Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson Read Free Book Online Page B

the author was still married in the late summer of 1936, more than two years after the safari was over, when the story appeared for the first time in print, in
Esquire
, which was also about five months before Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn in the Key West bar named Sloppy Joe’s.
    Two letters, both written at sea, about a week apart, four months before this pictured moment in New York City, seem to say much about his state of mind. One letter is full of belligerence and prevarication and pridefulness; the other is tender, loving, funny, and boy-adventuresome. The first letter was written late at night to one of his friendlier critics; the second was sent to his middle son. The first letter ran to more than eighteen hundred words and may have been typed (the original is apparently lost); the second was fairly brief and in longhand. The letters were written on a scow of a boat named the SS
General Metzinger
, part of the Messageries Maritimes line, on the front end of the African trip. The
Metzinger
had sailed from Marseille on November 22, 1933, bearing the Hemingway shooting party of three through the Mediterranean Sea toward Port Said, Egypt. The ship then navigated through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, to its landing at Mombasa, East Africa, on December 8, 1933.
    The shooting party of three bound for safari consisted of Hemingway, his wife, and Hemingway’s close Key West friend, Charles Thompson, who sold fishing tackle and ran Thompson’s Hardware store at the waterfront. Thompson and Hemingway had known each other for close to six years, since the spring of 1928. Both he and Thompson were tall, outdoorsy men, with similar physiques and similar interests, born in the same year, 1899. Thompson, whose family were old-time Key Westers, had a boat, an old-fashioned nineteen-footer. Evenings, when he got off work, Charles would come by and collect Hemingway—who was living with the pregnant Pauline in a sweatbox of temporary lodgings above a Ford Motor garage, working on
A Farewell to Arms
—and the two would troll into Jack Channel or over toward Stock Island to fish for grouper and snapper. They became fast friends. Charles wasn’t in the least a literary man, or even a very educated man, but the more telling difference between them was that he had a very soft personality. He was a man you could dominate. Originally, Hemingway had hoped that Archie MacLeish would go on the safari with him, and he had also invited other long-standing friends, includingHenry Strater, whom everyone called Mike, a painter and amateur boxer and graduate of Princeton, who’d known Hemingway since Paris sparring sessions in 1922. Both Strater and MacLeish had known better than to give in to the repeated invitations. Hemingway was a friend you might not be able to live without—as MacLeish would one day say—but he also was a friend with whom you wouldn’t chance an extended shooting trip.
    The critic to whom Hemingway sent his late-night diatribe was Clifton Fadiman of
The New Yorker
, known to friends as Kip. He’d done a long and serious review of the story collection
Winner Take Nothing
in the form of an open letter (“A Letter to Mr. Hemingway”), in which the reviewer was essentially entreating the author—it was obvious how he admired Hemingway’s work—to go on to other themes if he wished to grow as an artist. Hemingway’s reply, a month after the review had been published, was written four days after the
Metzinger
had left Marseille for Africa. He put at the top of the upper-right-hand corner on the first page: “A Bord du General Metzinger, le 26 Novembre 1933, One day out of Port Said.” The letter got more rageful and scornful as it went on. It was as if Hemingway was writing to somebody whom he knew was both sympathetic and tough-minded toward his work—and yet couldn’t stop himself from sounding immature