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

by Paul Hendrickson

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

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 his beloved boat, Pilar.

Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway's sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer's boorishness, depression and alcoholism, and despite his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. 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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Memoir, Literature, Collections

704 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2011

Reviews

[Quo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Hendrickson's wonderful book, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost is less a traditional biography than a sort of non-clinical excavation of the author's psyche, using a wide range of sources, all manner of people who intersected with Hemingway, sometimes only briefly and using Hemingway's boat, the "Pilar", as a metaphor for the author. The boat was built by Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn in 1934 for $7,500, paid for via royalties from Hemingway's initial success as an author & following his very exacting specifications for a vessel that would attempt to match his personality.



For example, Hendrickson comments: "No sailboats--the Hemingways were rowboaters and canoeists & stinkpotters. Sailing was a different culture. This fits with the link between the "Pilar", Hemingway & fishing. You could formulate it like this: a sailboat would always be to a motor launch as fly-fishing is to night crawlers."



While I am hardly in the thrall of Hemingway's books, I found the long study of the author fascinating & full of surprises, especially when dealing with a few characters Hemingway befriended & retained as friends & who did not represent the author's star power, including a minor diplomat named Walter Houk, serving in Cuba before the revolution but who he cared for & was loyal to for a long period of time, even though it is suggested by someone who knew him well (Les Hemingway) that "Papa" Hemingway "loved everything for a small time and then nothing was any good anymore." Obviously, there were exceptions and Hemingway's hallowed boat as well as the figure of Mr. Houk rank high among them.

Hemingway, having carefully considered just what sort of boat would suit his fishing needs & his personality at large, the "Pilar" became a part of his consciousness, in Key West, Cuba & Bimini. While much of the extended character study is focused on the boat, Hendrickson invests the energy of a good literary detective in sorting through many other components of Hemingway's life. Thus, I think this book might be of interest even if one has never read one of the famous author's celebrated novels.



Among the points of focus beyond the "Pilar" are Hemingway's wives, editors, fellow writers, celebrities and his children, including his favored son "Gigi", whose life initially had the most promise but which ended most tragically, still in search of his essential identity late in life.



With most if not all legendary characters, defining his or her most telling qualities is fraught with complexity and separating the person from the hype & the myth often a frustrating ordeal. Paul Hendrickson finds particular meaning in some of Hemingway's fishing logs from the "Pilar"...

He's writing in the 3rd person, crowding the margins with data on equipment used, weather & who was on board but with a kind of emotional texture too. It's as if he's creating a raw, immediate, documentary novel within the larger novel of his life, a work with its own storytelling arc.

A small boat is daily tossing on a large sea, and here is some of what it tastes & looks & feels like. Somewhere in the background you can hear the revolutionary turmoil in the streets of Havana. If there's the occasional fishing victory, there's more often the palpable disappointment. You can read the logs & imagine a man composing his book, or trying to.

Hendrickson sums this up by saying, "as with all of Hemingway's work, you end up feeling more than you necessarily understand: another core Hemingway writing value." Hemingway's Boat is a masterfully conceived & an artfully delivered biographical book.

*Within my review, the photo images include author Paul Hendrickson; Hemingway on board the "Pilar" in the late 1930s; the restored & sheltered "Pilar" in Cuba; the interior cabin space of the "Pilar".

[John Arfwedson · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 story.

Almost 200 pages to go. I think some serious editing would have made "Hemingway's Boat" much more readable and memorable.

100 pages to go. I am so thoroughly bored and confused by the frequent leaping from decade to decade and character to character that I'm not interested enough to do the work to figure out the connections and point of what I confess I'm now only skimming.

Finally finished. Ernest Hemingway is one of our best writers and he lived a fascinating life, full of triumph, failure and tragedy. A biographer, it seems to me, would need to approach a life of Hemingway much as a historical novelist might, with focus and selectivity. But while "Hemingway's Boat" contains many interesting anecdotes, my conclusion is that the author was simply overwhelmed by the huge amount of material he has obviously studied and absorbed.

