Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost
Paul Hendrickson, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
704 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400075355
Summary
From National Book Critics Circle Award winner Paul Hendrickson, 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.
Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway's sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer's boorishness, depression and alcoholism, and despite his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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—in midwestern USA
• Education—St. Louis University; Pennsylvania
State University
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives near Philidelphia, Pennsylvania
Paul Hendrickson’s most recent book, Hemingway's Boat, was published in 2011. He spent seven years on it. It was a national best-seller and a finalist in biography for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book previous to this, Sons of Mississippi, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction and the Heartland Prize presented annually by the Chicago Tribune. The research and writing were supported by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship.
Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2005, Hendrickson worked for thirty years in daily journalism. He was a staff feature writer at the Washington Post from 1977 to 2001. Eventually, he came to understand the truth of the old saying that the legs are the first to go, and that the honorable and difficult business of writing perishable pieces on deadline belonged to younger people. He needed to try to find a place—a home—where he could continue to work on books and the occasional magazine article and to be involved with gifted, creative people. So now, luck beyond dream, fortune beyond hope, he finds himself conducting writing workshops full time at the University of Pennsylvania in advanced nonfiction.
The neophyte professor, hardly young anymore, was born in California but grew up in the Midwest and in a Catholic seminary in the Deep South, where he studied seven years for the missionary priesthood. This became the subject of his first book, published in 1983: Seminary: A Search. His other books are: Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award); and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (finalist for the National Book Award in 1996).
Hendrickson has degrees in American literature from St. Louis University and Penn State. He is married and has two grown sons (both working in media) and lives with his wife, Cecilia, outside Philadelphia. He has entered the terror, the "long joyful sickness"—as John Updike once called it—of the next book project. It has to do with Frank Lloyd Wright and is being supported at its outset by a second National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship. (From The University of Pennsylvania faculty page.)
Book Reviews
Heartbreaking.... Hemingway’s Boat includes some of the most moving, beautiful pieces of biography I have ever read.... In the best of these streaming "other lives." ... Hendrickson’s two strongest gifts—that compassion and his research and reporting prowess—combine to masterly effect.
Arthur Phillips - New York Times Book Review
A rich book and a wandering one.... Hemingway’s Boat is about Hemingway, about what was good in him and what was bad, about what brought a man who took pleasure in so much to the point where he could take his own life. It is about the joy he spread and the infection he carried.... For Hendrickson, discovering just how unhappy and unsettled Hemingway was for so long makes him more of a hero. He states his case persuasively, which is why this book is so good.
Allan Massie - Wall Street Journal
Large-minded [and] rigorously fair.... An indispensable documen.... With this sterling summation of the entire Hemingway canon, Hendrickson shows what has eluded some very able scholars. A writer’s life can contain two conflicting existences, one of purely original genius and one of irreversible destructiveness. It’s a lucky genius who gets credit for the first and a free pass on the second. Hendrickson issues no free pass to Papa. He gives the ravaged old man something more honest: a fair summing-up of a life like no other.
Howell Raines - Washington Post
Brilliant.... Through painstaking reporting, through conscientious sifting of the evidence, and most of all, through vivid, heartfelt, luminous writing, Hendrickson gets to the heart of both Hemingway and his world.... Hendrickson writes sentences that seem lit from within—but not in a showy way. Rather, they glow with the yearning of the humble seeker, the diligent observer who understands that we’ll never get to the end of the Hemingway story—yet we have to start somewhere.
Julia Keller - Chicago Tribune -Top Picks of 2011
Writing with stylistic verve, great heart and profound insight, Paul Hendrickson gives us a fresh way to understand one of the most written-about, fascinating characters in American letters.... Hendrickson doesn’t reveal Hemingway’s life as much as he illuminates it with his characteristic passion and intelligence, in a great match of biographer and subject.
Elizabeth Taylor - Chicago Tribune
Hendrickson’s engrossing book offers a fresh slant on the rise and fall of a father figure of American literature.
San Francisco Chronicle - Best Books of 2011
Glorious.... A copious, mystical portrait.... [Pilar] proves that there just might be one more way of telling Papa’s story.... Hendrickson handles her like the relic she is, and makes of her a cunning, capable metaphor for Hemingway’s contradictory drives.... Hendrickson fills in the negative space exuberantly. He imagines each scene completely, and then imagines himself into it. The book becomes a participatory biography—the details are rendered with a hallucinatory intensity.... This big-hearted book leaves us with a litany of sorrows, but also images of grace: of heroism in Gigi’s muddled final moments; of tenderness and lucidity in Hemingway’s paranoid last days; and of Pilar and her promise of escape, renewal, and the open sea.
Parul Sehgal - Cleveland Plain-Dealer
An often lyrical mélange of biography, lit-crit meditation and straight reportage...Hendrickson delves deep into the margins, running down fascinating profiles of a handful of characters who had been treated like bit players in earlier works and searching for renewed significance in some episodes that had previously been relegated to footnotes.... Smart and lovingly crafted, a worthy addition.
