington Post feature writer, who currently serves on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. His other books, also germane to this Library, include Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, in which he profiles seven Mississippi sheriffs, photographed while one of their number poses with a billy club just before the 1962 riots that broke out when James Meredith attempted to be the first African American student to enroll at Ole Miss.
And The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, in which Mr. Hendrickson juxtaposes insights on Robert McNamara. His life is described as a kind of technocratic, hubristic fable against episodes in the lives of others affected by his decisions as Secretary of Defense.
E. L. Doctorow once described one of Hemingway's many achievements in his early novels as serving as a travel writer introducing a provincial American audience to the world. If our country is any less provincial these days, it might be attributed to the journeys many of us have taken via the journalism and reporting of today's moderator, Scott Simon, NPR's Peabody Award-winning host of Weekend Edition.
There are many reasons why we invited Mr. Simon today – his own love of Hemingway, his Chicago roots, and his support of the Hemingway Council, which helps promote the unique collection housed here. But what sealed the deal is the fact that his daughter named her horse after Hemingway. [laughter] And if you get to know him well enough, you, too, can call him by his nickname, Hem.
Two closing observations: In his depiction of Hemingway's multifaceted life, Paul Hendrickson casts the great writer in a benevolent light, summed by up Hemingway's friend, Archibald MacLeish: "It would be so abundantly easy to describe Ernest in terms, all of which would be historically accurate, which would present him as a completely insufferable being. Actually, he was one of the most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creatures I have ever known."
Finally, and perhaps disclosing my own parochialism, I was proudest of a scene described in the book that occurred in this Library when Mr. Hendrickson read through Hemingway's fishing logs which are housed here. He describes the logs as "a raw, immediate documentary novel within the larger story of Hemingway's life, full of data about each day's expedition, the wind, the weather, the day's catch; yet, also suffused with a unique emotional texture about life beyond the sea. The logs themselves," he concludes, "demonstrate a core Hemingway technique. In reading through them, you end up feeling more than you necessarily understand."
The same might be said of this wonderful new book by Paul Hendrickson. Please join me now in welcoming him and Scott Simon to the Kennedy Library. [applause]
PAUL HENDRICKSON: I'm just going to say a very few words that don't have to do with the book, per se, but this is my opportunity to say them. That very resonant quote that Tom Putnam in his eloquent introduction just made, it was one of Hemingway's core values to try to make the reader feel more than he necessarily understands. He articulated it at one point as his iceberg principle; namely, the dignity of an iceberg derives from the fact – he said dignity – that seven-eighths of it is underwater; you can see the one-eighth.
That is, by way, and I didn't think that I was going to necessarily say this, for me, to make a few quick remarks about some people that I am hugely indebted to and care for tremendously, and who are in this audience and some of them connected with this Library. But maybe if I make it brief and then sit down and we'll begin the real program, that the doctrine of less will be more, that you might end up feeling more than you necessarily understand.
First of all, thank you very much to Tom Putnam. I did not know him until today. I knew of him by reputation. He gave the Ernest Hemingway annual birthday lecture out in Oak Park in 2010, and I had given it the year before. But I had heard from all my friends out there how wonderful he did it.
I am honored that Scott Simon – and I know of his connection to the Library and of his connection to Hemingway, but I didn't know that there was a horse in the family named Hem. [laughter] I saw a picture of it a few minutes. But even if none of that were true, I am deeply indebted to Scott Simon for being willing to come here and moderate this.
I've been going around the country giving a so-called kind of stump speech, which I tweak to different occasions, but we'll be having a conversation tonight which I look forward to. But Scott Simon has a wonderful Saturday reassuring voice for all of us as Americans, and my wife is just the largest fan.
This building, I said to some people upstairs when we were having the reception, I did come here sometimes on brilliant summer days and was able to look out on Dorchester Bay and see that beautiful shimmering air and water. But mostly, my mind and my imagination identifies this building and this Point with a day like today – low, overhanging clouds and windwhipped water. I often sat at those smooth, polished tables upstairs and, while trying to absorb what was in the lines and between the lines, would let my gaze drift out to that watery place. I almost think that Hemingway, who had a genius for choosing the right symbolic place, could not have done better if he had chosen this place himself.
I have to pay some quick tribute to the Hemingway archivist, and that is Susan Wrynn. She'll be embarrassed that I say these things, but I have to. I went to Lausanne, Switzerland last summer to participate in the biennial international Hemingway conference. I was able to get some travel money from the University of Pennsylvania, but my wife and I spent some of our own money. Why did I go? Because Susan Wrynn said, "Paul, I'm actually hosting this panel.
I'd give anything if you'd be on it." It was the least little thing I could do to pay her back, and I'm paying her back now. So, Susan, all love to you. I went to Lausanne last summer to be on your panel and if you weren't going to be there, I wouldn't have shown up in Lausanne.
James Hill, who has helped me through the years of doing this book. Gosh, I'm going to embarrass him. I see him sitting in the front row. He and I became bonded almost immediately because he thinks so intensely visually. It's as if he sees the whole narrative of our history through his eyeball, through photographs. He sees photographs as narratives. Indeed, a course that I teach, a writing course, at the University of Pennsylvania, is called "Telling Stories Out of Photographs." James, I would love to have you come down, and I would take a chair and you would just stand up and talk to the kids. You are a kind of visual genius.
I think Mary-Jo Adams is here, of the Finca Vigía Foundation, which is a Boston-based private foundation that has worked to raise funds with conservators in Cuba for the restoration of the Finca Vigía, which was Hemingway's home, and Pilar. She has become a friend in the course of this book.
There are some old, beloved students who just showed up from both the University of Pennsylvania, two of them whom I taught a whole decade ago in 2001, and they showed up tonight. I could not be prouder. I think there's a student here from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is doing work in Boston. And Chris Fowler, if you're somewhere out there, you said you were coming. And other students. I could not be more honored that you would fight the traffic at rush hour to find your way to Columbia Point.
Charlie Clements and Gigi Wizowaty are here. These are old, old friends, and I was introducing them upstairs. Charlie is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. I can't begin to tell you his whole story, but the quickest nut of it would be this: A graduate of the Air Force Academy, who flew 50 missions in Vietnam, turned morally in his conscience against the war, against what we were doing in Cambodia.
