Hemingway Adventure (1999)

by Michael Palin

  You can take one of the 186 rooms at ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ Hotel, or one of the 314 rooms at ‘The Garden of Eden’. You can wander down to Wild Ernie’s for a drink, stuff yourself at ‘The Green Hills of Africa’ and sweat it all off in Papa’s Solarium.

  I drive past these various temptations until I reach the waterfront. Out there beyond the harbour mouth is what, more than anything else, drew Hemingway to Cuba. La Corriente, the Gulf Stream. A sixty-mile-wide, mile-deep fisherman’s paradise.

  This Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it … That stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone.

  Hemingway’s long rap in Green Hills of Africa is not all celebration. Like the good reporter he once was, he notes, with equal relish, the ‘high-piled scow of garbage’ which the tugboats of Havana dump into the deep blue waters, ‘the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep-floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat’.

  Nevertheless, Hemingway elevated marlin-fishing on the Gulf Stream into one of life’s last great adventures. He went at it day after day after day, so much so that local fishermen christened the stretch of water east from Cojimar ‘Hemingway’s Mile’. And when he wasn’t fishing it he was writing about it and even working with scientists from the Smithsonian to classify the various marlin species. It was a very serious obsession.

  In 1950, never really happy with any activity unless some sort of contest was involved, Hemingway started an International Marlin Tournament. Ten years later the competition was named after him, though he resisted this - ‘A lousy posthumous tribute to a lousy living writer’ - and the first prize that year was won by Fidel Castro.

  One of this year’s main fishing tournaments has been running for two days and has two more to go. There is only one Cuban boat in the competition, a couple of Canadians, and the rest, surprisingly, are American. The Cuban organisers are helpful and suggest we wait until the boats come in and ask if any would be happy to take us aboard tomorrow morning.

  At six, the boats start to come back in and the lucky ones can be picked out long before they dock by the number of white pennants they have run up. One for each catch.

  I notice straightaway that there has been a major change since Hemingway fished here. This is the age of tag and release. Not only is it not necessary to kill the marlin to score points, you actually get fewer points if you do kill one.

  So there are plenty of pennants but no one hoisting dead marlin up on the weighing post and posing for a photo as Ernie loved to do.

  I approach an American boat with two fluttering white pennants and introduce myself.

  ‘I’m from the BBC.’

  Instant recognition. ‘Ah yes!’ says the skipper, shaking my hand warmly. ‘The Bahamas Billfish Championship.’

  In the world of deep-sea fishing, the BBC means only one thing.

  They’re a friendly crew and lead the competition after two days. They’re happy to play host to us tomorrow, but they warn us to be on time. The starting gun goes off at nine sharp.

  The starting gun is not quite as impressive as it sounds. It’s a small brass cannon, carried from the clubhouse to the shore in the back of a car and set up at a point opposite which the sixteen competing boats are lined up.

  With due ceremony, the breech is filled with rifle powder and the barrel stuffed with sheet after sheet of toilet paper, laboriously folded, inserted and rammed home with a plunger.

  On the stroke of nine o’clock a match is applied and the rifle powder and the toilet paper combine to raise a respectable thump, which sends the cannon reeling back and the boats gunning their engines and racing off toward the waiting marlin.

  This is quite a thrill. To be about to hit what Hemingway called ‘the great blue river’. Conditions are good as our wooden-hulled 55-footer slaps and bounces on a lively sea. About three miles out from the shore, perhaps a little less, the colour of the water indeed changes very abruptly, from milky green to a blue, more royal than navy, with lines of wind-spun silver foam slanting through it.

  Our hosts are five Americans out of West Palm Beach. I ask them why the majority of boats in the tournament are from the USA when that country forbids trade with Cuba.

  They come, they say, because this is the best marlin-fishing in the world, and for this they are prepared to accept certain restrictions. All supplies, right down to bread and water, must be brought with them from the States. They are not allowed to buy anything Cuban, nor are they allowed to accept anything from the Cubans by way of prize money or on-shore hospitality. American customs pay them a lot of attention when they return to Florida.

  The organisers have issued a map of the fishing zone, divided into alphabetical squares. Square F is the best. It is where the coastline juts out to meet the stream and the marlin are most likely to stop and feed. It’s also right at the mouth of the harbour, opposite the old city, visible once upon a time from Room 511 at the Ambos Mundos.

  It’s also the busiest and our skipper, up on the flying bridge, decides to head a little further north and east before putting out the lines.

  Four rods are fished, but apart from one false alarm, there is a lot of watching, waiting and application of sun cream. Little else. Explanatory theories are concocted - the wind has slipped away from due east, the most favourable direction. There’s too much direct sunlight. The middle of the day is always the worst time. No one mentions the Palin effect.

  The sun climbs, hangs and begins to fall. The skipper puts the boat about and we begin to readjust our position a little nervously. But still nothing breaks the waters.

  At the end of the day’s fishing, at six o’clock, we return to shore empty-rodded, hoping everyone else will have done so too. But there have been strikes and other people’s flags are flying and one boat is still out there. A huge marlin was hooked early on this morning by one of the women in her crew and she has held on to it all day long and is prepared to hang on all night if necessary.

  Now that is hard to take. A Hemingway adventure is happening out there and we have no way of getting to it.

  Our crew is still optimistic. They were unlucky today, but their first two days’ tally keeps them up with the leaders and in with a chance. They’ve invited us to return tomorrow, the last day of the tournament.

  Anxious to sample all the myriad forms of Cuban transport, I ride out to the Marina today in a motorcycle sidecar. They were very popular in Sheffield when I was a lad, but they tend to be consigned to transport museums nowadays.

