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  • Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
  • Joseph M. Flora
Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. By Paul Hendrickson. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2011. 531 pp. Cloth $30.00.

For Paul Hendrickson, the world has had too many biographies of Ernest Hemingway. Carlos Baker's Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969) remains his gold standard; of the rest, Michael Reynolds's five-volume biography wins the laurels. Others he finds too thesis-ridden or deficient in capturing the essence of their subject. In his foray into the Hemingway story, Hendrickson aims to get closer than his predecessors to the man, though, as his title indicates, he does not mean to provide a conventional biography. An object, rather than a person, is the title by which readers will name the book. The boat, Pilar, becomes a symbol even before we begin reading. But what comes after the colon takes us to the essence of what Hendrickson wishes to accent—great passions followed by the pain of loss. Hendrickson's book embraces emotion.

From the start, he assumes that his reader possesses a good deal of information about Hemingway's life. Many of those readers will be familiar with one, several, or all of the major biographies. The reader unfamiliar with any of the biographies will, however, find a good deal of Hemingway's life recounted. Hendrickson is not much concerned with chronology or completeness. Only late in the book does he consider the Oak Park and Michigan years. Paris he mostly touches indirectly. Probing the consequences of extraordinary fame for Hemingway's art and happiness, he is determined to approach the drama through a new lens. Baker aimed for scholarly detachment. Hendrickson, in contrast, encourages his reader to join him on an exceedingly personal pilgrimage.

He makes no bones about his role as player in the story he tells. He has been fishing from Hemingway's boat, as it were, for nigh on to seven years. This narrative opens with the first person singular, and that pronoun dominates throughout. Hendrickson means for us to view Hemingway's Boat as his own story as well as Hemingway's. We witness him interviewing his sources, see them become more than sources. He shares judgments about them and about persons in the stories they provide. He judges contemporary critics and academicians as well as critics who shaped Hemingway's image during his lifetime. [End Page 119] He takes the reader into what seems like his full confidence, sharing his prejudices about virtually everything he considers. Sometimes he judges in anger, sometimes with humor. In this, he is like his subject.

Foregrounding himself, Hendrickson similarly accents his reader, whom he addresses directly and often. Boldly, he provides an unexpected reason for joining this pilgrimage: Hemingway and his writing have the "capacity to stir up complex things, to make us uneasy, defensive, secretly troubled about our own far less glamorous and sedentary selves" (17). Hemingway's Boat becomes a challenge to us. We have a stake in the narrative, he insists, but we also have a guide with our best interests at heart. Warmly, he shapes our journey using family photographs at the beginnings of chapters. We look at the photographs together in a manner common in family experience. He tells us what to see, and at the end of a chapter may advise that we look back at the picture with our new knowledge. Imperative sentences abound. He insists that his book be a collaborative effort. Appropriately, he gives the final sentence of the biography to someone other than himself—Pierre Saviers, the psychotherapist son of Hemingway's Ketchum doctor and friend. In that declarative sentence the pronoun is we.

The italicized interludes that precede his prologue, the four sections of the biography, and the individual chapters (titled but not numbered) are also important to the technique of Hendrickson's unconventional biography. Epigraphs from Hemingway's letters and work introduce the four sections, tweaking memory and inviting emotional response from the reader about to enter what may be familiar ground but will also be new. The interludes become tonal pieces, emphasizing Hemingway...

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