Left the government, left the Army, became a medical doctor. Went to the civil war in El Salvador with a medical backpack to heal and minister, and wrote a classic documentary cum memoir called Witness to War, which also became an award-winning documentary.
To these, and all of the others of you whom I know in larger or smaller ways who have helped me with this book, I am profoundly thankful. [applause]
SCOTT SIMON: It is a great pleasure for me to be here. And I know it's perhaps a difficult thing to be a Chicagoan in Boston today. [laughter/applause] Particularly a North Sider. My wife suggested, after hearing the news about Theo Epstein – forgive an inelegant analogy – was that she could now understand what it must be like to have been working in the Japanese Embassy in Washington, DC, on December 7, 1941 [laughter] and have to go out for dinner on Pearl Harbor Day.
Everybody's been very nice so far. [laughter] I really welcome the opportunity to be here and talk to Paul about this utterly remarkable book. Let me begin by getting you to tell us about Pilar, the boat because she was a very handsome piece of seacraft. Help us understand what it meant to him.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: That's a great question. And why would we expect anything else from Scott Simon? First of all, he said "tell us about Pilar," and not the Pilar. Hemingway never used, or almost never – with Hemingway you almost always have to insert ‘almost’ – the article. He called her Pilar. Scott also said "tell us about her." He really did think of Pilar – I mean, boats often have this feminine identity, but he thought of Pilar, I think, as … He was married four times, so maybe Pilar was his fifth wife, his fifth spouse, and his most loyal because he owned Pilar and rode her and worked her, and wrote achy poetic letters on her and did appalling things aboard her. He owned her for the last 27 years of his life and as I say in the book, through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin.
But Scott asked me specifically what was Pilar and what did she represent to him. Tom alluded to this in his introduction. When he acquired Pilar, he was just about to be age 35. It's the spring of 1934. He has just returned to America, triumphantly, from safari in East Africa. He has wanted to own his own seagoing fishing vessel for a long time, and this is the first instance where he's able to get all the cash together. He got the down payment from the editor of the new men's monthly magazine called Esquire. Arnold Gingrich advanced him $3,000. He landed in America and went right out to the Wheeler Shipyard, which was at the foot of Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn, and he plunked down this $3,000 the next day, and the boat was delivered to him roughly five-and-a-half weeks later.
This boat, I said, was so loyal, was so faithful, was so beautiful, as Scott said. She was humble by '30s yachting standards, and she was not custom-made; she was a production shipyard boat. He had her modified to his own specifications, had her stern cut low with a roller so he could haul over the big ones. But basically, this seaworthy, extremely loyal, seakindly, which is an old expression seamen use, lasted him all that time.
It began to occur to me -- I was looking for a metaphor, as Tom said. You can't read Hemingway's letters -- his first Selected Letters is a big doorstop book -- from page 404 in the Selected Letters of Ernest Hemingway, when he first acquires Pilar, until the end of that 1,000-page book, you can't read that book without the word Pilar beginning to impinge upon your consciousness.
So it's one of my theories, Scott, that our books find us, we don't find them. Somehow or another, this began to occur to me as a structural storytelling device, a metaphor, an organizing principle, a narrative vehicle that took him out there.
I'll make the rest of my answers shorter than that one. [laughter]
SCOTT SIMON: Among many of the things you do in this book, you see his time aboard Pilar and the way it expanded his horizons, the way it introduced him from … He'd been around the world, a lot of different places at that point, but you see a real relationship between his time with Pilar and an increasingly intricate prose style that represented a real departure from what he'd become known for.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: I sound like I'm shining up to Scott Simon, but I have to think he's two-for-two in the question department.
SCOTT SIMON: I'll get worse. I'm a Cubs fan, after all. [laughter]
PAUL HENDRICKSON: If I said to any of you out there, Ernest Hemingway, one of the immediate associations, I think, might be these simple declarative sentences, unlike the looping sentences I was spinning a minute ago, these Jack-and-Jill-go-up-the-hill-to-fetch-apail-of-water kind of sentences. The strange declarative music, free of the subordinate clause, free even of commas, yoked by the simple conjunctive and. And, parenthetically – so I'm writing an un-Hemingway sentence here – this is why Hemingway is so easy to parody.
Anybody can parody Hemingway, but I defy anybody to write a Hemingway sentence, to replicate a Hemingway sentence. Why is that? It's because the music of that sentence, that really I believe broke through and changed the American language in the way that we know it, and that's Hemingway's burden. I think modernism kind of starts with the kind of sentences he was writing in the '20s when he came to fame in Europe.
I defy anyone to write a Hemingway sentence. The easiest thing in the world to do is to parody one. When he was on the backside of his fame in 1950 and wrote Across the River and into the Trees, E. B. White, who was never a big game hunter in Africa, he was a very domesticated literary man for The New Yorker, he couldn't resist parodying Hemingway, and he wrote a very famous parody called Across the Street and into the Grill. It's hilarious! But the point is it's a parody.
To answer Scott's question, in brief, it is this: I believe that right at the point when he was getting Pilar – what does an artist have to do, except to try to grow. If you repeat yourself, that's the first road to death as an artist. So Hemingway had become world famous by breaking through with this new kind of American language. You study a little story like The Killers, it's full of white space on the page; the lines are that long, it's all dialogue. But by the mid-'30s, when he's getting Pilar, the sentences are becoming much more complex. There are plenty of subordinate clauses.
Now, people have theorized why, why, why is this? Is it because he had gotten out of the dampness of Europe and he had thawed out? He had gotten out of the Victorian four-square confinements of Oak Park, where he had grown up? All of that, all of that might be true. I think, Scott, that a five-letter word, Pilar, was helping to take him further out there where you don't necessarily see shoreline. The first book he wrote at length, book-length manuscript, after acquiring Pilar, after coming home, is a documentary, quasi piece of reportage called Green Hills of Africa. In that book, there is a diagram-defying 497-word sentence.
You should go home and look it up tonight. It's in Chapter Eight. I have studied it in its original form in the manuscripts division at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It's as if he began writing out of his head. This 497-word monster, which is bigger than any damn marlin he ever boated, starts on page 223 in his big, looping handwriting, at the University of Virginia. It doesn't end until page 228. It's as if he caught up to himself somewhere about a quarter of the way through and just kept going and going and going and going.