Believe me, I know the feeling, having succumbed to it more than once in writing my own historical novels. Fortunately, several of my early readers pointed out to me that it was not necessary, and indeed distracting, to write everything I knew. "Hemingway's Boat" would have been a far better read had Hendrickson received and taken that same advice.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I remember all these things happening and all the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year,” he once said. “But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been.” Living in that book, making the country, a man still so young had written a passage so immortal as this, about a retreat from a place called Caporetto: I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.
*
I also believe there was so much more fear inside Hemingway than he ever let on, that it was almost always present, by day and more so by night, and that his living with it for so long was ennobling. The thought of self-destruction trailed Hemingway for nearly his entire life, like the tiny wakes a child’s hand will make when it is trailed behind a rowboat in calm water—say, up in Michigan.
*
Alone with the pain in the night in the fifth week of not sleeping I thought suddenly how a bull elk must feel if you break a shoulder and he gets away and in that night I lay and felt it all, the whole thing as it would happen from the shock of the bullet to the end of the business.…
*
I miss who I miss so badly that I do not care about anything,
*
I wouldn’t do it again. But I would do something worse, I hope.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed it!! The last section not so much......hitting Gregory too much,and just seemed almost tagged on........but otherwise, an engrossing, interesting read....read like a novel. I highly recommend it.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/8846556...

Paul Hendrickson has written a new biography of Ernest Hemingway titled Hemingway’s Boat meant to fully, if not super-fully, appreciate the "myth-swallowed" life of this man. The biography is presented in a scientific, almost astronomical, technique known as "averted vision" and is described by Hendrickson as an idea that "sometimes you can see the essence of a thing more clearly if you are not looking at it directly." In telling stories of lesser known characters involved in their own way with the Hemingway myth such as the mesmerizing story of Arnold Samuelson who went on to write his own memoir of his year with Hemingway, to Walter Houk who still holds Hemingway in the highest regard though Papa had every intent to bed the woman who became his wife, and also Papa's son Greg (Gigi) whose own infamy rests in his desire to wear women's clothes and express his feminine side publicly instead of in the closet where his dad remained until the day he died. Looking closely at the relationship between Hem and these outer rim characters is sort of like looking at things in the "periphery rather than at the center of your gaze" as Hendrickson offered in his preface to the book.

The next wild jump I think appropriate to make at this point in my record is my own jack-in-the-box claim that the one theme present in every bit of the creative work that I myself have done thus far in my own attempts to get as near to the truth as possible without burning up like Icarus is in regards to the unconscious. My own poetry and film is a way for me to speak from the unconscious to the unconscious. Sounds crazy, and it probably is, but it is what I have believed in for several years. I am not alone. Matter of fact I am in good company. Gilles Deleuze and other great philosophers have gone to great lengths in their study of the unconscious. I certainly believe Paul Hendrickson believes in the unseemly power of it too. Much of what we do we cannot explain. We cannot find the words. Hemingway tried. His son, as one not fallen far from the tree, made some of those words manifest.

But the last words in the Hendrickson text comes from his notes when he is visiting with the adult Pierre Saviers who was a younger brother of a boy Ernest Hemingway was trying to save at the end of his own life. Saviers' last words in attempting to explain Ernest Hemingway are bracketed in quotes. Hendrickson writes: He stood up. He was tired of talking about it. He had other things to do. "It's all layered. The way I see all this is that part of what we do in this life is unconscious. Maybe this is the best we can ever say."

From front to back Hemingway's Boat is a thoroughly enjoyable and titillating read. I confess to never having read before this another Hemingway biography. And if this is the only one I ever do read I believe it will be enough. That is how good this book is. I read somewhere by somebody I guess is important somewhere that the author, Paul Hendrickson, basically wrote a gossip tabloid as far as this somebody's opinion is concerned. That certain somebody is certainly wrong with his assessment. Hemingway's Boat is a masterpiece in Creative Nonfiction.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hemingway's life has been chronicled six ways to Sunday but Paul Hendrickson takes a different tack by telling it through the angle of EH's boat, the Pilar. This means we're talking the last 27 years of Hem's life and clocking a lot of hours on the Gulf Stream.

The sub-heading of the book is "Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961" and it's appropriate because EH loved life a tad more intensely than your average Joe and he got around, from the cafés of Paris to the Gulf Stream off Bimini to the green hills of Africa (to name a few of the outposts the rest of us read and dream of instead of live). Though his years were relatively short, EH squeezed a lot more experience out of it than many of us can even begin to dream of; thus, his legions of vicarious-driven fans.

What's great about Hendrickson is he's not afraid to call boorish behavior what it is when he sees it. On the other hand, and unlike some other EH biographers, he is compassionate and sensitive to the man, flaws and all (and all flaws are on deck when you're talking Hemingway). He's quick to dismiss, too, some of the psychological drivel that others have put out about Hemingway's hangups, chiefly Kenneth Lynn.

