Paul Hendrickson read Sunday morning from the prologue of his book Hemingway’s Boat. The biography focuses on a 27-year period of the author’s life from April 1934 when he bought Pilar from a Brooklyn shipyard until the end in July 1961 when he took his own life in Ketchum, Idaho.
A Washington Post journalist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hendrickson explained the approach to his book as “averted vision,” a sailor’s term whereby looking at a subject off to the side—and not head on—enables one to see the subject more clearly. Pilar was significant, Hendrickson notes, because she endured three marriages, and was perhaps the thing Hemingway loved most as he spent his days in Key West, Bimini, and Cuba sport-fishing on the Gulf Stream in search of marlin, sailfish, and tuna.
“I wondered if I could find out everything that happened on that boat,” Hendrickson said. “To have one real ride on her and feel her under me.” He explained that he hopes to link the words “boat” and “Hemingway” in the same way “bat” and “Joe DiMaggio” are linked.
As an “amateur Hemingway student,” Hendrickson met Hemingway’s younger brother Les in Bimini by chance, and also interviewed his three sons for a series in the Washington Post called “Papa’s Boys.”
In his reading this morning, he selected a passage from the end of Hemingway’s life that encapsulates what may be the last words he ever wrote in a letter dated June 15, 1961—17 days before his suicide. Hemingway was in a hospital bed at St. Mary’s psychiatric ward in Rochester, Minnesota, and in a “moment of lucidity,” he wrote a letter to a nine-year-old boy who was ill in Denver with a congenital heart disease.
In his letter’s postscript, Hemingway writes: “Feeling fine and very cheerful about things in general and hope to see you all very soon. Papa.”
“His life, like his boat, beat across so many cross-currents,” Hendrickson said. “Amidst so much ruin, still the beauty.”
Scott Thompson says:
I loved Hendrickson’s Hemingway book. It was fun reading stories about Hemingway from a different perspective and seeing how important water was in his life.
Judy Henn says:
Hemingway’s Boat is a tone-poem in honor of a ghost whose one constant for over 30 years was the “Pilar” to whom he could return.
Peter krynicki says:
It is a great 3/4 s of a book. But the emphasis on Gregory at the end ruined it for me. The descriptions of the boys on Pilar were informative, but the focus on Greg seemed antithetical to the purpose of the book. Why not focus on Patrick of John?
Or what would have been more in keeping with the title, all three.