I reproduce that sentence in the book, 497 words. And when you say Hemingway, you don't necessarily think of a sentence like that. Something was happening to this artist who felt a need to grow. And I think Pilar could have had something to do with it. It's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
SCOTT SIMON: We're going to talk about family life, his wives, his sons. But let me ask you first, what kind of friend was he?
PAUL HENDRICKSON: That quote that Tom quoted from Archie MacLeish, Archibald
MacLeish. They had come to know each other in Paris in 1924, riding bicycles around. When Hemingway broke from his first wife, Hadley, he moved in with Archie and Ada MacLeish. MacLeish said so beautifully, and of course he has such a Massachusetts connection, he said he was a friend that you couldn't live with and he was a friend that you couldn't live without. The quote that Tom read, it would be so easy to think of him as the world's most insufferable human being. He gave his critics all the ammunition they ever needed. But there was this whole other side of him. So MacLeish was also saying, Scott, that he actually was one of the most spiritual human beings Archibald MacLeish had ever encountered.
I have heard this said about FDR, that when he would enter a room, he could take up all the oxygen just by entering it. There was something of that in Hemingway.
SCOTT SIMON: Let me get you to talk about his relationship with his sons. I think your book, among many other assets, is especially remarkable for sketching in the relationship with his son who became known as Gigi. This was – a cliché, I'm sorry – but a very gifted and very troubled young man. You get to learn a lot about him, the father, by taking a look at their relationship.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: You're three-for-three. Hemingway had three sons. His oldest son, Jack, or Bumby, by his first wife. And then the next two by his second wife, Pauline – Patrick and Gregory. Patrick is 83 years old and lives in Montana. He's the middle son, has a Massachusetts connection -- has a big connection with this Museum – and is the only one alive.
Gregory, or Gigi – Hemingway needed to bestow a nickname on everyone, that was one of his traits. I'm not exactly sure why. Gigi, in my estimation, was the most gifted of the family, the truest writer of the family, the most natural athlete of the family, the youngest son who could shoot or ride a horse or catch a ball, do all these manly things his father would have approved of. Grew up to be a medical doctor, like his paternal grandfather in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway's father, Clarence Hemingway, who committed suicide in 1928.
So Gigi grows up to be a medical doctor and fought against the compulsion -- heroically seems not too strong a word in my lexicon -- to dress up his squat, bulky body for nearly his entire adult life. But he began doing this from when he was about four years old and surreptitiously sneaking into what was then Hemingway's third wife, Martha Gelhorn's closet to try on her white, sheer nylons. So Gregory Hemingway spent …
SCOTT SIMON: He was a crossdresser, we would say.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: He was a crossdresser, who ultimately became a transgendered woman. Even after he was transgendered and had sexual surgery, he would come back and dress as a man. If he was the son that disappointed Hemingway most, I think he was also the son that Hemingway forsook least. One of the difficult things that I had to try to deal with in this book – when I was at the Washington Post for 23 years on staff, we had an expression – in for a dime, in for a dollar. If you're going to go there, then go there all the way.
In 1987, as a Washington Post feature writer, I found all three Hemingway sons. See, I believe that our books find us more than we find them. This book may have started way before then, but in 1987 I went and saw all three Hemingway sons. And once I had gotten Jack and once I had gotten Patrick, then I was able to get Gregory. He was 55 years old. He was spending his days in Miami parks, he had no fixed address. He was a wreck. The medical career had drained away. He was estranged from his then-third wife and from most of his eight children. There was something beautiful about him and generous, and doctorly in wanting to sort of take care of people.
I quote this in the book. You'll excuse my profanity, but I don't know how else to say it because it's Gigi's quote. He said very softly, "I've had 98 electroshock treatments." And then he said more softly, "I've taken every fucking pill there is."
If I can just finish the point that I think Scott was getting to. In for a dime, in for a dollar. When I wrote about the three Hemingway sons in 1987, I did the thing that journalists do; that is, put it off onto somebody else if you're afraid of your own convictions. So I said in those 1987 pieces essentially what I'm not saying in anybody else's voice. In this book, I say it for myself. That is in 1987, in the Washington Post, I said given what we now know posthumously about Hemingway and his sexual ambiguities and his novel, The Garden of Eden, there are some Hemingway experts out there who might raise the question, was the son merely acting out what the father felt? You see, as a journalist, you put it onto somebody else and you raise it as a question. In this book, I don't raise it as a question. I try to say what I know about it and to bring things together to make that point. But the truth is will we ever fully and finally know? No, I don't think we will.
Do you know this line from Hemingway's Nobel Prize acceptance speech? If you read him carefully, there are so many incredible clues. He was too ill to attend his Nobel Prize ceremony in Sweden. It was 1954. Hemingway had been wrecked by two back-to-back surreal plane crashes in Africa. But in his Nobel Prize speech, he said, "Things may not be immediately discernable in what a man writes. And in this, sometimes he is fortunate. But eventually, they are quite clear. And by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure, or be forgotten." I start that chapter with this sentence: "I'll whoof this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt, which is why they could not forsake each other, no matter how hard they tried." Hemingway's relationships with his sons are so complex, and I believe so beautiful.
SCOTT SIMON: Let me draw you out on that a little bit more because in a lifetime, really
– and as you note, Gigi was a very gifted writer himself, and they would write letters in
which they would say some things which were meant to hurt, to be sure, and also say some things which obviously were meant to make up for that, but also to express real love.
October 1951. Let me get you to talk about the events that happened then because there was this confluence of events, beginning with a problem Gigi had.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: It's so difficult. Hemingway and his wife – and wives, but I'm especially talking about Pauline, Hemingway's second wife, from whom he would have been divorced for a good while in 1951. Pauline is the mother of Hemingway's two younger sons, Patrick and Gigi – they had known about, quote, problems for a long, long time. Really since maybe he was four and his father walked in on him trying on …Gigi, that night that I met him at age 55 in Coconut Grove, told me, "Well, maybe it's the thrill at first of putting it on. It's tingling, it arouses you, you like that feeling. Maybe it's because you want more attention from your mother. Who knows what it is? After a while you begin doing it for its own sake." So all through his adolescence and growing up there were periods of being caught but in October 1951, what Scott is arrowing right into, the great tension points of this book, Gigi,
19 years old, newly married, child on the way, college dropout, St. John's College in Annapolis, working as an aircraft mechanic in Santa Monica, California, possibly high on some drugs, was caught for the first time publicly entering and being inside the women's restroom of a Los Angeles movie theater. They called the police. He was arrested, taken downtown.
