Hemingway's Boat and a North Dakota Boy

"If you were born in a sod hut, and were raised on a homesteading wheat farm in the upper Midwest, and had never been to sea, and had ridden horses bareback to school, wouldn't you think to call the thirty-eight foot shiny new floating thing that you'd just stepped down into a ship?"

These words, taken from Arnold Samuelson's memoir of his time spent with author Ernest Hemingway, sum up the experience of a young North Dakotan who spent a year with Hemingway in the 1930's. His memoir of that year titled With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba was published after his death by his daughter. Samuelson's brief time with Hemingway seems like a happy moment in a life book ended by sadness and disappointment. Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life and Lost, 1934-1961 is a compelling book that adds to the Hemingway story.

Ernest Hemingway, often portrayed in media as an example of the “quintessential man”, evokes thoughts within my popular culture soaked mind of movie action stars from Vin Diesel to Jason Statham. One can almost smell the sweat on his testosterone laden, sunburned face as he sips a strong drink with one hand, shoots a rifle with the other and drives his boat at full speed with his feet. He is the literary equivalent of all that is redeeming and destructive about the male sex.

Despite some of his more retrograde simian qualities, or because of them, his book For Whom the Bell Tolls is for me, one of the finest works in the English language. In his spare prose, it evinces so much more about the meaning and impact of war than any of the non-fiction history books that exist. There is a quote, the structure and author having faded in my memory, who once wrote that there can often be more truth in fiction than in fact itself. Much of Hemingway's work remains the embodiment of this very idea. The short story Big Two-Hearted River remains one of the most poignant and succinct enscapulations of this ideal.

Hemingway's boat Pilar provides the focus around which the book Hemingway's Boat is centered. The book isn't so much about the boat itself, as it is about several of the people (like Samuelson) whose lives crossed Hemingway's aboard this storied craft. The boat, as Hemingway's de facto “man cave” serves as an effective device around which to craft stories regarding Hemingway that had yet to see the light of day.

The book focuses on several people whose lives intersected Hemingway's both on and off Pilar. Hemingway's troubled son Gregory, a young naval attach'e to Cuba and Arnold Samuelson allow us to see Hemingway through their eyes. Samuelson's remains the most interesting for me. Spending his youth on a small farm in White Earth North Dakota, he was shaken early by the murder of his older sister Hedvig in the infamous Arizona Trunk Murders Wanting to become a writer, he hopped trains and bummed his way down to spend a year fishing and learning to write with a master of American prose.

This book has many strengths, I had hoped for more regarding Hemingway's boat and what it was actually used for: fishing. In addition, I'd hoped for more on the fascinating months that Hemingway hunted Nazi subs in the gulf stream during World War Two. There are other books that delve into these topics at length. In spite of these small oversights, the book remains a compelling look into the life of Hemingway and several of the lives that intersected his.