Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

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Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

3.62 of 5 stars 3.62 · rating details · 681 ratings · 172 reviews

From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood.

Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the write...more From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood.

Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer’s exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.

We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities.

Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer’s boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity—to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend.

We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a cross-dresser, and died squalidly and alone in a Miami women’s jail. He was the son Hemingway forsook the least, yet the one who disappointed him the most, as Gigi acted out for nearly his whole life so many of the tortured, ambiguous tensions his father felt. Hendrickson’s bold and beautiful book strikingly makes the case that both men were braver than we know, struggling all their lives against the complicated, powerful emotions swirling around them. As Hendrickson writes, “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.”

Hemingway’s Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.

From the Hardcover edition.(less)

ebook, 544 pages

Published September 20th 2011 by Vintage

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Dec 13, 2011 John Arfwedson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What a book! Hendrickson takes the quirky view that writing a (kind of) biography of Hemingway using the old man's love of his boat, the Pilar, and everything it connects him to will work. It does, in fascinating and unpredictable ways. PH writes, on every page, with an urgency that fully catches you up in his obsession. And he IS obsessed, just as much as Santiago is in "The Old Man and the Sea" to get that big fish back to shore.

PH's research is not merely relentless, it is joyful, and it is...more What a book! Hendrickson takes the quirky view that writing a (kind of) biography of Hemingway using the old man's love of his boat, the Pilar, and everything it connects him to will work. It does, in fascinating and unpredictable ways. PH writes, on every page, with an urgency that fully catches you up in his obsession. And he IS obsessed, just as much as Santiago is in "The Old Man and the Sea" to get that big fish back to shore.

PH's research is not merely relentless, it is joyful, and it is this quality, really, that sets the book apart as a reading experience. Everything is recreated, plunged into, imagined and reimagined, with a depth and intensity that grab you by the throat and never let go. Obviously, the book centers on Hem but it also presents side biographies of little-known friends of Hem's who serve to illuminate the great man's contradictory qualities.

Of course I use the phrase "great man" ironically. How could you not? Hemingway is easily one of the most tragically and artistically compelling figures ever to bestride the world stage. He was a great writer and a terrible one; he was a staunch friend and a vicious rejecter; he was a loving father and an absent one. He was all these things at once, sometimes on the same day.

The man's enduring magnetism comes first from the art and the achievement (How does a young man in his twenties write those short stories? There is at the heart of Hem's best work a profound sense of the death-in-life and the life-in-death that animates everything. His answer to this, on and off the page, was a passionate living and dying every day. Even as we turn our eyes away from the carnage, it is riveting)...and then from the legend. The latter both made him and destroyed him. It fed his hubris which, eventually, swallowed him whole. It is easy to dismiss Hemingway, and many do, but Hendrickson makes us see (and especially, FEEL) the reasons not to. He offers up the man in all his stunning complexities and larger-than-lifeness. You would not have wanted to be his friend when he turned on you (as he turned on so many) but here you grasp why so many were drawn to him anyway. The example of abused/rejected friend who stands for all the others is Archibald Macleish (himself a famous writer/poet) and here is what he says: "It would so abundantly easy to describe Ernest in terms, all of which would be historically correct, which would present him as a completely insufferable human being. Actually, he was one of the most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creatures I have ever known."

Hendrickson uses a phrase several times in the book which sums it all up, in a poetic style echoing Hemingway's own: "Amid so much ruin, still the beauty."

We live such gray, ordinary lives, most of us, and so the ruin and the beauty draw us back. Always the beauty. Always the ruin. Always together. (less)

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Jan 09, 2012 Lewis Weinstein rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

First impression ... "Hemingway's Boat" is a wonderful combination of Hemingway gossip and Hemingway writing.

Unfortunately, this view was not sustained as I continued reading. After about 100 pages, my enthusiasm began to wane.

There is much repetition and a confusing lack of focus. The timeline and cast of characters has become very jumbled. I have the sense the author has lost control of the material and is just pumping out everything he knows. Yet, every once in a while there is a fascinating...more

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Mar 14, 2012 Jay F rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Certainly Hemingway has more than his share of biographers, of critical studies of his life and works, of explorations of his creative processes. Is there really a need for yet another book that digests and interprets his personal and public persona and evaluates his creative production?

Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat is the unequivocal “yes.” Hendrickson approaches Hemingway obliquely, if you will, and, in the process, lets us see Hemingway in some different lights. It is not that he tells...more Certainly Hemingway has more than his share of biographers, of critical studies of his life and works, of explorations of his creative processes. Is there really a need for yet another book that digests and interprets his personal and public persona and evaluates his creative production?

Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat is the unequivocal “yes.” Hendrickson approaches Hemingway obliquely, if you will, and, in the process, lets us see Hemingway in some different lights. It is not that he tells us something radically new about Hemingway. Rather, he approaches what we might already know from new angles.

Paul Hendrickson tells us from the start that he is not giving us a linear biography a la Michael Reynolds or a literary biography a la Kenneth Lynn:

[The book] isn’t meant to be a Hemingway biography, not in any conventional sense…. …My aim, rather, is to try to lock together the words “Hemingway” and “boat” in the same way that the locked-together and equally American words “DiMaggio” and “bat,” or Satchmo” and “horn,” will quickly mean something in the minds of most people….