Pauline was in San Francisco. She actually was visiting friends in San Francisco and heard about what had just happened in Los Angeles, because Gigi called her from the clink. Pauline called her former husband in Havana. It's late at night. Conversation is staticky. And she said, "Something has happened and you're not going to like it." She told him what it is and she said she would be flying down to Los Angeles in the morning to quickly investigate it and see what she could do to keep it out of the papers and get a lawyer.
No one knows exactly what went on in that conversation between Havana and San Francisco. Pauline's sister, Jenny, who began to hate Hemingway later on, so she's not the most trustworthy witness, but she's the witness we have. And Gigi, in his beautiful book – Scott says what a gorgeous writer Gigi was -- wrote a book called Papa that stands on kind of the top rung of Hemingway memoirs. She claimed that Hemingway and Pauline began a terrible fight, and Hemingway is screaming at her, "This is all your fault. You caused it, you bitch. You're corrupt. He's corrupt and you're corrupt." Corrupt would have been a Hemingway word for sexual deviance, if you want to use a kind of archaic word.
To get to the narrative of this terribly tragic story -- and Scott said a confluence of events -- it's Shakespearean. Pauline never made it to Los Angeles the next morning. She went to bed, having had this terrible fight with her ex-husband. And how can you win a war of words with Ernest Hemingway? She awoke at midnight with a severe stomach pain, crying out. So her sister Jenny and some friends rushed her down the Hollywood Hills and took her to St. Vincent's Hospital in Los Angeles. She died four hours later on the operating table. The surgeons were trying to stanch desperately this invisible hemorrhage that had surfaced in her adrenal glands.
Gigi never got over that. He was sprung from jail. He attended her wake. She was buried in a Hollywood cemetery. I've been to that cemetery. All these years later, Pauline Hemingway has an unmarked grave. Isn't that odd?
There's so much to tell here, and I want to get to Scott's next question. To bolt the story forward, I said he never got over it. The first line of Gigi's beautiful, beautiful memoir called Papa is as follows: "I never got over a responsibility for my father's death. And the manifestation of it sometimes made me act in strange ways." Like the best of all openings, it was telling us so much more than we really understood. What he's really saying is, "I never got over the fact of both of my parents' death." Because here's what happened. Three months after Pauline dies on that operating table, Gigi goes to Havana to introduce to his father his new bride and the baby has not yet been born. At the close of that visit, and it had been a pretty good visit, Gigi came out of himself a little and said, "Papa, that thing that happened with me in Los Angeles, it really wasn't so bad." And Hemingway shot and said, "Oh, no? Well, it killed Mother."
What a thing to say to your child. When Gigi was a medical student at the University of Miami, he got the medical records. What he was able to piece together as a physician, or a near physician, was that far more likely it was not this hidden tumor that fired off. It did fire off, but what happened was that the screaming argument precipitated that firing off.
Nine months before Hemingway committed suicide, Gigi confronted his father with the medical facts of this autopsy. So that first line, "I never got over a responsibility for my father's death," he knew in some strange, necrotic place of himself that his father was exactly right, that by entering that movie theater, he had fired off the chain of terrible events that indirectly, or directly, you could say, caused his mother's death. And then these years later, by confronting his father who was then turning wild in his paranoia about the FBI and everything else, "No, Dad, it was far more likely that it wasn't my going into that movie theater, it was this screaming argument that fired it off."
To end this little saga, and I'm not inviting you to buy the book, I'm not baiting you to buy the book, but there is so much more here. Here is a fact that will kill you. Scott, I'll be done in 30 seconds.
SCOTT SIMON: No, no, I was saying, buy the book.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Here's a fact that will kill you. Gigi died in a Miami women's jail cell, a transgendered man who'd been picked up naked wandering on a causeway. He died 50 years to the day, and almost to the hour, if we subtract East Coast time and West Coast time, from the day that Pauline died. Not 50 years to the day, 50 years to the hour and almost 50 years to the moment. That's why I say it's Shakespearean.
I think he was haunted, and he carried that with him. That's one of the reasons I said a while go, heroic seems not too strong a word to define Gregory Hemingway's life.
SCOTT SIMON: Help us understand that about Hemingway because for those of us who love him, in some ways that's the most difficult section. Because it just doesn't strike you as something a father would do. Even if it were true, you're selfless in addressing your children.
You don't say something like that to a son you love. And yet, he loved Gigi.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Yes. For any of us who are fathers, who are parents, it seems unimaginable that we could say that to our child.
SCOTT SIMON: Parenthetically, he called him a brute, he called him an asshole. Names are one thing, but to say something like that …
PAUL HENDRICKSON: "Oh, no? It killed mother."
SCOTT SIMON: Yeah.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Howell Raines, the former editor-in-chief of the New York Times, reviewed this book three weeks ago for the Washington Post. He said something that I think is true, that what hasn't been examined enough is how wrecked and beat-up Hemingway was for so many years.
You see, the French have that expression, notre demon est le mesure de notre ange. Our demon is the measure of our angel. Hemingway could be appalling in the things he did, in the things he said and, yes, to his own family members. And he could turn around and say beautiful things.
He and Gigi said unconscionable things to each other, and they could make up. Could you argue, Scott, that in this titanic anger between the two of them, they were only suggesting how much they cared for each other? They couldn't let go. Gigi, in his memoir Papa wants to portray the last years of Hemingway's life as that they were estranged. It's not true.
Gigi wrote this beautiful book, but it's full of distortions and omissions and elisions. The record bears out that they were in touch – the letter record – in touch more than they were estranged. I don't have an answer why a man could say that to his children. Other than, what? The onslaughts of bipolarism. The wages of megalomania. The wastings of booze. The seductions of fame. All of the things that could give him what he called the black ass.
When this event happened in October of 1951, Hemingway by then was married to his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway. He is stalking around the house for two days with the knowledge that Pauline has died on an operating table in Los Angeles. His fourth wife, Mary, told him that he was behaving appallingly. He followed her into the bathroom and spit in her face.
