New Approaches to Hemingway

Next to William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway is probably the most written-about writer who ever lived. Biographies have been piled on top of biographies in the years since his death. Critical studies have hotly succeeded other studies. The challenge for anyone seeking to revisit this much picked-over material, therefore, is to come up with a fresh angle.

As the title suggests, Paul Hendrickson's strategy in Hemingway's Boat is to examine the author through the prism of his relationship to the Pilar, his much-loved fishing boat. Thus the book opens in 1934 with Hemingway's purchase of the boat at the Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn, New York. The opening chapters detail at some length the boat's history, its manufacture, its characteristics, its feel. This is followed by the shakedown cruise in the sea off Key West, and then gradually Hendrickson begins to bring on board the characters who will figure in the coming narrative: Hemingway's wives, his sons, his boatmates, and various visitors. One of these last is a young man from North Dakota named Arnold Samuelson, who has hitchhiked down to Florida for the sole purpose of meeting Hemingway and discussing writing with him. Samuelson craved to be a writer. He has been mostly either ignored or dismissed by previous biographers, but Hendrickson devotes whole chapters to him in which we see Hemingway at his best: as benefactor, as mentor, as gracious host. He not only hires Samuelson to help out on his boat, but he instructs him in his attempts at writing, and even helps him get some fishing pieces published in outdoor magazines. This is the Good Hemingway.

Another young man Hemingway takes a shine to and helps is Walter Houk, a U.S. consular employee in Havana. He meets Houk through Nita Jensen, his part-time secretary; and, before you know it, he is hosting the young couple's wedding ceremony at his legendary Finca Vigía (Lookout Farm) outside Havana. Houk and Nita spend a lot of time on the Pilar, fishing and drinking and observing the Hemingways and their retinue at play, and it is Houk—who is still alive and was interviewed by Hendrickson on numerous occasions—who provides much of the fodder for the book. Houk is a staunch Hemingway defender, aware of all the great man's faults but an admirer nonetheless. He attends annual Hemingway academic conferences and has even written some Hemingway articles himself. From him we get more of the Good Hemingway.

There's a lot of jumping back and forth in Hemingway's Boat, which at times makes it hard to follow. Hendrickson, a former Washington Post reporter who has been on the Hemingways' collective case for more than twenty years now (he wrote a series for the Post on the three Hemingway sons in 1987), has accumulated lots of material and often seems at great pains to get all of it into his book. His subject may have earned his early reputation as a minimalist, but Hendrickson himself has chosen the maximalist route. Few stones are left unturned.

What makes Hemingway's Boat memorable, however, and what will make it an invaluable resource for future Hemingway scholars, is not the author's depiction of Hemingway's loving relationship with his boat but his revelations about his tortured relationship with his youngest son, Gregory, known by one and all as Gigi, pronounced with hard g's: Giggy. The two were very much alike. Physically, Gigi was said to be a smaller, "pocket" version of his father. They were also much alike in their emotional and psychological complexion—and they knew it. Gigi was a bipolar cross-dresser. He acted on his impulses, going so far as to have a sex-change operation late in life. He died of a heart attack in a female...