So it’s about such ideas as fishing, friendship, and fatherhood, and love of water, and what it means to be masculine in our culture (as that culture is now rapidly changing), and the notion of being “boatstruck” (a malady that seems to affect men more than women), and how the deep good in us is often matched only by the perverse bad in us, and—not least—about the damnable way our demons seem to end up always following us... .

Hendrickson writes around those themes: he organizes his narrative thematically rather than strictly chronologically. He tells us that up front, too: “So there are more than a few purposeful zigzags and loop-arounds and time-bends and flashbacks and flash-forwards and other sort of departures from the main frame... .”

For the date-struck reader, Hemingway’s Boat can be a bit of a challenge. Hendrickson does not always root his reader with exact dates as he zigzags and loops around. But again, the book is not about dates and chronology but about themes and people who ricochet between the good and the perverse.

The focus on Pilar, Hemingway’s boat, is one structural device that Hendrickson uses to move his study forward. For the most part, it holds up as an organizer except for the final section when Hendrickson detours with an extended discussion of Gregory, Hemingway’s youngest child. In that last section Pilar almost disappears.

All of the central cast of characters who appear in Hendrickson’s study do have some connection to Pilar. All spent time with Hemingway fishing in the Gulf Stream. And it is from that cast that Hendrickson selects three figures to write about in detail, tracing their lives from their encounter with Pilar and Hemingway into the present. There is Arnold Samuelson who served as Pilar’s first mate during the first summer of Hemingway’s ownership in 1934; Walter Houk who courted his wife in 1951-52 under Hemingway’s Cuban roof; and Gregory Hemingway who lived his life in emotional symbiosis with his father from his birth until his death in 2001.

From their first encounters with Hemingway and Pilar, all three remained connected in various ways to Hemingway himself. As Hendrickson explores those multiple connections, the reader sees Hemingway in quite variegated lights. Out of it comes a reassessment of Hemingway’s creative life and of his social, personal relationships from primarily 1934 until his suicide in 1961. It is a vision of Hemingway far more complex and strongly human.

In a certain sense, Hendrickson’s approach is innovative and certainly fresh. I do think, however, that it requires some familiarity with both Hemingway’s life and works. Without some background, the reader might find the book’s zigzags and loop-arounds stumbling blocks to an informative read.
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May 27, 2013 Clare rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is a huge disappointment on more than one level.

It promised to be one of those rare (and getting rarer)books into which I could sink for days or even weeks. Unfortunately I was disabused of that notion very quickly.

The idea is good, to explore Hemingway through the ownership of Pilar, his boat but it all falls apart after that.

The book is confusing and fuzzy. The author seems to be operating in opposition to the adage that less is more and repeats himself, well, repeatedly. It meanders...more This book is a huge disappointment on more than one level.

It promised to be one of those rare (and getting rarer)books into which I could sink for days or even weeks. Unfortunately I was disabused of that notion very quickly.

The idea is good, to explore Hemingway through the ownership of Pilar, his boat but it all falls apart after that.

The book is confusing and fuzzy. The author seems to be operating in opposition to the adage that less is more and repeats himself, well, repeatedly. It meanders around and around, repeating itself. We are still in the first year of ownership half way through the(very thick) book. Tiny details are obsessed over for instance at least a paragraph is given over to whether Hemingway goes to the boat yard on a Wednesday or a Thursday(or some such) and THEN the subject is revisited!

Another character(Samuleson) is pulled up on the fact that he got the date he met Hemingway wrong by a day or so(do we care 80 years on ?) but applauded for other accuracies giving the impression that the author is deep in some sort of OCD.

And yet general information is neglected or presented out of sync. Gigis death is compared to Pauline Hemingways 50 years earlier and yet her death is not referred to anywhere else in the text.

I could go on I suppose but it is hard to continue to try and describe how incoherent this book truly is.

The only part of the story I enjoyed was the part about Arnold Samuelson which was relatively coherent and provided information and some analysis. A pity the author could not have captured this in the rest of the book.

As for the editing....well, there doesn't seem to have been any. If the fact that this made it onto the market is a reflection of the book publishing business then it's denizens must be illiterate cretins.

On another level it is depressing because it is a prime exapmle of the Emperors New Clothes that seems to be so prevalent in our media driven world. It is lauded as a brilliant book because it looks like it should be a brilliant book and it is written by some guy who teaches at a prestigious institute(boy, am I glad he ain't teaching me..) The fact that this book is nearly unreadable seems to be irrelevant to the majority of reviewers, an attitude that pervades the arts.

I hope someone in the future takes this idea and does it properly. In the mean time, don't waste your dosh.(less)

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May 12, 2013 Leon rated it 2 of 5 stars

...more

From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood.Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer’s exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities.Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer’s boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity—to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend.We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a cross-dresser, and died squalidly and alone in a Miami women’s jail. He was the son Hemingway forsook the least, yet the one who disappointed him the most, as Gigi acted out for nearly his whole life so many of the tortured, ambiguous tensions his father felt. Hendrickson’s bold and beautiful book strikingly makes the case that both men were braver than we know, struggling all their lives against the complicated, powerful emotions swirling around them. As Hendrickson writes, “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.”Hemingway’s Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.From the Hardcover edition.

