The heart of Hemingway

A new biography of ‘Papa’ has deeply impressed Sam Leith, although its thoroughness — like its subject — ‘teeters on nuts’

Hemingway’s Boat is just what it sounds like. It takes as its conceit — and it’s a good one — that writing about Hemingway’s boat Pilar (now up on blocks in Cuba) is a way of getting at deep things about the man. Pilar was there all the second half of his life and may have been the only friend he never fell out with. Fishing was more than a recreation for Hemingway: it was at the centre, this book plausibly suggests, of his being in the world.

Paul Hendrickson duly set about getting to the core of Hemingway’s relationship with Pilar. And how! His research is flat-out phenomenal. It teeters on nuts. The author hasn’t just interviewed Hemingway’s sons and Hemingway’s surviving former helpmeets and friends. He has researched the history of the company that built Hemingway’s boat, and he has visited the muddy waterway in which she would first have floated. If a journalist published a hack news report on Hemingway’s arrival in Cuba, Hendrickson will have researched his subsequent career. If Hemingway fished a particular stream in Michigan on one occasion in his teens, Hendrickson won’t just have visited it: he’ll have fished it too. This is the total immersion school of — well, biography isn’t quite the word. It’s a sort of mental home invasion.

The narrative loops around in time — describing the acquisition of the boat (Hemingway begged his editor for a loan to buy it) and going forward and round and back to his childhood, zipping into his afterlife or legacy, and closing in, always, on his death. As well as the Pilar story, it describes a trio of others — the author’s three biggest scoops — arranged like a Venn diagram.