Hemingway's Boat

Malcolm Gladwell, “Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961”, 2011, Alfred A. Knopf, 507 pp.

Hemingway’s boat, Pilar, is the one constant in his life in the twenty-seven years preceding his suicide in July 1961 at age 61. I was pleasantly surprised by Gladwell’s extensive research, documentation and writing ability—he is every bit as good a writer as the subject of the book. However I am thankful I read Hemingway years ago, thankfully before reading this book, it might have discouraged the effort. Hemingway was a very selfish, jealous, narcissistic and tormented man; characteristics he does not, in my opinion, show at all in his writing, except for probably the tormented part. Maybe that is because he was also extremely charismatic, daring, spontaneously generous, and never ordinary in any attribute. I am always surprised when I read about geniuses as I always conclude that I would not like to be around them or be like them; luckily, I never had either problem, some would say "with especial emphasis on the latter".

The most surprising revelation in the book is that Ernest may have been fighting a transvestite tendency all his life. His son Gregory was a transvestite. (Pg. 415: In October 2001, Ernests’ son Gregory (Gigi) was found dead in his Miami women’s prison cell. This former doctor, with his surgically altered genitals, with his pink-painted toenails, scheduled for a hearing later that morning on indecent exposure charges, was awakened by a corrections officer, rose, and five minutes later pitched down dead on his face. ) My one criticism of this book is that too much time is devoted to Gregory and his problems.

Suicides:
Father Ed Hemingway 1928: fifty-seven, trying to escape his diabetes and angina. (P. 195)
Sister Marcelline (1963), at least the family suspected her death was not natural.
Sister Ursula (1966) was suffering from cancer and depression, took an overdose.
Ernest (1961) suffering from paranoia, depression, etc.

Pg. 277: In a Midwestern nuclear unit of eight Hemingways—mother, father six children—four (and possibly five) of the members would end up dying by their own hand: Clarence, Ernest, Ura, Les, maybe Marcelline. Suicide is so prevalent that some of the Hemingway's have labelled it "The Family Exit".
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Pg. 112: “The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time. Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little of the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.”

Pg. 257: Left for Cuba in 1939 after living in Key West for 13 years. In Key West he completed a huge body of work. A partial listing: A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Note, The Fifth Colmn, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. He was also 100,000 words in to For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Pg. 283: Ernest volunteered in 1918 as an ARC ambulance driver in the Italian army. His career lasted eight months, and six of those months had been spent in the hospital after he was wounded. The experience certainly provided a wealth of material for his later writings.

Pg. 459: It seems inarguable now that Hemingway never recovered mentally or physically from those back-to-back plane crashes in early 1954 in Africa. Between 1955 and 1961 Hemingway’s life alternated between ever-shortening cycles of euphoric writing and paranoia-ridden depression. (He was obsessively convinced the FBI was trailing him; of course, J. Edgar (the puke, my emphasis) did have a file on him).