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Apr 03, 2013 Sabine Stenning rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was a major disappointment. First of all, it's really only about Hemingway's boat for the first half of the book which ends around 1935 or so. After that it glosses over the rest of the 1930s and 1940s and concentrates on marginal characters in Hemingway's life until finally focusing full-time on Hemingway's son Gregory, AKA Gloria. There is almost no treatment of Martha Gellhorn, who was of course instrumental in finding Hem's house in Cuba. It's really a book that combines 1980s rese...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Buzz Malone rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For every book ever written by Hemingway, there are twenty that have been written about him. It is brazen and crass to believe that anyone could say anything about the man that hasn't already been said. At least, such was my feeling when I heard about this book. I dismissed it immediately as yet another exploitation of a life already picked apart by countless other scavengers. I even had to feign a smile when I opened the Christmas gift from my mother-in-law and it turned out to be a copy of Hem...more

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Oct 20, 2012 Michele Weiner rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have never been an admirer of Ernest Hemingway. I read A Farewell to Arms in high school (as assignment), consigned him to the ranks of authors I didn't care to read again, and never gave him another thought until my various book clubs decided to read The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife, all in the same year, and then there was Midnight in Paris... My curiosity was piqued. This 20-year-old Hemingway in Paris with his tomboy wife was not the boorish he-man I had expected. He...more I have never been an admirer of Ernest Hemingway. I read A Farewell to Arms in high school (as assignment), consigned him to the ranks of authors I didn't care to read again, and never gave him another thought until my various book clubs decided to read The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife, all in the same year, and then there was Midnight in Paris... My curiosity was piqued. This 20-year-old Hemingway in Paris with his tomboy wife was not the boorish he-man I had expected. He looked fragile, slim and almost too well-kept. I thought he looked effete, and I thought his first two wives looked like boys. I also thought the dialogue between himself and Hadley was weird- all that stuff about cutting their hair so they would be the same. Wanting to be the same. What was that about? I became interested.

Hemingway's Boat satisfied much of my curiosity about what the heck was wrong with Ernest Hemingway. Hendrickson chose a wonderful means of explaining the great man through his life on the sea and on his beloved boat, Pilar. He did a creditable job using quotes from Hemingway's writings and the memoirs written by so many of the family. And he tried to get a handle on Hemingway through the recollections of two young men who entered his orbit for a short time and shared his life.

I think Hendrickson was largely successful in his effort explain the complex psychology of Ernest Hemingway. The book is not a definitive biography, and is not supposed to be, but I liked the unusual approach and thought it lead to some good insights. There was too much detail about the peripheral characters whose lives intersected only very briefly with Hemingway's, and the overall organizational principle escaped me. On the plus side, the identification of Hemingway's psychological issues was meticulous and well-documented. The source of said issues, which plagued many members of this talented family, was no doubt genetic, inherited along with the huge chest and Hemingway smile, and included immense rage, bipolar disorder and sexual identity confusion. Not every family member was affected, but so many were... The author says more than once that Hemingway lived as long as he could. When he lost everything, he had to move on, and he pleads for compassionate understanding of Ernest and his most talented and most troubled boy, Gregory, who ended his life as a bipolar transgendered woman named Gloria, who dropped dead in a jail cell after being arrested wandering naked on a highway in Florida.

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Sep 16, 2012 Colby rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For a large chunk of the population the reaction to this book would probably be something along the lines of, "Ugh, another book about this jerk!" Aside from Shakespeare, has any other writer had more written about him, his life, and his work? Why the persistent fascination with Hemingway? What makes scholars, writers, readers, and journalists flock to this man? I think I've come with an answer. Hemingway created dozens of unforgettable and complex characters in his fiction; however, the most co...more For a large chunk of the population the reaction to this book would probably be something along the lines of, "Ugh, another book about this jerk!" Aside from Shakespeare, has any other writer had more written about him, his life, and his work? Why the persistent fascination with Hemingway? What makes scholars, writers, readers, and journalists flock to this man? I think I've come with an answer. Hemingway created dozens of unforgettable and complex characters in his fiction; however, the most complex and interesting character he ever created was Ernest Miller Hemingway. Why do we return to this man and his life over and over again? Because Hemingway, as a character, is as fascinating, as complex, as filled with contradictions and inner-battles as any fictional character ever created. His life story can be read as a heroic tragedy. In other words: We come back to Hemingway because, in his case, biography is as good and as compelling as the best fiction.

This book is unapologetic in its admiration of the writer. That being said, Hendrickson is never less than honest and fair in his reporting (he comes from the world of journalism and not academia...a wonderful and refreshing fact). If you want a book to confirm that Ernest Hemingway was an immature, sexist, over-macho, prick, this book will do that for you. If you want a book to confirm for you that Hemingway was just a scared little boy overcompensating for his deep sensitivity and insecurities, this book will also do that. At this point, you just can't have a serious conversation about Hemingway without recognizing that he was both and that both identities were at war within him from his childhood to his final, tortured days.