Ladies and gentlemen, I still make the case in this book that I feel Ernest Hemingway, despite everything you've already heard, was on some sort of strange quest for sainthood, and not just literary sainthood. And that at every turn, he succeeded in defeating himself.
SCOTT SIMON: Speaking of Mary, there's this flabbergasting anecdote – or maybe not flabbergasting by the time we get to it – on Pilar when he brings a guest to lunch with Mary and her cousin, and Bea Gluck -- which is in a whole different category -- but if I could get you to tell that.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: It's a whole different category of humiliation. I mean, yeah, the guest is a 19-year-old Havana whore, prostitute, favored by many people. He's given her the nickname Xenophobia. He claims that her only problem in her profession is that she doesn't like to go to bed with her clients. He parades her right onto the decks of Pilar in the face of Hemingway's very proper cousin, Bea Gluck, who is visiting from Chicago -- an out-and-out appalling, abominable humiliation of your spouse.
In telling you all these things, all these darknesses …I end the prologue of this book, the prologue, the very beginning of the book, with a 210-word letter that Hemingway wrote to a sick child. And that letter, I think, would make granite weep. That's the whole other side of Hemingway. That's the beautiful.
SCOTT SIMON: Tell that story. This was the son …
PAUL HENDRICKSON: This was the son. I won't read it. These may be the last words Ernest Hemingway ever set down on paper.
SCOTT SIMON: And he wrote it at a time when he wasn't writing. He wrote at a time when he …
PAUL HENDRICKSON: He wrote it from his bed in a locked ward at St. Marys Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. He's only 15 days from blowing his head off with a 12-gauge shotgun. He's going to fool his foolish doctors at the world-famous medical clinic to allow him to go home and almost immediately the Boss shotgun will go off in the Sunday morning quiet of the house in Ketchum, that sits up on the west bank of the pebble-smooth Big Wood River.
But this paranoid man -- delusional, slurred of speech, can no longer write anything -- hears that Fritz Saviers, who was nine years old and who was the child of Hemingway's small-town doctor in Ketchum and has a congenital heart disease, he hears that Fritz has been taken back to a Denver hospital by his papa, by his father George Saviers, who was Hemingway's smalltown doctor. Hemingway, from his bed at Mayo, his inner landscape now a paranoid's nightmare, somehow finds within himself, at the end of his life, to write 210 luminescent words -- the momentary lucidity and courage and not to say literary grace. I can't read you these 210 words, because they're still 210 long words, but a couple sentences might give you the idea.
"Dear Fritz, I was terribly sorry to hear this morning in a note from your father that you were laid up in Denver for a few days more and speed off this note to tell you how much I hope you'll be feeling better. It's been very hot and muggy here in Rochester, but the last two days it has turned cool and lovely with the nights wonderful for sleeping. The country is beautiful around here and I've had a chance to see some wonderful country along the Mississippi, where they used to drag the logs in the old lumbering days and the trails where the pioneers came north. Saw some good bass jumping in the river."
He goes on and says, "I hope old timer that we'll be able to see each other back in Ketchum in a few days more and that we'll be able to laugh about our medical troubles." He was able to summon in himself, this man with his acute observation of the natural world, with so much feeling contained under the surface of the prose, was able to summon those words at the end of his life, which is why I say amid so much ruin, still the beauty. Which is why I say, if you can spit in your wife's face and if you can turn on your son and say, "Oh, no? It killed mother," you can also do this.
SCOTT SIMON: And let me draw you out about this, because I think ultimately what I certainly wind up cherishing about your portrait of him is you see the years that you talk about here, for whatever the anecdotes we've even begun to recount, of not just boorishness, but cruelty. These were not just years in which – and maybe I can get you to talk about that – in which we can now with advantages in modern science and knowing what we know now about brain injury, can begin to almost chart Hem's deterioration, but also see that his continuation to write …
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Yes.
SCOTT SIMON: … as a prolonged act of courage.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Thank you, Scott. I've talked about heroically is not too strong a word for Gigi. A man who's insides were ravaged a lot earlier than we ever knew physically - alcoholism, brain damage, concussions – Hemingway had a gift for bumping into things, for having skylights fall on his head, and gashes, being taken to Paris hospitals in the middle of the night.
SCOTT SIMON: Two plane crashes.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Two plane crashes back to back and stumbles from them, in light planes in Africa, 1954, stumbles from them to read his own obituaries. I think, just as Scott said, what is becoming so increasingly clear that maybe for the last 30 years of his life, the man only lived to be 19 days shy of his 62nd birthday. That's a very young life.
Hey, have you ever seen the pictures of Hemingway in his 30s? He's as rangy as a tightend. He's a Hollywood movie star. He's Clark Gable. Why then in the next frame of pictures does he look this white-bearded … He had no middle age. Everything was so sped up, it went so fast.
But Scott's point, I think, is right to the mark. This ravaged man, himself heroically, courageously was Scott's word, still found a way to make his way wherever he was to that morning's writing desk. Underneath all that macho bravado was a bookish man in glasses trying to get his work done and finding it harder with each passing year.
SCOTT SIMON: You've seen Pilar. You've been aboard Pilar. Do you know it's Pilar?
PAUL HENDRICKSON: I have not been aboard Pilar. When the guards weren't looking, I surreptitiously reached over and touched her febrile surface. She is sitting under a corrugated plastic roof on what was Hemingway's tennis court, about 100 yards from the main house, next door to the swimming pool where Ava Gardner reputedly swum nude.
When I saw her in 2005, Pilar seemed to be dying from thirst. It was as if all she wanted was to get in the water. She has been beautifully restored. I mentioned the Finca Vigía Foundation and the work of Mary-Jo Adams and other people, the Cuban conservators and these private monies in America they have gotten together for the restoration.
There's always been some question, and I write it as a kind of appendix or a coda to this book. Scott asked a loaded question. Is that beautiful object on that hillside the real Pilar? A man who wanted to be here tonight, but is out of town, I think he's the foremost wooden boat authority in America, and he's become a good friend of mine, as so many people have become friends of mine in the course of this book.
