Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved In Life, and Lost, 1934 - 1961

by Paul Hendrickson, c. 2011.

The cover/inside flap is a bit misleading: I thought this book earned a National Book Critics Circle Award for the author. In fact, it was the author's 2003 Sons of Mississippi that won him the award.

But don't let the title of the book mislead you.

This is not another Ernest Hemingway biography. It is a biography of the Hemingway tribe.

I've never particularly enjoyed Hemingway's novels and never understood why he was judged to be one of the best. There's no question I will go back and read some of his novels, now that I understand him so much better. Wow, what a complex man. Hendrickson has written an outstanding book, and goes to the edge in positing hypotheses about why things the way they were.

For 389 pages, the author is leading you toward the climax: early on you will infer that you will learn more what led up to Hemingway's suicide. But starting at page 389, one starts to get the feeling that the author is leading the reader elsewhere, and by page 453, one feels he has come as close to the Hemingway tribe as is humanly possibly without actually being one of the family.

Along the way, one is reminded, or one learns, that the Hemingway family abounded in suicides: the father of the author, the brother of the author, the author, a sister, possibly a second sister.

But it's the pages between 389 and 453 that hold the reader spellbound. It is the story of Ernest's youngest son, a cross-dressing, transvestite, Harvard-trained physician. The facts are impossible to fathom. The psychological underpinning is impossible to comprehend.

After one has read the other biographies of Ernest Hemingway, this is the capstone.