Untamed Enough To Ride On Hemingway's Boat

Hemingway's Boat
by Paul Hendrickson

Hardcover, 544 pages
Published September 20th 2011 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN:1400041627 (ISBN13: 9781400041626)


Animalinside
by László Krasznahorkai, Max Neumann (Illustrator), Ottilie Mulzet (Translator), Colm Tóibín (Preface)

Hardcover, 48 pages
Published April 26th 2011 by New Directions Publishing Corporation (first published 2010)
ISBN: 081121916X (ISBN13: 9780811219167)
edition language: English
original title: Állatvanbent



There are collaborations, and then some. Often they work, and often they do not. I am a large fan of László Krasznahorkai and his work with film maker Béla Tarr. I enjoyed his latest novel War & War. This latest book, a collaborative effort, Animalinside, looks interesting enough, has a theme I enjoy visiting, but I feel the work is just more of the same death-drive literature that Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and others have already done to perfection. A little pretentious actually. I almost wish he wouldn't have made it. Max Neumann, the artist collaborator, meant nothing to me before reading this book and he means even less to me since owning some of his work on the pages of the book I happened to purchased. I know about animals, I know where we came from. I am not a "creationist". It is a beastly world we live in and then we die. The mystery is in the details of a life, not in the ending of it. The ending is nothing. Nothing is nothing. You get my drift? Whereas, and we are going to take a mighty leap off this topic about a less than satisfying book and into a different and more important biography that does solve some mystery for us, a book published in 2011 titled Hemingway's Boat diligently and efficiently offers us much much more to chew on. I read somewhere by somebody I guess is important somewhere that the author, Paul Hendrickson, basically wrote a gossip tabloid as far as this somebody's opinion is concerned. That certain somebody is certainly wrong with his assessment. Hemingway's Boat is a masterpiece in Creative Nonfiction.

Hendrickson has written a new biography of Ernest Hemingway meant to fully, if not super-fully, appreciate the "myth-swallowed" life of this man. The biography is presented in a scientific, almost astronomical, technique known as "averted vision" and is described by Hendrickson as an idea that "sometimes you can see the essence of a thing more clearly if you are not looking at it directly." (page 304) In telling stories of lesser known characters involved in their own way with the Hemingway myth such as the mesmerizing story of Arnold Samuelson who went on to write his own memoir of his year with Hemingway, to Walter Houk who still holds Hemingway in the highest regard though Papa had every intent to bed the woman who became his wife, and also Papa's son Greg (Gigi) whose own infamy rests in his desire to wear women's clothes and express his feminine side publicly instead of in the closet where his dad remained until the day he died. Looking closely at the relationship between Hem and these outer rim characters is sort of like looking at things in the "periphery rather than at the center of your gaze" as Hendrickson offered in his preface to the book.

The next wild jump I think appropriate to make at this point in my record is my own jack-in-the-box claim that the one theme present in every bit of the creative work that I myself have done thus far in my own attempts to get as near to the truth as possible without burning up like Icarus is in regards to the unconscious. My own poetry and film is a way for me to speak from the unconscious to the unconscious. Sounds crazy, and it probably is, but it is what I have believed in for several years. I am not alone. Matter of fact I am in good company. Gilles Deleuze and other great philosophers have gone to great lengths in their study of the unconscious. I certainly believe Paul Hendrickson believes in the unseemly power of it too. Much of what we do we cannot explain. We cannot find the words. Hemingway tried. His son, as one not fallen far from the tree, made some of those words manifest.

But the last words in the Hendrickson text comes from his notes when he is visiting with the adult Pierre Saviers who was a younger brother of a boy Ernest Hemingway was trying to save at the end of his own life. Saviers' last words in attempting to explain Ernest Hemingway are bracketed in quotes. Hendrickson writes: He stood up. He was tired of talking about it. He had other things to do. "It's all layered. The way I see all this is that part of what we do in this life is unconscious. Maybe this is the best we can ever say."

From beginning to end Hemingway's Boat is a thoroughly enjoyable and titillating read. I confess to never having read, before this, another Hemingway biography. And if this is the only one I ever do read I believe it will be enough. That is how good this book is.