His name is Dana Hewson, and he's in charge of all watercraft preservation at Mystic Seaport. He's been in very much on the restoration of Pilar. He's convinced it's the real Pilar, but there has always been the speculation of a, quote, bogus boat that was too hard to restore, and so the Cuban government, in some back shed in Havana, replicated her and put that on the hillside. I can't conclusively say, but I take Dana's word that she's the real thing.
But guess what? I kind of like it that we can't know for sure whether she's the real thing. You know why? Because it's a better metaphor than I ever imagined for the man himself. I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of Ernest Hemingway. If Hemingway resists knowing on some fundamental level, no matter all I've spouted off here of what I seem to know, if I have one answer, I have 999 doubts. So maybe Pilar is a better metaphor than I ever dreamed because there's this element of doubt.
I think we'll keep trying to get to the bottom of Ernest Hemingway throughout the rest of this century. It's why we want to read him. He's tremulous, as a great critic said. At his best, he's neurasthenic. He's so shimmering in all of his ambiguities. This man that could do these horrible things and say these horrible things could also write this letter to this dying nineyear-old child.
I went to see the nine-year-old child's brother a couple of years ago, who's a middle-aged psychotherapist in Ketchum, and I asked him about the letter. His name is Saviers, and he's a practicing psychotherapist in Ketchum. He said, "Oh, it's all so complicated." He said, "Paul, the damsel is dying in distress on the railroad track and we want to save her. That's us; we want to save ourselves."
So in Hemingway writing that letter to that child, as sick as he was, he desperately wanted to save himself. But there was no going back. But in that moment of lucidity and literary grace, he found the courage to write those 210 words. And he went home to Ketchum and went to the smallest place in the house and took the 12-gauge and placed the butt of it against his temple, and nothing went awry at about 7:20 in the morning, while Mary was sleeping in an upstairs bed. And she heard two muffled thumps, she said later. She told Carlos Baker of Princeton, it sounded like two drawers being pulled out. She jumped out of her bed in the master bedroom and ran down the hall to where he had been sleeping in the smaller room, and saw that one of the two twin beds was mussed, but there was no one in that twin bed. And she ran to the foot of the stairs and she held there. And she ran down the 20 steps and she ran across the living room, and she looked into this tight entryway, foyer space, where a mass of teeth and brain was spread all over the walls and floor.
A novelist I revere, James Salter, a nonfiction writer as well as a novelist, reviewed Hemingway's Boat for the New York Review of Books. He makes the case at the end of his review by saying, "Is it possible that this last act, which the Hemingway detractors want to say is an act of failure, is in some way his last act of courage?"
SCOTT SIMON: You're acting like a journalist for a brief moment when you were asking a question …
PAUL HENDRICKSON: [laughter]
SCOTT SIMON: … and just letting it hang. How do you see it?
PAUL HENDRICKSON: When James Salter said that in the New York Review of Books, it was one of those instants when I was saying, yes. And then somebody who read that review sent me a quote from George Orwell, who was kind of a hero of mine, a journalist hero of mine, a saint of mine. And Orwell had this to say about suicide and people who would glorify, or at least if not glorify, at least try to legitimize or sanitize or explain away a suicide. Orwell said: “Oh, yes, you have to be a member of the intelligentsia to think that way. Any ordinary mortal sees it for what it is, suicide, ending your life.” So Scott, I'm going to waffle a little on you. I don't know where my mind is yet. It's why I'll keep reading Hemingway.
SCOTT SIMON: We're going to invite your questions – I see two microphones are set up – and leave time for that. But we also have some photographs that are here in Paul's wonderful book at which we want to take a look. Paul can identify them for us.
Well, the cover of the book that we hope you purchase. [laughter] I'll ID that one, you take the rest.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: This is Hemingway at the stern of Pilar, fishing with Arnold Samuelson. Arnold Samuelson, in all the Hemingway biographies, is a footnote, or a paragraph. I write a 15,000-word chapter on him, and he filters through the book. I wanted to know who that guy in the middle is.
SCOTT SIMON: Kind of the man who came to dinner.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Yeah! Turning towards his literary hero to share some kind of inside joke. So I went to Texas and found Arnold Samuelson's daughter, and the chapter in question is called "Shadow Story." But we should move on.
James Hill helped me with every one of these images. We pored over these pictures.
This is Hemingway on the docks of Bimini. That's Mike Strater on the far left. That's the Baroness von Blixen, number two. That's Pauline with her hair grown out, number three.
There's the '30s tightend, rangy as a Hollywood movie star. This is June 1935, docks of Bimini. And that's Bror Blixen, who had been married – the great book of Africa is Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. That was her pen name. This was Bror Blixen, her one-time lover.
SCOTT SIMON: This is before she met up with Robert Redford, right? [laughter]
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Yes. Meryl Streep played her. This is Hemingway on Bimini with a fish. I love this photograph. We want to invite questions from the audience, but here is the father who doesn't look hateful, does he? He's grown out his beard, he's on Bimini.
There's little Gigi, protectively crouched between the father's spread-apart legs.
SCOTT SIMON: Is he about four there?
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Gigi's going to turn four in November. This is three to four months ahead of that, before he will first get caught. That's Jack in the middle, with his head characteristically down because he was always a bashful, shy kid. And that's Patrick on the far left with his hands on his hips, as if to replicate his Daddy, saying, "Ain't afraid of nothin'."
This is Pilar, early in her life, before her flying bridge was built. This is the man. I was saying to the photographer taking some pictures here tonight how Hemingway was so beautifully aware. He had a genius for being in the right place with the camera. And James told me a long time ago that JFK and Hemingway both understood the click of the shutter, maybe better than almost anybody we can think of. Am I quoting you half-correctly?
This is Gigi in a little dinghy. He's caught a fish. It's in the '40s. This is a little attached boat. Pilar is out of sight. This is the boy already fighting against these terrible compulsions. Gigi was so loveable. He was the little imp of the family. He's the youngest kid and so you always pick on him.
This is Pilar steaming from Havana Harbor. That's the Morrow Castle over on the right. That's Hemingway up on the flying bridge. The flying bridge was added in 1937. See the man at the stern with his foot up? Gosh, I've got to say hello. Walter, you'll be watching this.
That man is alive. He's 86 years old. He's in Woodland Hills, California.