So, as might be expected, we learn a lot about boating and a lot about the Pilar in particular. Lots of Pauline (wife #2) and Mary (#4) as well. Lots and LOTS about youngest son, Gregory, who dominates the final chapters of the book and who suffered mightily as an unhappy transsexual (Hemingway's cross to bear, as we discover, in more ways than one).

Hendrickson also plays up some bit players who received little attention from previous biographers. Two of the most notable are Arnold Morse Samuelson, who drove from Minnesota to Key West, cold called EH by knocking on his door, and said he wanted to learn to be a writer. EH hired him as another hand on the Pilar. Do things like this happen in real life? They do if you're Ernest Hemingway. The other person who gets reams of pages is Walter Houk, an ex-Navy man whose wife, Nita, served as EH's secretary. Houk, still alive in California where he lives a lonely life surrounded by EH memorabilia, provides all manner of insight into EH's character: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Artfully written, the book includes italicized codas between longer chapters, snapshots of key scenes or moments along the way. By the end, you feel as if you know the man that much better and the legend that much less. I think any biographer can count that as a compliment.

[Frederic · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 life seen mainly through the eyes of three witnesses,two young men who came into brief but memorable contact in the '30's and '50's and his youngest son,Gregory...Hendrickson uses "Pilar"(Hemingway's boat) as a metaphor for,as the sub-title has it,everything he loved in life,and lost...and for once,a literary conceit works beautifully to illuminate the subject rather than just demonstrate the author's cleverness...written with intelligence and empathy this is an revelatory work on a writer about whom there is still much to be learned...

[John Devlin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Enough padding to sit in goal for the Red Wings, Hem's Boat seems an interesting tack to take in understanding Earnest, but the novel is filled w/far too much back story and almost fetish like tangents. Researched to the point where the author worries being a day off 80 years ago, Hem's Boat spends less time w/Papa than w/ his cross dressing son, the family that produced the boat, and a few roustabouts who found themselves under Hemingway's wing for a time in Cuba.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Audrey Ashbrook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson is a non-fiction book about Hemingway's life from the years 1934 to 1961, largely spent in the Key West and Cuba, and his beloved boat, Pilar. 

This was a great read, and had quite a bit I haven't read about before. This book went in-depth on Hemingway's children, especially his youngest, which was interesting. I also had never heard of Arnold or Walter and Nita Houk, so that was interesting as well. 

This book could have had better organization. I'm also confused why Hendrickson didn't go into Hemingway's WWII activities on this boat? Or his third marriage to Martha Gellhorn? 

Hendrickson provided great gossip and really took the time interviewing people who knew Hemingway, including each one of his children, which was fascinating (but incredibly sad) to read. Such a fascinating time in literature and such a multifaceted human being.

I read this in preparation to go to the Key West and Hemingway's Museum, and I was not let down. 

[Ben Hobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. Pretty magic how all things spiral together. And so sad. So many broken people.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Keenan Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

How can you not want to know more about a guy who described himself as follows:

"Look, I'm 35, I've had a damned fine life, have had every woman I ever wanted, have bred good kids, have seen everything I believe in royally fucked to hell, have been wounded many times, got over all wish for glory or a career before I was 20, have always made a living in all times, staked my friends, written 3 books of stories, 2 novels, a comic book and one fairly exhaustive treatise and every chickenshit prick who writes about my stuff writes with a premature delight and hope that I may be slipping. It's beautiful."

I read this book because I was really curious to learn more about the man who had everything in life, and lost it all. He had such a wonderful, tragic and unique life. He loved and lost it, lived with regret and depression. The book is a little long at 600 pages and jumps around a lot, but there were some good stretches that I particularly liked. The first half is about his trips around the world and his purchase of his boat, "pilar" which he used to hunt big game fish in Cuba and Key West.

I come away fascinated with Ernest Hemingway and how complex he was. To summarize, he was ultra masculine, traveled the world before it was cool to travel internationally, had three wives, children and many friends. However, what makes Hemingway a guy I would love to get a beer with, is how everything eventually unraveled. He tended to alienate almost all his literary friends, and knew it too. He was at times self righteous and bastardly. It was almost as if he used up his enjoyment in life, in the way he spent through so many other things and places and human beings in his life. He loved everything up to a certain point, and then nothing was any good anymore.

He had a very bizarre and screwed up personal life. His father shot himself, and then his mother sent the pistol to him to keep which is messed up. His brothers also killed themselves, and Ernest eventually did at age 61. Ernest was ultra-masculine (hunting, fishing, big personality) and he was obsessed with being masculine. You can imagine how he felt when he caught his son cross-dressing at age 10 with his wife's clothes, which set off a string of cross-dressing events and ultimately led his son to have a sex change. Ernest blew up at his ex-wife over his son's cross-dressing one evening which led his ex-wife to have a hemorrhage and died over night that evening. Ernest then preceded to blame his son for the death of her...

