The Night Circus - ANTHEA

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30 September 2011 Knopf Rights sold: UK: The Bodley Head Other rights available PAUL HENDRICKSON’s previous book, Sons of Mississippi, won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. For two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. Among his other books are Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (1992 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (1996 finalist for the National Book Award). He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Hemingway’s Boat Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934- 1961 Paul Hendrickson “Admirably absorbing, important, and moving. . . . Acutely sensitive to his subject’s volatile, ‘gratuitously mean’ personality, Hendrickson offers fascinating details and sheds new light on Hemingway’s kinder, more generous side.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Splendid. A moving, highly evocative account . . . this beautifully written, nuanced meditation deserves a wide audience.” —Kirkus (starred review) 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. 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.
EXCERPT FROM THE PROLOGUE: AMID SO MUCH RUIN, STILL THE BEAUTY She was sitting up on concrete blocks, like some old and gasping browned-out whale, maybe a hundred yards from Hemingway’s house, under a kind of gigantic carport with a corrugated-plastic roof, on what was once his tennis court, just down from the nowdrained pool where Ava Gardner had reputedly swum nude. Even in her diminished, dry-docked, parts-plundered state, I knew Pilar would be beautiful, and she was. I knew she’d be threatened by the elements and the bell-tolls of time, in the same way much else at the hilltop farm on the outskirts of Havana—La Finca Vigia was its name when Hemingway lived there—was seriously threatened, and she was. But I didn’t expect to be so moved. I walked round and round her. I took rolls and rolls of pictures of her long, low hull, of her slightly raked mahogany stern, of her nearly vertical bow. When the guards weren’t looking, I reached over and touched her surface. The wood, marbled with hair-line fissures, was dusty, porous, dry. It seemed almost scaly. It felt febrile. It was as if Pilar were dying from thirst. It was as if all she wanted was to get into water. But even if it were possible to hoist her with a crane off these blocks and to ease her onto a flatbed truck and to take her away from this steaming hillside and to set her gently into Havana Harbor, would Hemingway’s boat go down like a stone, boiling and bubbling to the bottom, her insides having long ago been eaten out by termites and other barely visible critters? A man who let his own insides get eaten out by the diseases of fame had dreamed new books on this boat. He’d taught his sons to reel in something that feels like Moby Dick on this boat. He’d accidentally shot himself in both legs on this boat. He’d fallen drunk from the flying bridge on this boat. He’d written achy, generous, uplifting, poetic letters on this boat. He’d propositioned women on this boat. He’d hunted German subs on this boat. He’d saved guests and family members from shark attack on this boat. He’d acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat. She’d been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years—which were his final twenty-seven years. She’d lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin. He’d owned her, fished her, worked her, rode her, from the waters of Key West to the Bahamas to the Dry Tortugas to the north coast and archipelagoes of Cuba. She wasn’t a figment or a dream or a literary theory or somebody’s psychosexual interpretation—she was actual. 31
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The Night Circus - ANTHEA

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