The journalist in me, Scott, when I found out that there was a living Hemingway witness, I was trembling. I discovered this man was a young embassy officer in Havana, 25 years old, and comes into Hemingway's life and becomes intimate with Hemingway. And when I found out there was someone still alive, not in the family, who knew Hemingway for two years of his life and was out on Pilar, I could not keep my fingers from trembling to dial the number; I had to wait till the next day to calm down. And I had been a journalist for 30 years at that point. And I've been visiting Walter Houk, who turned 86 in June, and he won't be watching this right now, but I'll get him– I talked with him yesterday. He's a wonderful man. And that's him with his foot up on the stern.
Hemingway, if he were alive today, would be 112. So how many people can you find? It's very easy to get his age. He was born a year before the 20th century; he was born in 1899.
Just a add a year to almost any event.
That’s Gigi in the fighting chair. The fighting chair is where you fight the fish. Doesn't the boy look meditative, pensive, ruminative, sad, complex?
That's Pat, the Mexican mouse. His father had a damn name for all of them, behind him.
This is the man with a Tommy gun on Bimini who wants to shoot sharks and bloody the water. Why? He wants to kill these sharks with a Tommy gun because they are ravaging the tuna and the marlin that he wants to bring in. So Hemingway, he hates sharks with all his might.
This was before the flying bridge was built. There's the man, the proud owner of his boat.
This is very new in her life.
I love this picture. This is in Havana. I was able to get the exact date. I was able to track it through newspapers. That's Pauline on the right who always had a stylish way with clothes. That's Arnold Samuelson, the Shadow Story, the man who came to dinner. And there is the '30s movie star, sitting on the left. Are those Danish bottles of beer with their stoppers in them?
If that's a Havana newspaper on the backside of that table, and believe me, I got the actual copies of the Havana Post. It was the only English language daily in Cuba. I got the University of Pennsylvania to borrow them from Cuba. They came to me. I'm poring over them with a magnifying glass. I can't swear that that's the Havana Post of that date, but if it is, there's an Ernest Hemingway story on A1 of that page, of that day.
They went out and caught a fish that day. Pauline caught it. This is Gigi standing watch on the backside of the boat.
This is Ernest Hemingway, this is all about the antecedents. This is 1904 in northern Michigan with the big sombrero and the big wicker creel with the overlong cane pole, fishing at Horton's Creek. I have trout fished in Horton's Creek. I can tell you that it is icy cold and that it is alive with fat, pulpy rainbows. So all the watery antecedents begin in childhood. And this starts a chapter called "Before."
This is the father with his three sons. Look at that father embracing that youngest child.
Under way. That's Hemingway piloting and that's several of the mates on board. They're going out for a day of fishing. Hemingway is at the wheel, you can barely see him there.
Boy, this'll lead to the questions. I went in search of Ernest Hemingway's three sons in 1987.
Is that where this book started? I don't think so. I think it started so far back. This is 1980. This is what I looked like when I was a young, energetic man. That's me on the left, and ladies and gentlemen, that's not Ernest Hemingway; that's Ernest Hemingway's little brother.
He was 16 years younger.
And my wife and I were in weekend escape from the snows of Washington, DC, and inadvertently, completely by accident, stroke of luck, met Hemingway's brother in the Grumman Goose seaplane going over to Bimini. He sat right ahead of us. I said, "Are you by any chance Ernest Hemingway's brother?" He said, "Yeah, and if you're lucky it will get you a cup of coffee somewhere." He turned out to be a wonderfully nice guy and told me all these impossible-sounding stories. He was the first guy who told me about Gigi. I said, “It annot be true, cannot be true.”
SCOTT SIMON: This is Les.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: This is Les Hemingway, Leicester Hemingway. 1980. Two years later, shot himself with a borrowed pistol in front of his home in Miami Beach.
SCOTT SIMON: Is it your phrase, Paul, or was it his phrase, that to be Hem's younger brother was to be like growing up in the shadow of a volcano.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Who could ever live under the shadow of a Hemingway volcano? Ladies and gentlemen, here's a terrible, terrible statistic. In a churchgoing, Protestant, middle class, suburban Chicago family of eight, mother, father and six children – Ernest was the second-born – four died by their own hand and maybe a fifth. That's why I think that some of these things were beyond Hemingway's control.
SCOTT SIMON: Please, we do invite your questions. Is this Charlie?
PAUL HENDRICKSON: This is Charlie Clements, a great man and friend who showed up tonight.
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: Don't embarrass me further, Paul. On page 219 …
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Oh, my God. [laughter]
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: … you have a marvelous description of something Gigi told you on a night, you said it was about 94 degrees, in the Coconut Grove nightclub and it is so eloquent. I'm just curious if he spoke that, how you captured it. It probably, I think, is the essence of what it was like to grow up being a son of this very macho man and trying to please him and be his son.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Should I read what Gigi said?
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: I think you should. And then tell us, did you take notes on that?
Did you have a tape recorder? I was just taken by it.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: I had both, and I fill in my notes obsessively later that night. I hadn't slept for three days because I had gotten the other sons up in Montana and Idaho, and finally Gigi called me and said, "If you get here by tomorrow, I'll talk to you." So I got a cross-country flight, charged it to my American Express card. Couldn't sleep. The whole thing was incredibly surreal.
CHARLIE CLEMENTS: I haven't read Papa, but I know how eloquent he is by that statement.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: You've got to read Papa. It's 100 pages long. Norman Mailer wrote the introduction and he said, "By god, the man is alive on the page."
Here's what Gigi told me: "He always had this tremendous need to have a son who would do well, please him inordinately, but how we felt so compelled to do all these things to make him love us. Look, my brother Patrick went off to Africa to be a professional hunter. So did I for a time. That's no way for an adult to spend his life, taking people out with guns to destroy animals. But this was the kind of person I consciously and unconsciously knew he admired, and so did my brother Pat. Pat would have been so much happier being a curator in a museum." The quote goes on. And I won't read it because we need another question. But Gigi says, "I don't know how exactly it was done, the destruction. You tell me."
Yes, sir?
