Free Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson

practically a 40 footer and with its wide beam, semi Vee bottom form and wide flaring bow this boat provides more comfort, more room, better sea-going qualities, more headroom and runs steadier and smoother than any other boat of its size on the market today. Before considering any boat in this size you owe it to yourself to look over the fine specifications and complete equipment list offered in the new WHEELER PLAYMATES . We offer SEVEN fine arrangements, each with features very far in advance of competitive models and best of all at the VERY LOWEST possible PRICES .… Forward deck is fitted with monkey rails of varnished oak, anchor windglass, chocks, side cleats, etc.… Center of main cabin has large modern galley on starboard side fitted with three burner alcohol stove, large sink, chromium flashed drain board, refrigerator, dish and glass racks and plenty of food and locker space. Port side fitted with a toilet room, which has marine type toilet, large sink, mirror, shelves and other fittings complete.
    The ’34 catalog offered an endorsement from Vincent Astor himself. He’d recently bought a Wheeler thirty-eight. He was the son of Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, robber baron supreme. Vincent Astor could have afforded any kind of yacht or yacht maker he wanted. And he came to Brooklyn for a Wheeler—well, not literally. The hull of his
Little Nourmahal
was white and she was a little more upright as she churned the water, but still: Astor’s custom Wheeler looked remarkably similar to the production Wheeler that, in about six months, was going to come off the wooden ways at Cropsey Avenue, with her five-character Spanish name lettered neatly in white on her dark stern.
    On March 24, in Paris, four days before boarding an ocean liner with the same name (it’s the day he punches the vase of tulips at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company), Hemingway wrote to Arnold Gingrich at
Esquire
. Much of the letter was taken up with instructions regarding his next contribution to the magazine, which would be about the safari. “You may also use the photo of me and lion,” he wrote. “But under no circumstances run this picture with the group of pictures or any single picture oflive lions. It would be very bad taste and give people the impression that we photographed lions and then shot them.” Further on:
    I hope to hell your finances are on the wax rather than the bloody wane as I am broke (after fashion) and it is a pain in the jaw to be writing stuff for nearly enough money to pay the postage when I could put it in a slightly different form and get 10 times as much for it.
    Cosmop paid 5500 for that story [“One Trip Across”]—think I told you—I want to buy a boat that costs $7,000 and have only $3500. Once I get the boat am set. But have been within a grand of enough to buy it with twice and both times the money has peed away.
    Must send this now—Bremen boat train leaving.
    The letter of the twenty-fourth had a postscript: “Please acknowlege pictures to Scribners and mark letter PLEASE HOLD. Will be there in about a week or 8 days.” He had addressed the envelope: “Arnold gingritch Esq.” (Inside, in the greeting, he had used the same spelling and lowercase
g
.) Hemingway’s spelling, not least the spelling of people’s names, was often erratic, and sometimes had a kind of deliberate facetiousness about it, but it seemed to take him a particularly long while to get this one down, even though Gingrich had been his acquaintance for a little more than a year. It would be a good while before Gingrich, like so many others, would begin to register his public contempt for Hemingway. Years later, for
Playboy
, he’d write a biting memoir called “Horsing Them in with Hemingway.” By then Gingrich was not only a legendary American magazine editor, he was a world-class fly-fisherman. He was also the fourth husband of Jane Mason, a