Hendrickson excels at presenting Hemingway's relationships with minor figures in his life and with his three children, most especially Gregory (who would die in a prison cell after a sex-change operation and a life spent trying to rationalize his urges to dress like a woman under the weight of being Ernest "hairy chest" Hemingway's son). The book skips chunks of Hemingway's life I would have liked to have seen explored in more depth. For example, Hemingway's contentious marriage to Martha Gellhorn is all but completely skipped. Hemingway's courtship of Mary Welsh also goes ignored. Hendrickson essentially leaps from the divorce from Pauline Pfeiffer to the middle of the marriage to Mary (which, if you're looking for it, is where you will find EH at his absolute worst).

In the end, I adored this book. It is, as I said, incredibly fair and honest. Hendrickson may love Ernest Hemingway, but he loves him warts and all. (less)

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Sep 05, 2012 Ray Bearfield rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Paul Hendrickson didn’t set out to write another Hemingway biography, but he skillfully and faithfully plotted just such a course as a result of several chance events. He chose to illuminate the author’s struggle with mental health, the artistic process, and his family through the figurative and the literal: Pilar, Hemingway’s cherished deepwater cruiser.

Hendrickson opens with a description of the boat propped on a hillside in Cuba, bereft and crumbling in the same fashion as its master’s reputa...more

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Jul 20, 2012 John rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I recently finished this wonderful book by Paul Hendrickson, and thought I'd give it a shout-out here. It's superbly written, excellently researched and one of the best books I've read in years.

This isn't a full-on adventure story of fishing for marlin in the Gulf Stream, though there is some of that. The book traces from 1934 to 1961 Hemingway's joys and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.

The boat was a stock 38-foot twin cabin cruiser made b...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Colleen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was fantastic, not least because Paul Hendrickson's writing is phenomenal. He is a master researcher, leaves no facts out, and when you find yourself reading a detail you think is superfluous he immediately makes you realize its importance to the overall message of the book. Picked this up in England (with a much better cover, blue - look it up :) ) and it is definitely a big book, but do not be intimidated (as I maybe was at first). I could not put it down. I found myself forcing peri...more

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Jul 14, 2012 Melinda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

The author has a captivating thesis and purpose: Hemingway's "fishing machine" and the time he spent on it coincided with a change in writing style, and the Pilar should be as closely associated with the author as Babe Ruth was with his Louisville Slugger. That being said, this is one big chunk of detailed and discursive biography and not all of it serves Hendrickson's thesis and purpose. Hendrickson tells several lengthy stories about people who knew Hemingway; these stories slowed down the pac...more

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May 09, 2012 Mark S. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

After reading "Hemingway's Boat", it isn't difficult to imagine the impassioned and embattled author bobbing in the Gulf Stream alone on the flying bridge atop his beloved Pilar, or becalmed in the Sargasso Sea and asleep on deck with a gin and bitters balanced on his bulbous torso. But neither is it dificult to imagine the author, Paul Hendrickson, many years into his exhaustive research, interviews and study of Hemingway lore in search of unfound tidbits related to the good ship Pilar, in his...more After reading "Hemingway's Boat", it isn't difficult to imagine the impassioned and embattled author bobbing in the Gulf Stream alone on the flying bridge atop his beloved Pilar, or becalmed in the Sargasso Sea and asleep on deck with a gin and bitters balanced on his bulbous torso. But neither is it dificult to imagine the author, Paul Hendrickson, many years into his exhaustive research, interviews and study of Hemingway lore in search of unfound tidbits related to the good ship Pilar, in his own very similar solo ship-out. All though the concept of tying E.H.'s fate to the boat is interesting and mostly well-executed, I have to believe there were times when the author certainly MUST have felt alone in a rudderless boat with no shore in sight. There are occaisional stretches where it feels like the boat is momentarily forgotten and there are quick rushes to find it to reconnect. Mostly it is the final third of the book, though, where this is most noticeable, when the focus shifts to E.H.'s troubled family. I admit I was unaware there were Hemingway sons in Bozeman and Missoula, sometimes in newsworthy trouble, at the same time I was. I'm unsure that the final chapters truly fit the book's mission, even if they were the tru gen.

I was especially drawn to the book because my own favorite Hemingway work is "Islands in the Stream" (and I am in the small minority here).
That work is peeled entirely from the years on Pilar and there is much in "Hemingway's Boat" about its genesis including his 3 boys who are famously a major part of the story. In fact I read it in Missoula right in the time frame where Patrick was in Bozeman and Gigi in Missoula. I would have been fascinated to know that. For that connection alone "Hemingway's Boat" is a great success for me. Extrapolating the boys of "Islands" to those of the latter part of "Boat" is painful and intriguing.