Q: Aside from being a literary genius, I wonder, with the work that you've done in writing this book and coming to know Hemingway, if there is a nuance, a personality characteristic, something that's almost undefinable that set him apart to write the way that he wrote.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: What explains genius? I don't have the answer for that. Hemingway's mother was artistic. She was a painter. She was a pianist. She gave music lessons. She was a kind of literary artistic figure in her community. He gets the artistic quotient there. His father's a medical man who took Hemingway from earliest boyhood outdoors, so he gets the natural world, but a scientific bent. You put both of those things together, does that equate to Ernest Hemingway? I don't think so. What explains Bob Dylan, sir? Who were his antecedents? So I'm not sure there's any explaining this.
Q: I've enjoyed this very much.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Nice beard, sir. Fits the theme tonight.
Q: Thank you very much. Grew it just for this occasion, actually. [laughter] Now, for those of us who aren't going to get to go to Cuba any time soon, there is what's supposed to be the sister of Pilar at a Bass Pro Shop on the Keys. And it looks a lot like the pictures I've seen of Pilar. Have you seen that boat? And does it bear any resemblance?
PAUL HENDRICKSON: No. I'll answer this very quickly. It's just a bogus boat. And if you read the handout, they say Pilar's sister ship. It wasn't even built by the same shipyard. It vaguely looks like Pilar. You know what it is? It's a tourist attraction, it's a suck-in, it's to get people to pull off the Keys highway and go into this big Bass Pro Shop, and you see Pilar, the words. And then you read the handout and what they're essentially saying is, "We'd like to think of this as Pilar's sister ship." It's all entirely bogus.
Q: Thank you very much.
SCOTT SIMON: Saved you a trip. [laughter]
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Yes, sir?
Q: I wasn't going to say anything, but I can't resist after this last exchange. I have a friend who owns a boat on the North Shore of Boston, who – before I paid any serious attention to
Hemingway – had a boat that he said was a sister ship to Hemingway's Pilar. [laughter] And I've seen the boat and I've never seen Pilar before this evening, but I have to say it's the spitting image. So I'm curious. You said earlier that this was a production boat.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: A stock boat, yes.
Q: So I'm curious.
PAUL HENDRICKSON: They use the same hulls and these boats came off the production assembly line at Wheeler Shipyard, Inc., at the foot of Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn. Until a few years ago, at the International Game Fishing Association Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, there was a 1934 Wheeler. As opposed to the one at the Bass Pro Shop, which wasn't even made by the same boat company, this one was made by Wheeler. It did come off the weighs in 1934. So that boat can legitimately be called Pilar's sister boat. But when you examine it closely, they're all kinds of little differences.
There are Wheeler boats still around. The grandson of the founder of the company is still alive in Stamford, Connecticut. His basement became documentary gold for me. There are boats out there that look very much like Pilar. There's a whole cottage industry of people building little Pilars and selling them. [laughter]
Q: This was an older boat and privately owned. He wasn't going around making …
PAUL HENDRICKSON: Making the claim that it was Pilar.
Q: Yeah, exactly.
SCOTT SIMON: Let me ask Tom Putnam. Are there any little Pilars for sale in the gift shop? [laughter]
PAUL HENDRICKSON: But I met a man in the Florida Keys who was building beautiful, beautiful replicas. He was an old roustabout, and I guess he's still around. I asked him, "Why are you doing it?" He said, "Because I think that Pilar was the first true sportfisherman boat that we know of that came large into American consciousness.” I thought that was a beautiful word, sportfisherman is all one word. That's how they would say it, a sportfisherman boat. This boat has tremendous resonance in American literature. It has tremendous resonance not only in his life … See, all I wanted was a metaphor, a story-telling vehicle, an entry, a way to think about. I wasn't trying to do a technical treatise on the boat. I'm not a boatman myself. That's why in the coda, at the end, I treated this business of "could this be the actual boat," leave that story to someone else. I wanted a figure of speech, so to speak.
Q: When I read about or hear about Hemingway chasing German U-boats in Pilar, I'm kind of skeptical. Am I wrong to feel that?
PAUL HENDRICKSON: No, you're not wrong. And I can be criticized, and rightly, for not going into that period very much. During two-and-a-half years of World War II, he turned Pilar into a Q-boat, a decoy boat, a sub-hunting boat, because German submarines are patrolling off the coast of Cuba. In the usual Hemingway way, it got polluted with too much ego and booze, but there was real bravery also at the heart of it. His wife, Martha Gelhorn, accused that this was a way of staying out of the war in Europe, that he was cruising around the Caribbean, outfitted with government funds and government armatures.
I don't see it that way. I think that he genuinely was willing to sacrifice the blowing up of his boat and the blowing up of his life to hunt German subs. They never encountered one.
There's a whole book on this. This is one reason I did not go into it extensively. The biographer Michael Reynolds, who is only one of many Hemingway biographers, goes into it very deeply. Two years ago, in 2009, a book came out called The Hemingway Patrols, in which this subject is gone into extensively. I go into it this much.
Q: And I'd also be interested just to hear anything you'd have to say about how you write -- a certain time of day? Legal pad? Computer?
PAUL HENDRICKSON: I have to write in the mornings. And I have to try to read over what I've done, as Hemingway actually always tried to do. He'd go back to page one and try to catch the rhythm. I write on a computer. The first book I ever wrote, I wrote on a typewriter, and then I would borrow an electric typewriter, and that was my computer. But I pounded on it.
But once you get on a computer, I don't think you can go back. I wish that somehow I could write a book like this, but I don't think I can. And at my advanced age, about three hours is the most I can get close to any kind of writing. And here's my theory about writing: Off the failure of yesterday and off the failure of today, you may get something on the page tomorrow that will work.
TOM PUTNAM: Before we thank our two panelists, can I make a couple of announcements? First, the book is on sale, and Paul is happy to sign copies. So please come up after the signing.
Second, we've put a small exhibit together of some photos, and you can actually see the receipt that Hemingway got when he bought the Pilar. And one of our interns, Hannah, has put that exhibit table together. It's right outside, so please see that on your way out.
And lastly, we wanted to make Scott Simon feel right at home, so we thought we would try pledge week here at the Kennedy Library. [laughter] And for the very first time ever, if you enjoyed tonight's Forum, you can text on your cell phone a certain number and a small donation of $5 will go to help us support this and other forums.
But please, pause now and help me to thank both Scott Simon and Paul Hendrickson. [applause]
THE END