Hemingway's Boat

Starred review from July 11, 2011
NBCCâaward winner Hendrickson (Sons of Mississippi) offers an admirably absorbing, important, and moving interpretation of Hemingway's ambitions, passions, and tragedies during the last 27 years of his life. When Hemingway purchased the sleek fishing boat Pilar in 1934, he was on the cusp of literary celebrity, flush with good health, and ebullient about pursuing deep sea adventures. The release from his desk was a reward for productive writing and the change replenished his creative energy. But eventually Hemingway's health and work declined. When he committed suicide in 1961, he hadn't been aboard the Pilar in many months. Acutely sensitive to his subject's volatile, "gratuitously mean" personality, Hendrickson offers fascinating details and sheds new light on Hemingway's kinder, more generous side from interviews with people befriended by Hemingway in his prime. Most importantly, Hendrickson interviewed each of Hemingway's sons. He suggests, not for the first time but with poignant detail, the probability that Papa's youngest son, Gregory (Gigi), a compulsive cross-dresser who eventually had gender-altering surgery, was acting out impulses that his father yearned for yet denied. Hendrickson makes new connections between ex-wife Pauline's sudden death after Hemingway's cruel accusations against Gigi, and Gigi's lifelong guilt over her death. In the end, Hendrickson writes of the tormented Gigi and his conflicted father, "I consider them far braver than we ever knew." 23 illus.

Starred review from August 15, 2011

A splendid view of Papa and his beloved boat Pilar.

 "You know you love the sea and would not be anywhere else," wrote Ernest Hemingway in Islands in the Stream. In 1934, already the "reigning monarch of American literature" for The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, he bought a 38-foot motorized fishing vessel at a Brooklyn boatyard and set out for the Caribbean. "Mr. H. is like a wild thing with his boat," wrote Pauline, his second wife. An integral part of his final 27 years, Pilar offered afternoons of solace on waters between Key West and Cuba, during which Hemingway fished, drank, wrote, bickered with wives and sons and entertained visitors. A former Washington Post feature writer and winner of a National Book Critics Circle award, Hendrickson (Nonfiction Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, 2003, etc.) offers a moving, highly evocative account of Hemingway's turbulent later years, when he lost the favor of critics, the love of wives and friends and, ultimately, his ability to write. Drawing on interviews, documents (including 34 Pilar logs) and secondary sources, the author succeeds in restoring a sense of Hemingway the man, seen as a flawed, self-sabotaging individual whose kindness and gentleness have been overlooked in accounts of his cruel and boorish side. Even as he attacked critics and fired his shotgun angrily at sea birds, the tortured author proved remarkably sweet and friendly to many, including Arnold Samuelson, an admiring young writer who became Hemingway's assistant on Pilar; and Walter Houk, now in his 80s, who remembers the author fondly as "a great man with great faults." Seven years in the making, this vivid portrait allows us to see Hemingway on the Pilar once again, standing on the flying bridge and guiding her out of the harbor at sunrise.

Appearing on the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death, this beautifully written, nuanced meditation deserves a wide audience.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2011

Fifty years after Ernest Hemingway's death, Hendrickson profiles the great writer from the height of his career onward by focusing on his constant return for fun and solace to his beloved boat, Pilar. Sounds a bit offbeat, but Hendrickson has the credentials to pull it off; his Sons of Mississippi, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, made good history out of a single photograph of seven segregation-era sheriffs with a billy club. With a five-city tour.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2011
In previous, riveting books about Robert McNamara (The Living and the Dead, 1996) and civil-rights-era murder (Sons of Mississippi, 2003), Hendrickson peered into the intersection of melancholy and history. The story of Ernest Hemingway offers more of that, in spades. Less a biography than a deeply reported, achingly considered meditative essay, Hemingway's Boat covers a vast amount of territory in the life of the mythic, difficult-to-understand Papa, all of it coming back in some way to Hemingway's beloved 38-foot, two-engine, ocean-plying Pilar. Fishing, fatherhood, manhood, writing, the infinite pull of the Gulf Streamthese constitute only the starting point of Hendrickson's sympathetic, illuminating wanderings. To him, the Pilar represents the nexus of Hemingway's outsize, complicated, and sad yearnings, personal relationships, and many losses, none perhaps as poignant as the volatile chasm between Hemingway and his youngest, gender-confused son, Gregory. Hendrickson has previously profiled the three Hemingway sons. In returning to this much-traveled country, he tracks down overlooked voices and continues a personal quest. Of fishing, a young Hemingway wrote, It's not the duration of sensation but its intensity that counts. Hendrickson's book is filled with intensity, humanity, and more.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)