The book is well written, well researched, and obviously somewhat of a labor of either love or obsession. There are nice twists of time and place (enough to make a reader pay attention) and sometimes interesting turns of phrase (much like those that shine in E.H.'s letters)that ask a reader to go back and re-read. So it can easily be said that the book is worth the time, is well-executed, and a legitimate addition to the mountain of Hemingway scholarship, even if Pilar isn't necessarily always visible on the horizon.(less)

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Jan 29, 2012 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

The silly subtitle aside, this is a compelling story not just of Hemingway and his boat but of cross-generational family tragedy that makes the Kennedy saga look like happily ever after. The divorces, the deaths by suicide, the violent arguments and frequent physical and emotional trauma left one thing clear: You wouldn’t want to be a Hemingway, not by marriage or birth. Hemingway’s Boat is not comprehensive and assumes that its readers know Hemingway’s life and work to some degree, but a strong...more The silly subtitle aside, this is a compelling story not just of Hemingway and his boat but of cross-generational family tragedy that makes the Kennedy saga look like happily ever after. The divorces, the deaths by suicide, the violent arguments and frequent physical and emotional trauma left one thing clear: You wouldn’t want to be a Hemingway, not by marriage or birth. Hemingway’s Boat is not comprehensive and assumes that its readers know Hemingway’s life and work to some degree, but a strong narrative makes it accessible to those who are curious without great familiarity. The assumption of awareness allows for Hendrickson to play counterpoint to the worst of Hemingway without having to detail all the bullying and general nastiness of his last decades. The boat is a device, one Hendrickson takes seriously and spends significant time on, but not really the heart of the book.

By framing his time-bracketed tale of Hemingway from the time of his purchase of the Pilar through his death, Hendrickson has a great swath of Hemingway to navigate: three of four wives, all his non-posthumously published books between Death in the Afternoon and Old Man and the Sea, his homes in Key West, Bimini, Cuba, and Idaho, his parenting challenges, his peak and decline as an author, several near death events, and the premature degeneration of his health, physical and mental. Hendrickson writes frankly but empathetically about Hemingway, making clear that yes, he was often and increasingly a shit but that this was one tortured individual, not just a torturing one. Some of this is very well known: the love and shame he felt for his doctor father; his hostile, even hateful relationship with his puritanical mother, his wounding in World War I as a teenager, his lifelong insomnia, his father’s suicide, his various other physical traumas (skylight falling on him, a car crash, shooting himself in the legs, two plane crashes, and more). Hendrickson uses some individual relationships to stand in argument with a conventional view of the author’s personality and documented behavior…his generosity to the Maestro, a young would-be writer who knocked on Hemingway’s Key West door and was in essence taken in for a few months, his friendship with the Houks, a young couple that Hemingway met in Cuba, and the more enduring and troubled relationship with his son Gigi. In the end it’s this third featured relationship that is most compelling and important.

The posthumous publishing of unfinished writings fall within Hendrickson’s frame too and they throw in greater relief a theme that scholars had sussed out in earlier writings: the androgynous, gender-bending and/or homo-erotic nature of some of Hemingway’s fiction. Fiction published in The Nick Adams Stories, Islands in the Stream, and The Garden of Eden substantiate that gender identity, shame, and family (Hemingway as son and sibling; Hemingway as father) were strong topics for his fiction and likely strong concerns for him personally. The urge to meld male and female, which Hemingway does in fiction, may have been something he shared with his son Gigi, who became a big game hunter, writer, and doctor, and was a cross-dresser who ultimately died while in lock-up at a women’s detention center in Florida after being arrested semi-nude on the street, his belated efforts to become transgendered incomplete. As a boy he had been discovered dressing up in woman’s clothes; as a newlywed young man he’d been arrested in a California movie theater’s ladies room dressed as a woman, an incident that immediately preceded his mother’s death and became a source for further conflict between father and son: was it her distress over his son’s arrest or the intense telephone shouting match between father and mother about the incident that precipitated Pauline’s sudden death? Both, at different times, blamed the other. Was the earlier incident what Hemingway obliquely referred to in Islands in the Stream, when he wrote of the protagonist’s son: he “had a dark side to him that nobody except Thomas Hudson could ever understand. Neither of them thought about this except that they recognized it in each other and knew it was bad and the man respected it and understood the boy’s having it.”

Hendrickson’s connects the fictional event to the real life event and wonders was this Hemingway confessing his own confusion? If so, it was a confusion that he went in and out of understanding about. In a story unpublished until the 1987 publication of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway a boy wins a prize for a short story that his father later discovers was copied from an anthology. “In the last five of the seven years between the summer of the prize-winning story and the day his father ran into the book the boy had done everything hateful and stupid he could, his father thought. But it was because he was sick his father told himself. His vileness came on from a sickness. He was all right until then.” The fictional boy was modeled on Hemingway’s youngest son, who was indeed troubled. Perhaps it was a family history of manic-depression, of suicide, and of unacceptable sexual identity that was responsible for both the boy’s “vileness” and the father’s. Perhaps too, as Hendrickson argues, there was a tragic grace and a doomed courage underlying both Hemingways’ troubled lives.

