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.