These are just a few glimpses into the complexity of Hemingway and what eventually led to his drinking and depression. Despite it all, he was the most popular writer of his generation and I'm glad I read the book, though it definitely got boring at times.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why do I love this book? So many reasons, but it comes down to this: it is honest, comprehensive and full of heart. Ernest Hemingway was such a complex man; through an exhaustive study of Pilar, as well as extensive interviews with the people who knew him—both intimately and on the periphery—Hendrickson gives you a greater sense of who he was, warts and all. You learn so much about this man through Hendrickson’s careful research and writing, whether you want to know or not, and it leaves you with a deeper sense of compassion for a literary genius who never quite seemed to know how much he mattered.

The detailed descriptions and vivid images Hendrickson paints for the reader drew me in (much like Hemingway’s work does)… I could feel myself sitting seaside at the Cuban café; standing at the bow of the great Pilar; watching EH as he agonized over those last lines of a letter to a 9-year-old boy from a hospital bed. It is a long read, and there is much to be digested…but well worth the time invested.

I am impressed by how much of himself Hendrickson has given to this work, as evidenced by the writing itself, but also in our conversation at CHF. Taking years and years to complete the book, Hendrickson poured himself into it, heart and soul…he loved every aspect of this work, which makes it even more worthwhile. Hendrickson is clearly a champion of EH, and makes no apologies for it…yet he offers a very honest and balanced portrayal of Hemingway throughout the book. I love that he includes people who touched Hemingway’s life (even if it was briefly), many of whom Hendrickson came to know personally as well. It humanizes EH, makes him more real, and shows that—flaws, talents and everything in between—he was a human being just like the rest of us.

The amount of tragedy and challenges that befell Hemingway and his family do not go unnoticed...and one cannot help but attribute some of his “difficult” personality to just that. And all the while, as you cringe while reading some of the things he did and said, you root for him…because deep down, you know he is searching for the same things you are…some semblance of peace, passion, love. In the last lines of the novel, Hendrickson recalls a conversation with Pierre Saviers: “It’s layered…you recognize yourself there, and you want to save yourself.” So very true, and seems to be what Hemingway was trying to do for most of his life.

Hendrickson revisits a line throughout the book that, in my opinion, summarizes the essence of not only Hemingway’s work and relationships with others, but the man himself: “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.” Exactly.

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Colleen Lynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 periods of reading into my day so that I could enjoy the book, rather than racing to finish it or slugging through it. I haven't read many biographies (I don't consider myself a biography person) but Hendrickson makes you think there is a story here, with Hemingway and his boat, and he has dug it out from history for you. Among all the Hemingway scholarship, Hendrickson makes you think of the man in a new way, see him in a new light, a unique eye, and that is wonderful and very difficult to do. I want to write a letter to Paul Hendrickson to tell him how utterly impressed by his work I am, and how thankful I am that he dedicated three decades of his life to creating this masterpiece. I am not the biggest hemingway fan, as I know there are many fanatics out there, but I enjoyed this book immensely, and finished it faster than I ever would have imagined when I picked the tome of a thing up. It was that good. Highly recommended even for those who would not find themselves drawn to this kind of thing.

[Buzz Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 Hemingway's Boat. It has consumed my waking hours ever since.

How do you say something new about someone like Hemingway? You don't. But, as Paul Hendrickson has shown by delving into the thing most loved by Hemingway, it is possible to gain a new insight into the man behind the bravado. The reader is taken upon a journey that ultimately brings you closer to the true spirit of Hemingway than has ever been possible before. If you have ever been to Key West and stood in Hemingway's writing room and felt the ocean breeze blowing across your face from the balcony where he once stood, you can feel a tiny bit of the essence of Hemingway. It's the same feeling that you get when you read Hemingway's Boat, without the cost of the travel and the crowds.

What an incredible endeavor by Paul Hendrickson. I am grateful to both Paul, and my mother-in-law, for making this journey possible. This one will remain with me for a long time. If you are a student or a fan of Hemingway, it is a must read that will permanently alter your thoughts and feelings about the man.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This haunting and sympathetic biography of Ernest Hemingway is one of the best bios I have ever read. Hemingway's struggle with intense bipolar-induced paranoia, mania, and depression makes the reader appreciate his literary accomplishments all the more. Covering the years 1934-1961 (the years he owned his boat Pilar), you learn of what made Hemingway tick and in the process discover the pain behind his written words.