It is a tribute to the author’s grasp of the life and work, and his personal connection to it (he interviewed and in some cases befriended many of the figures in the story, including Gigi and Mr. Houk), that Hemingway’s Boat is as compelling and moving as it is. It’s not a book that seeks to excuse but one that tries to understand the talent, the charm and the self-destructive and destructive side of one of America’s best 20the century writers. Some of the history of the Pilar was too much for me but most was well-delivered and purposeful, and the complicated nature of the Ernest Hemingway presented here frees the reader and rescues the man from the simplicity of a forced choice: hero or oaf. (less)

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Dec 28, 2011 Bob Mustin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“You know you love the sea and would not be anywhere else…She is just there and the wind moves her and the current moves her and they fight on her surface but down below none of it matters.”

That’s a segment from Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, repeated in this book on pages 457 and 458, and it sums up Hendrickson’s view of the great American writer. The author’s project here, built somewhat waveringly about his boat, Pilar, is to depict, not the superficial man – the writer, the fisher, big g...more “You know you love the sea and would not be anywhere else…She is just there and the wind moves her and the current moves her and they fight on her surface but down below none of it matters.”

That’s a segment from Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, repeated in this book on pages 457 and 458, and it sums up Hendrickson’s view of the great American writer. The author’s project here, built somewhat waveringly about his boat, Pilar, is to depict, not the superficial man – the writer, the fisher, big game hunter, drinker, and womanizer, but the man few have written about, the man even fewer knew.
The more important parts of this book draw on letters to and from friends and family. They show a Hemingway who could be generous to a fault, as in the “maestro, Arnold Morse Samuelson, who showed up destitute at Hemingway’s door in Key West – just to meet his writing hero. Hemingway not only tutored Morse, but kept him around for a year to experience life at sea.
Then there was Hemingway’s family, particularly his youngest son, Gregory, or Gigi, as Papa called him. Gigi was talented – adept at so many things that mattered to and mirrored Papa – but a troubled soul. Gigi was a cross dresser who near the end of his life sought and received a sex change operation. He was also a bright, articulate, friendly, well-read person, a doctor.
Hendrickson posits that beneath Papa’s ultra-male exterior resided, not a latent homosexual as some, from Zelda Fitzgerald to Hemingway’s posthumous chroniclers, have proclaimed, but a complex person, perhaps an androgynous person, living out many subterranean facets of his makeup through his writing.

Until Gigi’s behavior became apparent to Papa, that is.

Gigi is portrayed here as those submerged aspects of Papa manifested. The son is confronting his own personality conflicts at the time Hemingway is writing the book eventually published under the title, The Garden of Eden. Hendrickson surmises that the gender-swapping aspects of his protagonist’s ménage à trois were Hemingway’s attempt at trying to understand Gigi. Since Hemingway was one of the first American writers to fictionalize personal life in such depth, Hendrickson may not be far off the mark.

The writing here is elegant, the research deep and well thought out. As I wrote earlier, the story wanders in and out of many lives all hovering about the presence of Pilar. It would be crude to criticize Hendrickson’s work here in a structural sense; it’s not meant to be that sort of work, but a deep, caring investigation of the man many love to hate, the person who made the most significant impact on the art of modern writing.
(less)

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Nov 13, 2011 Annie Garvey rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Oct 04, 2011 Cheryl rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography

Paul Hendrickson, author of HEMINGWAY'S BOAT: EVERYTHING HE LOVED IN LIFE, AND LOST, 1934-1961, has intensely researched Ernest Hemingway's life beginning in 1987 when he interviewed the Author's three sons for The Washington Post. Hendrickson is an inspired guide of the last two decades of Hemingway's life in this latest biography. Sometimes in first person, he invites the reader to imagine what it must have been like to board the cabin cruiser, Pilar, and fish for marlin off Bimini and the Cub...more

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Nov 07, 2012 Andi rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I know nothing of fishing or boats, but I was enchanted with the metaphor and how Hendrickson could show how the Pilar proved both a respite and muse for Hemingway's writing, I also learned more about fishing and boats than I thought possible. I also enjoyed how Hendrickson explored the lives of those who met him. Like other reviewers, I found the book easy to pick up and read, even after a break of several days, each page surprising me with its freshness, candor and detail. I was not nearly so...more

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Mar 14, 2013 Ron rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An incredibly good read! So well written. If you are a Hemingway fan or just want to know more about the tangled, troubled, gifted life of this man, I heartily recommend it! From Amazon:Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer's exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.

Drawing on previously unpublished material, includin...more

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Sep 24, 2012 Edward Wright rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A quirky, very readable look at a writer who reshaped our language. What begins as a meditation on the importance of the sea in the life & work of Ernest Hemingway evolves into an in-depth look at the man in all his complexity -- intensely sensitive yet hyper-masculine, someone who could weep over the illness of a friend's son yet rage at any other writer (James Jones is a prime example) who threatened his place in American literature. Technically, this is not a traditional biography, since...more

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Sep 15, 2012 Carey Shea rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

The reason for the 3 stars is that this novel jumped all over the place. It was supposed to be from 1934 to 1961 when Hemingway comminted suicide. He spent plenty of time on Hemingway's childhood. Also, at the beginning there was so much talk about the boat he ordered, where it was built, how they built it, what Hemmingway wanted to add to the boat, etc. Of course, we had to hear about the fishing instuments, where they were made and the different types of lines he used. It was starting to bore...more The reason for the 3 stars is that this novel jumped all over the place. It was supposed to be from 1934 to 1961 when Hemingway comminted suicide. He spent plenty of time on Hemingway's childhood. Also, at the beginning there was so much talk about the boat he ordered, where it was built, how they built it, what Hemmingway wanted to add to the boat, etc. Of course, we had to hear about the fishing instuments, where they were made and the different types of lines he used. It was starting to bore me. I kept going.

