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Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
Knopf
October 2011
On Sale: September 20, 2011
544 pages
ISBN: 1400041627
EAN: 9781400041626
Kindle: B004J4X9OW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, 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. We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa,
Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels
and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his
beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the
biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain
celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his
children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of
fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his
critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried,
in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities. Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing
human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more benevolent
light. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including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. We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest
son, Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a
cross-dresser, and died squalidly and alone in a Miami
women’s jail. He was the son Hemingway forsook the least,
yet the one who disappointed him the most, as Gigi acted out
for nearly his whole life so many of the tortured, ambiguous
tensions his father felt. Hendrickson’s bold and beautiful
book strikingly makes the case that both men were braver
than we know, struggling all their lives against the
complicated, powerful emotions swirling around them. As
Hendrickson writes, “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.” 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.
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