The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats

Terry Mort's research into German U-Boats, the Nazi spy situation in Cuba, the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, and the life and career of Ernest Hemingway's third wife Martha Gellhorn, all make this book incredibly fascinating. He really fills in the background on so many fascinating issues Hemingway only briefly touches on in his writing. The only problem is that the research Mort does really works against his hero. Once the real U-Boat menace is described, both the deadly attacks and the dangers faced by the U-Boats themselves, Papa and his drinking buddies on the little fishing boat just look like amateurs playing at war. Terry Mort takes just about everything Hemingway ever did and said at face value -- even when the man was plainly drunk and making up excuses not to write. Make no mistake, however. When he did write to the best of his abilities, Hemingway was as good as the best. Just read a five page story like "A Clean Well Lighted Place" and you'll see what I mean. But by the time this story begins, Hemingway had already begun the long, slow slide into alcoholism and suicidal despair. There's a rot, a softness in later books like FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS that Terry Mort either misses or chooses to ignore. He writes so well about subjects like navigation, the sea, and sailing basics, but when the subject is Hemingway's writing he sees nothing but good, better, best. The real tragedy of Hemingway's life is that he became an alcoholic. And the truth Terry Mort avoids throughout the book is that in the end an alcoholic's first loyalty is to his disease. Hemingway had the raw materials of greatness in many fields. Early in his life he made successful gestures as a husband, a father, a literary man, and a military man, but by the time of this book his gestures were secondary to his main occupation, drinking. My personal theory is that Hemingway was making semi-conscious attempts to commit suicide going back at least as far as the Twenties. And that his U-Boat patrols were a sort of half-hearted attempt to opt out of life by getting wiped out in "heroic" fashion. Mort admits his attack plan was "suicidal" but doesn't see the real meaning of that description. I'm not saying any of this to bring anybody down, and certainly not to demean Hemingway's greatest work. And I'm very well aware that it was only after all this was over that he wrote his final masterpiece, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, a book I really love. That book could certainly not have been written without the thousands of hours Hemingway spent in the Gulf. But the tragic side of his life, which only makes his literary achievements more admirable, is rigorously excluded from this book.

If I hadn't just finished reading Mark Ott's so-called "eco-biography," A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream--a Contextual Biography, then possibly I would have given Terry Mort's very similar book a higher review. It actually has more biographical juice in it than the literary criticism of Ott, but both writers point to a Hemingway strangely similar to the John Steinbeck who was so fascinated with Doc Ricketts and the Sea of Cortez. That two of the great US novelists cared so much about the oceans and about undersea life is an odd coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence, for both men studied Thoreau and the proto-ecological movements of the previous century. Ott makes better use of the log Hemingway kept for the Pilar, showing how their formal qualities--the fragmentary denotation of nouns and adjectives as the watchers spotted a dolphin, for example, or encountered heavy rain--led to later changes in Hemingway's style--not all of them for the better. But here Mort is much mor knowledgeable about German U Boats and the dangers they posed to the Atlantic seaboard and to US naval efforts in general. Almost as a subplot we have Martha Gellhorn and her bemused attitude towards Hemingway's defense action. She wrote, "Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice." Hemingway would have loved it if Martha had accompanied him on his U Boat expeditions, and maybe their marriage would have lasted longer if she wasn't so skeptical, but as Mort points out, Hemingway expected his disciples to toe the line 100 percent on all points or face his wrath, and Martha Gellhorn just wasn't built that way. Was she a careerist as some have charged? Certainly her alliance with Hemingway raised her profile no end, and she knew it. Finally, Mort does expand our sense of Hemingway's quarrel with "honor." On the one hand he saw it as an antiquated concept responsible for the worst carnages of World War I; on the other, says Mort, he believed in T E Lawrence's line about "there could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat."

As much WWII history - some with new information such as the 2002 discovery of the sunken U166 German submarine - as the weaving of literary criticism, the contexts of Hemingway's life and his hunt for U-boats. Was impressed that Scribner is the publisher - and could see why after reading it. As an amateur student of WW II's "Pacific War" and the air wars of Europe, I started to grasp a new understanding of WWII's merchant marine strategy and Atlantic submarine battle. The author's naval and Caribbean narratives were fresh, most readable and understandable. As a reader of Hemingway's novels with modest short story experience, I was fascinated how the author moved through Hemingway's early years, Paris and Spain to the Gulf Stream, Fifth Columns and the author's own takes on Hemingway. Most enjoyable - and informative.

The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats This is a fascinating book--no need to have a particular interest in either Hemingway or the U-Boat patrols that were conducted off of our shores during WWII to enjoy it. Terry Mort has a way of transporting the reader into the center of the story. I was immediately immersed in Hemingway's huge multi-faceted world from the beginning. I felt as if I were on board the Pilar anticipating a surprise confrontation with the enemy at any moment, or relaxing with "Papa" and friends in his favorite watering holes in Key West and Havana sharing lots of drinks and enjoying his colorful and often grandiose stories, or at home(s) with him and his family. By the end of the book, which came much too quickly, I felt as if I had been given the rarest of intimate and really true glimpses into this brilliant and complex man and his thoughts, feelings, relationships and adventures. I will probably pick this book up again soon as I am already missing my time with him and the huge life that he led.

Every time my grandfather went to Havana's main post office, he took his fourteen-year-old grandson along--Me! Being in the liquor business, Grandpa invariably stopped at the Restaurant/Bar "El Floridita" on our way over or back. One day, his bartender-friend pointed at a group of men sitting at the bar's farthest corner drinking, talking, and playing "cubilete," a dice game played mostly in Cuban bars. Gesturing with his hands, a bearded man mesmerized his cronies with a fishing tale. Bigger than life, Ernest Hemingway was narrating his latest expedition aboard the Pilar. An ardent admirer of his literary genius, Grandpa approached the group and introduced ourselves. Without hesitation he accepted an invitation to share in the conversation. Totally petrified I didn't say a word. Aware of my silence, the bearded man turns around: "Son, would you like to hear about my encounter with a German submarine during the war?" That said, the entire group chuckled at the laughable offer. One of last century's great story tellers, Hemingway reveled in entertaining his cronies sometimes with far-out tales. He cherished the attention, and rejoiced in the macho deportment he portrayed. "The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-boats" is only the title of a book dedicated to the prolific imagination of one of America's greatest writers. Andrew J. Rodriguez Award-winning author of "Adios, Havana," a Memoir