Then he talks about Hemingway's young family. He doesn't spend much time getting to know his wives (he had 4). I would like to have known them better.

The author spent a lot of time with people he knew for short periods of time. The author interviewed an old friend who was still alive when he was working on this book. This man, Walter, knew him for about a year. Walter's wife Nita was Hemingway's personal secretary for a while. Walter didn't say too much like he was hiding something. Of course, the author interviewed his sons and daughter. His daughter was hardly mentioned at all during the book. It seems that Hem spent more time trying to bond with the boys (3 boys). Hemingway's biggest disapointment was in his son Gregory (GiGi) and the poor fellow knew there was something wrong with him from the age of 4 when he tried on his step-mother's panty hose. His life was fine and he excelled during his childhood. Later on he became a doctor and was a transgender. He eventually had the operation to become a woman now called Gloria. He was arrested a couple of times and eventually lost his medical license. He was even married and had children. The author spoke to the other Hemingway sons but they didn't talk freely like Gloria did. Gloria had a lot of guilt trying to live up to his fathers macho image but just couldn't change his ways.

The book has quite a lot of quotes from Hemingway and other people who wrote him. Hemingway wrote a lot of letters. There are also a lot of pages in italics but could not find a reason why that was. You couldn't tell, for instance. if the author was talking to GiGi or if Hemingway was. It got a bit confusing. Sometimes it got confusing as to where Hemingway was when the author was describing a certain time in Hem's life. Was he in his Key West home or was he in his Havana home? He spent a lot of time in Bimini fishing for marlin which was his favorite fish. Especially, the black marlin.

The author spent a lot of research on Hemingway's personality. As time when on he became more beligerant, hostile and angry. He would get drunk and lash out on his wifes and friends. It got so bad that he lost a lot of friends. But he could be charming as well. And a hell of a lot of fun. I think Hemingway had many dificulties writing his books. Writer's block, etc.

Overall, I did learn a lot about Hemingway. He was so interesting and charasmatic. I really didn't care about the boat Pilar and his fishing tackle. And didn't care about the technicalities of catching a marlin or any other type of fish. I think many men would enjoy that part especially if they are fishermen themselves.

You might like this book so give it a try if you are a real Heminway fan. Also, I read the Paris Wife which is a story of Hemingway and his wife in Paris as expats. There they hang out with many famous novelists and artists. Try that one as well.(less)

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Jan 29, 2012 Judy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pilar was the name of Ernest Hemingway's beloved boat and Paul Hendickson organizes his biography of Hemingway during the years 1934 when he was considered one of the kings of American literature until his suicide in 1961 around her. It was on Pilar that Hemingway went to fish, to drink, to entertain, and to be with his children. He also retreated to the Pilar in the bad times--when he was being savaged by critics, when his marriages were deteriorating, and when he saw his creativity draining aw...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Frederic rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In the fifty years since Hemingway's death there have been many biographies and memoirs and I've read most of them,though I haven't had the time or energy to tackle the five volume Michael Reynolds work which I've heard is extraordinary...those that I've read range from the odious(Lynn)to the competent(Baker)to the superb(on both the man and the work,James R. Mellow)but not one has rendered the man as vividly as "Hemingway's Boat"...an impressionistic look at the last twenty-seven years of his l...more

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Jan 21, 2012 Robert rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If there is enough Papa scholarship-which is what Hemingway’s Boat, Paul Hendrickson’s non fiction book, aims to be-to fill a small public library, then lot of shelves would be redundant. There would be no decimal system but wood carved signs splattered in red paint, with disclaimers beneath them that they were written in blood. There would be a “Tragic Artist Madlib ” section ( Carlos Baker, Michael Reynolds, twice), a “Glorified Macho Excursion” section ( Nick Lyons, and sadly, Michael Palin),...more

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Jan 11, 2012 Valerie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Hemingway fans

Shelves: valerie

When I saw this book on a new non-fiction shelf at the library, I couldn't help but be a little curious. Nearly two weeks later, I'm finally through it.
Paul Hendrickson's biography of Ernest Hemingway is as much about EH as it is about his boat, Pilar. Hendrickson has gone a bit further in his research than some other biographers, mainly by digging further into the back stories of some of the people who entered in and out of Hemingway's life. It is evident that this was a labor love for Hendrick...more

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Jan 22, 2013 Abby rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An exquisitely written, far-reaching memoir that dips into the lives of almost everyone Hemingway encountered during his tumultuous, controversial life. Hendrickson clearly did his research for this novel; it is extensively quoted and cited throughout, with a well-crafted essay on sources at the back. Interestingly, there is little quotation from Hemingway himself in the book, but it actually isn't sorely missed. In fact, it's refreshing to hear about his life from the mouths of others.
What rea...more

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Aug 02, 2012 Amy Stapleton rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this book several months ago. It's a biographical account by Paul Hendrickson of the important role that Pilar, a 38-foot sportfishing boat, played in the life of Ernest Hemingway.Early on, Hendrickson lets the reader know that his aim in writing the book was to make it that the boat played a central role in Hemingway's life.