Larry Lebowitz - Miami Herald
Paul Hendrickson wrote Hemingway’s Boat almost as a rebuke to the many conflicting Hemingway biographies and "daffy critical studies." If he could ground a narrative in something that existed and still exists, that Hemingway loved, if he could learn about such a treasured possession, then maybe he could learn something about Hemingway, too. He does, in spades, and so do Hendrickson’s lucky readers.... Captivating.
Roger K. Miller - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
This may be the great Hemingway book of the past twenty years. It gives us, at long last, the New Hemingway we’ve needed. We are persuaded that, at long last, we have somehow encountered Hemingway whole—apparition and monster, buffoon and barbarian, literary titan and pretender, macho man and soft-hearted benefactor, and above all, the great artist wrestling with anxieties that are secret gifts and advantages that were vicious impediments.... [Hendrickson is] so attentive to detail that he will notice the polish on a woman’s nails, but, at the same time, so intuitive that he can neutralize some of the oldest toxins flowing through the bloodstream of Hemingway’s life narrative.
Jeff Simon - Buffalo News
Engrossing.... Movingly told...Hemingway’s Boat brings a commanding personality—and all the fears and insecurities that came with it—brilliantly to life side by side with the lives of minor characters, neglected witnesses who have their own stories to tell.
J. Malcolm Garcia - Kansas City Star
The most honest and honestly excellent prose about Papa Hemingway to date.... Hendrickson’s quirky, compelling, and compassionate biography of a literary lion slants great.
Linda Elisabeth Beattie - Louisville Courier-Journal
I read [Hemingway’s Boat] without a pause.... [It’s] a biography that is at once admiring and devastating, and full of material that I wouldn’t have thought even existed and of people who knew Hemingway whom I’d never heard of—an eye opener of a book, full of unexpected riches, fascinating digressions, and leaving one at the end wishing the book were longer, and thinking long and hard about the price of fame and success in America, and the dangers of seemingly getting everything you wanted out of life—it just may be the best book I’ve read this year, and certainly the best book I’ve read about an American writer in a long, long time.
Michael Korda - Newsweek - Favorite Books 2011
Rich and enthralling.... Paul Hendrickson is a deeply informed and inspired guide. He often appears in the first person, addressing the reader and exhorting him or her to speculate, imagine, or feel. He has researched exhaustively, been to the places Hemingway frequented, and talked to whoever was part of or had a connection to the Hemingway days. His diligence and spirit are remarkable. It is like traveling with an irrepressible talker who may go off on tangents but never loses the power to amaze.... Hemingway’s Boat is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It does not rival the biographies but rather stands brilliantly beside them—the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.
James Salter - New York Review of Books
The author, an accomplished storyteller, interprets myriad tiny details of Ernest Hemingway’s life, and through them says something new about a writer everyone thinks they know.
The Economist - Books of the Year 2011
There’s never been a biography quite like this one.... The stories are rich with contradiction and humanity, and so raw and immediate you can smell the salt air.
Publishers Weekly - Best Books of 2011: The Top 10
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Hemingway's Boat:
1. Having read Henderson's account, what do you think of Ernest Hemingway? Many accounts portray him in a negative light—a difficult man, cruel to family and friends, with a massive ego. Hemingway's Boat, however, also offers a more generous portrait—a man who extended kindness and help to those in need. How much did you know about Ernest Hemingway prior to reading this book? Has your opinion of him changed?
2. Point out or discuss the numerous parallels to Hemingway's life that Hendrickson has found in Hemingway's novels. Do these life parallels enrich the reading experience or are they irrelevant?
3. There have been hundreds of books written about Hemingway—more than ten by family members alone. Does this book add anything new? How is Hendrickson able to uncover stories and people that other writers have overlooked?
4. Many reviewers criticize the “endless speculation” over questions that no biographer is able to answer. Do you think too much of Henderson's book is based on speculation rather than a careful collation of facts?
5. Some reviewers say Hendrickson devotes too many spages to are spent on big game fishing, overly specific jargon. Do you feel this detracts from...or slows the pace of the prose? Or does it enhance the reading experience?
6. Talk about the relationship between Hemingway and his youngest son, Gregory-Gigi. Both men led tortured lives with tragic endings. Do you agree with Henderson's suggestion that Gigi was acting out many of the same tensions that his father felt but suppressed? Do you believe that their tumultuous relationship was because Hemginway recognized parts of himself in Gigi?
7. Why does Hemingway consider Pilar his most treasured possession? Talk about the role the boat plays in his life. Do you have a Pilar in your life?
8. Hendrickson delves deep into the lives on Arnold Samuelson and Walter Hock, including large sections of their lives before meeting Hemingway? Why does he spend so much time on the two characters. Does this enhance, or distract, from the narrative?
9. What are your thoughts about the author moving in and out of the first-person narrative and repetitive mention of his research and methodology? Interesting, distracting?
10. Why did you choose this book? Are you a devoted Hemingway fan...or a new one? Has reading this book enticed you to read (or reread) any of his work?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)