Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson Read Free Book Online

attacking his books. It was as if the reviewers had secretly gotten together at a club in New York and voted to pile on—certainly in Hemingway’s view. They’d done it firstly with his nonfiction meditation on bullfighting in Spain,
Death in the Afternoon
, published in 1932, and even more with his third volume of short stories,
Winner Take Nothing
, published on October 27, 1933, when Hemingway was in Europe, about a month before the trip to Africa. Individual stories in the fourteen-story work certainly had been admired—“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “Fathers and Sons,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “Wine of Wyoming.” But as an aesthetic whole, the book was judged by some of the country’s most prestigious reviewers to be tedious and anti-intellectual and boorish in its subject matter. Louis Kronenberger of
The New York Times:
“One reads a story like the first and finest in the present book, a story called ‘After the Storm,’ and one regrets that in the main such incomparable equipment as Hemingway’s goes off so many times with a proud and clean report—and hits nothing.” T. S. Matthews of
The New Republic:
“Some of his current subjects are the kind of abnormalities that fascinate adolescence but really have very little to do with the price of our daily bread.… This may sound like an attack on Hemingway, and it is. I think he is one of the few exciting writers we have, and that consequently we ought to see, if we can, what all the excitement is about. And I think that what it is about is adolescence.” H. S. Canby of the
Saturday Review of Literature:
“When you are bored by Hemingway, as I frankly am by a half dozen of these new stories, which are repetitive with the slow pound, pound of a hammer upon a single mood, there is nothing to revive you except flashes of excellent observation.” Max Perkins had tried to send a pacifying letter to Hemingway in Paris, along with half a dozen of these reviews, while Hemingway was engaged in last-minute errands for the safari. He would not be pacified by his editor, even though the book was selling well enough.
    Insult to injury, his onetime Paris mentor, Gertrude Stein, had also turned on him savagely in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
. Several installments had appeared in
The Atlantic
. Stein had actually called him “yellow.” Well, just like Eastman, he’d get her back in spades. That old fat lesbian bitch.
    It was in Paris, just before leaving for Africa, that this alternately gloomy and exhilarated and lashing-out man had written “A Paris Letter” for Arnold Gingrich’s
Esquire
. He’d become a contributor to this new (and surprisingly successful) men’s monthly, published out of his hometown,Chicago. In “A Paris Letter”—it appeared in the February 1934 issue, while Hemingway was on safari—the author had talked about Paris not belonging to him any longer and, presciently, about the coming of another war in Europe. It was all very gloomy, he wrote. “This old friend shot himself. That old friend took an overdose of something.… People must be expected to kill themselves when they lose their money, I suppose, and drunkards get bad livers, and legendary people usually end by writing their memoirs.”
    And what of Hemingway’s marital relationship with the boyish-looking woman in the zebra-striped suit and funny hat standing beside him in this held moment of Manhattan time?
    Hemingway had been married to his second wife for seven years, the wedding having taken place within a month of his divorce from Hadley Richardson in April 1927, and there is evidence to suggest that the marriage was mostly over in Hemingway’s mind by April 1934. He and the former Pauline Pfeiffer of Piggott, Arkansas, who were the parents of two young sons—and whom they’d been away from for months—would