Hendrickson mostly succeeds at his goal. He charts the course of the relationship that Hemingway had with Pilar, perhaps one of the longest and most meaningful relat...more I read this book several months ago. It's a biographical account by Paul Hendrickson of the important role that Pilar, a 38-foot sportfishing boat, played in the life of Ernest Hemingway. Early on, Hendrickson lets the reader know that his aim in writing the book was to make it that the boat played a central role in Hemingway's life.

Hendrickson mostly succeeds at his goal. He charts the course of the relationship that Hemingway had with Pilar, perhaps one of the longest and most meaningful relationships of the author’s life. After all, Hemingway owned Pilar for nearly twenty-seven years from 1934 until his death in 1961. During that time, he divorced and remarried three times, had multiple literary successes and failures, survived two terrible plane crashes, and won the Nobel Prize. Hendrickson, when he’s at his best, writes some amazingly beautiful passages about Hemingway’s love of the boat, the joy he experienced from hauling record-setting marlin and blue fin tuna onto her varnished decks, and the pleasure he had from sharing his boating adventures with this three sons. Hendrickson gives a detailed, intensively researched account of the Wheeler Shipyard, Inc., the Brooklyn, NY based shipbuilder from whom Hemingway ordered his boat.
For avid readers of Hemingway’s fiction and students of his life and literary works, it may be worth plowing through the challenging twists and turns of Hendrickson’s entire book.

For those interested primarily in the history of Pilar and in the myth of Hemingway the legendary marlin hunter, Bimini rabble-rouser, and gypsy of the Gulf Stream, the first two parts of the book will probably suffice. The second half of the book, in my opinion, veers off course. Hendrickson spends a lot of time delving into some oddities of Hemingway's sex life and sexual orientation. He then goes on to explore similar issues with Hemingway's middle son and traces the tragic downfall of both men. Hendrickson struggles to weave these tragedies into the fabric of the "boat story," but he never quite succeeds, in my opinion. Nonetheless, this is beautifully written book that will be of interest to those interested in the history of classic boats as well as to fans of Hemingway the writer.(less)

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Oct 22, 2011 Mike Smith rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If you've read other bios of Hemingway, e.g., Carlos Baker, and you're still interested in learning more, this book is fine: It's full of small details, personal memories, letters written by and to E.H., etc. For many people, it will be too much information, but I found it interesting, in places. There was too much biographical detail about other people, like Arnold Samuelson, a drifter who worked on E.H.'s boat for a couple of seasons in the early 1930s. Once he left Key West, he disappeared fr...more If you've read other bios of Hemingway, e.g., Carlos Baker, and you're still interested in learning more, this book is fine: It's full of small details, personal memories, letters written by and to E.H., etc. For many people, it will be too much information, but I found it interesting, in places. There was too much biographical detail about other people, like Arnold Samuelson, a drifter who worked on E.H.'s boat for a couple of seasons in the early 1930s. Once he left Key West, he disappeared from Hemingway's life (other than to write a short book about his time with the author), but earned a whole chapter in Hemingway's Boat. Same with Walter Houk, who married one of Hemingway's secretaries -- but at least he was still alive when the author was researching, providing both written material and personal reminiscences.

On the other hand, there's also a lot about Hemingway's sons, particularly his youngest, Gregory, who grew up to be a cross-dressing, sex-changed doctor. It's entertaining, and the letters exchanged between the two show E.H. at his worst.

If you're hoping to find out about Pilar, Hemingway's boat, don't bother: There's not much here about her -- she's just a hook to tie the narrative together, and a weak one at that. The author makes several minor technical errors when writing about the boat, about fishing and about the sea in general -- he confuses meridians of longitude with parallels of latitude in one place, calls fish that Hemingway is catching both "dolphins" (the cute swimming mammals) and "dolphinfish" (tasty warm-water fish called dorado or mahi-mahi) in the same paragraph, and describes both interchangeably. Which species is E.H. slaughtering? The fish, not the mammals -- Flipper-lovers need not fear. (There is mention of harpooning a porpoise, though.)

But these are minor errors relative to the book's purpose, to tell us more about the famous author and add to the already voluminous writings on his life. And at that, Hendrickson succeeds. If you're a fan of Hemingway, you should read this book.(less)

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Feb 16, 2012 Alison rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

I've never been interested in fishing or hunting, nor do I understand men who enjoy killing things for sport. And yet, I loved this book (especially after finishing "The Paris Wife.") It focuses on Hemingway's time in Florida and Cuba aboard his fishing boat, Pilar, but the author is so skillful at skipping back and forth in history, weaving in anecdotes, letters, and portions of the novels Hemingway was writing. "Papa" was described by a close friend as the kind of "charming bully" who would tr...more

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