Nonfiction review: Hemingway's Boat

Biographers (as well as graduate students looking for dissertation topics) have mined the darker recesses of Ernest Hemingway's history and made him one of the more closely examined literary figures of the 20th century.

This month, though, sees the publication of a book that, at first glance, seems to have jumped the shark: Paul Hendrickson's "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934 – 1961."

Yes, that's right. Hendrickson has written a book centered on Pilar, the 38-foot twin cabin cruiser that Hemingway bought in 1934 and owned until his suicide in 1961.

Skeptical? Hemingway aficionados have a lot more to look forward to than they might think. Pilar loomed large in Hemingway's life, Hendrickson convincingly argues.

"A man who let his own insides get eaten out by the diseases of fame had dreamed new books on this boat," he writes. "He'd taught his sons to reel in something that feels like Moby Dick on this boat. He'd accidentally shot himself in both legs on this boat. He'd fallen drunk from the flying bridge on this boat. He'd written achy, generous, uplifting poetic letters on this boat. He'd propositioned women on this boat. He'd hunted German subs on this boat. He'd saved guests and family members from shark attack on this boat. He'd acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat."

It doesn't stop with Hemingway's robust lifestyle onboard, either. Hendrickson speculates that Pilar also may have influenced Hemingway's much-imitated, tight-lipped prose style, which became more "expansive" in the early years of his exploring the Gulf Stream onboard Pilar.

"Could the artistic change have something to do with getting out of those tight, damp streets of Europe, away from those repressive, four-square enclosures of Oak Park so bulwarked against nature and the cold? Could his fuller prose line, his more complex sentence structure, have to do with a kind of literal and metaphorical thawing out, a throwing open of windows and doors?"

Sure, it's speculative, but enticing nonetheless.

Hendrickson's narrative is often playful, with flashbacks, flash-forwards and freeze-frames and a pace that sometimes feels as if he's a crafty funhouse guide taking us firmly by the elbow.

"The young man's name is Arnold Morse Samuelson, and he is in for the ride of his life," Hendrickson writes on Page 28. "But that's running out ahead."

Hendrickson circles back to Samuelson on Page 105, only to write: "Keep him here for a moment on Hemingway's doorstep, with his arm raised, in the dozen or so heartbeats between his knock and the crowding of the other side of the doorway with a sizeable shadow."

Only a biographer in full control of his voluminous notes could spin readers this gracefully across his pages.

"Hemingway's Boat" takes a darker turn as Hendrickson gets closer to his subject's suicide.

Hendrickson's overarching task is Herculean: to rescue Hemingway's reputation and show that hidden beneath the thick hide of a macho boor was a gentle soul whose highest goals were admirably lofty.

"The Hemingway myth, however much oversold and devalued, can still powerfully stand in a new century for a great many tensions unresolved in American males, or so I believe — and not only males," Hendrickson writes. "I also believe that all of Hemingway's writing, every bit of it, even at its most self-parodistic and Papa-cult worst, is seeking to be about the living of this life. The being of this life. The doing of this life. The engaging of this life. And in that sense, the work — and even, I am willing to say, so much of the coarsened personal history — can be thought of as something spiritual and indeed almost holy."

Canonizing Hemingway might be a stretch for readers who aren't used to picturing their saints posing next to their latest big-game kill. But "Hemingway's Boat" — a fetchingly kinetic book — makes headway against what sometimes feels like a tidal wave of Hemingway naysayers.