[Sidney · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s just unreadable. Hendrickson assumes the reader is an expert not only in Hemingway’s literature, but also anything ever published about Hemingway. He bounces around time lines and ideas, making it impossible to follow unless you’re Hemingway himself. Hendrickson also has such a defensive tone about anything written about Hemingway’s legacy that could remotely be considered negative. AND THEN there’s this weird machismo subtext throughout the book where he’s trying to convince you Hemingway is a man’s man… As if his masculinity is in mortal peril?? At one point he calls Gertrude Stein “that old fat lesbian bitch” for NO reason. And that’s all within the first 50 pages.

[Stacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have never read a book by Hemingway but due to this book, I have some understanding of the man. It mainly focused on his life and adventures associated with his boat, the Pilar. Lots of details on his various marriages, children, flashbacks to growing up in Illinois. At times, it was a slog for me to read, so I would skip through parts of it. But there were other chapters that were incredibly interesting. I finished the book feeling very sad. He was a complicated man.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are so many extremes in the genius-author's life which makes for mesmerizing reading.

[Noor Ali]

Dnf at 51%

[Carey Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Bob Mustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“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.

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this one. I enjoy Hemingway and I love boats and being on the water. I thought this one would capture more of his adventures cruising between the Florida Keys and Cuba and fishing the Gulf Stream. A chapter on a goofy kid who serves as an inadequate deck hand for a year and eventually goes insane later in life and a chapter on the progression of the family business that manufactured the boat ruined it for me.

[Clare · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 by Wheeler Shipyards in Brooklyn, N.Y. It was powered by a 75-horse Chrysler with a 4-cylinder Lycoming straight drive engine installed as a separate unit independent of the main power plant. The engines were fed by four 75-gallon gas tanks. It also had two copper-lined fish boxes, a live fish well, settee built on the portside, and black-painted hull. Cost: $7,495.

He took possession of it in early May 1934 and wrote this about it to Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire magazine:
"The boat is marvelous. Wheeler, 38 footer, cut down to my design. 75 horse Chrysler and a 40 h. Lycoming. Lower stern for fishing. Fish well, 300 gal gas tanks. 100 gal water. Sleeps six in cabin and two in cockpit. Can turn on its own tail burns less than three gals an hour trolling and four at cruising speed with the big engine. Will do sixteen with the two motors. The little one will do five hooked up."

What I especially liked about the book was Hendrickson's depth of research and peeling back Hemingway's macho layers to reveal a man with tortured, ambiguous tensions about his own sexuality. It's unlike anything ever written about Hemingway. Hendrickson, by the way, is a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, worked two decades for The Washington Post and is now on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the Univ. of Pennsylvania. The book is published by Knopf.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 Hendrickson, whose research is crazy good. He also took as well-balanced view of Hemingway, presenting the good and the bad in as fair of a light as possible.
I will admit- there were times that this book was a tough read for me. It rarely takes me this long to finish a book, especially if I'm interested in the subject matter. Unfortunately, Hendrickson has a slight tendency to repeat himself, or to go on too long about things that aren't really crucial to argue his point. Towards the end of the book, Hendrickson is covering a story Hemingway was hired to write that needed to be cut down in half, but Hemingway was having difficulty trimming it down by much at all. After having spent some time struggling to finish the book, it was hard for me not to giggle at the irony of that little tidbit.
All said, I feel like I learned quite a bit from this book - and I found myself truly enjoying some of the side stories that were woven into this biography.

[Bill Ibelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an absolutely fascinating book, although I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. I have long been fascinated by Hemingway because I fell in love with his short fiction as a teenager and believed he lived such an enviable life. But as I learned more, I realized what an asshole he was. A bully who routinely knifed his friends in the back. I have long grappled with how someone who had such a gift for friendship, could also be such a bully; and how someone who lived the life I wanted to live could be such a miserable and often tormented person.

Although I had a pretty good understanding of the deep conflicts in Hemingway's psyche, this book added an enormous amount of additional insight. This book focuses on the years that span the height of Hemingway's creative powers and fame, to his death by suicide—an old man at just 61. As the title suggests, Hemingway's beloved Pillar is one of the unifying themes of the book, but the author uses the boat to develop several fascinating and previously tangential characters to the Hemingway story, which provide interesting windows into the alternating charisma and nastiness. He does the same with Hemingway's kids, who play a prominent role in the narrative.

Somehow, this book remains engaging even while going into great detail. Quite an accomplishment.