  Cuba is a living transport museum, so you still see plenty of them, jostling for road space with Chevy Bel Airs from the 1950s, stretch Skodas from the 1960s, horse-drawn buggies from the 1740s, and lots of bicycles and scooters of indeterminate age, often with parilleras aboard. Parilleras are the girls who sit sideways on the back of bicycles, usually wearing eyecatching fluorescent Lycra shorts. My driver points to them as we speed along the Avenida Zoologico, and expresses a warm enthusiasm.

  ‘Especially the ones with big bottoms!’ he yells into the slipstream. A sign of beauty in Cuba, evidently.

  Aboard ship and out onto the famous blue water. Except that it isn’t so blue today. The wind has turned again and slabs of iron-grey cloud loom over us, blotting out the sun and washing out the colours of yesterday. The competition ends at two o’clock and by then our boat has not even a false alarm to show for its last days’ sailing. Very sportingly they allow me on the fishing chair for the last few hours of daylight. And, of course, everyone ho
pes that beginner’s luck might yet save the day.

  The swell heaves and sighs and I learn how to let my line out and how to control the reel and I grow mesmerised by the dot of colour that is my float, bobbing on the water, and desperate to feel some sort of pull on it. My instructor tells me exactly what to do in the event of a huge marlin impaling itself on the end of my line. Pump and reel, pump and reel.

  But the light begins to go and there’s still no one down there in the marlin department. We head back to the Marina for the last time. For all his action writing, Hemingway understood failure pretty well. I re-read the opening lines of The Old Man and the Sea, and don’t feel so bad.

  He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty four days now without taking a fish.

  Our American crew has been kind and generous with us. There’s little we can do but bid them farewell and promise to change our name to Albatross Productions.

  Thunder rumbles and lightning flashes out over the sea as we ride home.

  Any lingering dejection is dispersed by the hero’s welcome I receive back at the hotel. Thrusting a copy of Granma into my hand, Isis and Lilian gaze at me with new respect. ‘There, Mr Michael, in the television listings!’

  I look for the column. There are only four pages in today’s issue so it’s not hard to find.

  ‘Griaturas Feroces,’ I read, ‘con Jamie Lee Curtis y Michael Palin.’

  My stock has soared. I’m no longer a common or garden Hemingway fan. I’m Jamie Lee Curtis’s co-star.

  And the towel on my bed tonight is in the shape of the letter’M’.

  Heavy rain in the night and, as I push open the windows of my room next to Hemingway’s, the roofs are steaming, and Hurricane George is creeping slowly towards us. With a bit of luck we’ll be out in time. George is moving out of Puerto Rico and heading for Dominica. Tomorrow we leave Cuba for the States to cover the last few Hemingway destinations.

  Take a last walk around some of my favourite places. Like the Plaza de Armas, surrounded by fine colonial edifices, the most impressive of which is the grandly named Palace of The Captains General, now the City Museum. A tremendous colonnade of grey limestone walls and pillars, as massive and serious as anything in classical Europe.

  The communists have been surprisingly generous with the monuments of imperialism, and the rooms of the museum are an eloquent evocation of the days when the colonialists lived well in Havana. The rooms are unbearably hot, and yet the be-wigged and overcoated grandees in the portraits appear to be dressed for a funeral in Greenland. Is this yet more evidence of global warming or did people still dress up for their portraits in those days?

  For our last meal in Havana we go to the tiny Chinatown area to see if Hemingway’s favourite Chinese restaurant, El Pacifico, is still there. And it is, a monumental barn of a place, occupying several floors of a building in a narrow street in the Cayo Hueso area. They say that in the old days the restaurant occupied the ground floor and the floors above were arranged in ascending order of decadence - first: gambling, second: sex, and third: drugs. The penthouse presumably offered gambling, sex and drugs, and possibly donkeys as well.

  There is no trace of dissipation in the darkened entrance where an unimpressive menu is advertised and no one on the staff seems to know or care if Hemingway used to bring his family here for Sunday lunch.

  So we go across the road and eat our meal in the small back room of another Chinese establishment - not too small, however, for a six-piece band to squeeze in and supply ‘Guantanamera’ with the steamed rice.

  A last round of mojitos at the Patio restaurant in the fine old Cathedral Square. Normally at this time the place is ringed with professional ladies weighing up business prospects, but tonight I’m told there has been one of the periodic police crackdowns and only the real die-hards are left.

  To the airport in a vintage Chrysler. As it is precisely the same age as the black Chrysler that Hemingway used to drive, there is always a chance he swung this one round the same corners. Not always with much success.

  In a letter to Maxwell Perkins from the Finca in July 1945, Hemingway describes yet another messy accident, ‘[It] was at noon and I was cold sober,’ before adding, more incriminatingly, ‘Fourth bad smash in a year. Fortunately only two got into print.’

  Amazingly enough, in 1955, the most accident-prone man in the world was awarded the Order of St Christopher, for those who had driven exceptionally safely in Havana. Hemingway apparently regarded this as more precious than the Nobel Prize he’d won the year before. He passed the Nobel medal on to a church at Cobre near Santiago de Cuba. And there it resides to this day, in the Chapel of Our Lady of Miracles.

  This seems typical of Hemingway’s life here. The bold, if eccentric, gesture of a man who knew that in Cuba, bold eccentric gestures were much appreciated in a man, along with any show of confident flamboyance. Hemingway hated limitation and constriction of any kind, especially social and cultural. If he had lived and worked in America, he would have been required to conform in some way to the expectations of a literary establishment. In Cuba he didn’t have to pay this price.

  However, he had done himself lasting damage in the crashes in Africa, and, throughout the late fifties, his health, and the health of the island, declined rapidly. Castro’s revolution in 1959 was seen by most Cubans as a cure. For Hemingway, it was equivalent to a terminal diagnosis.

  As Castro and the USA began to square off, he was forced into an agony of divided loyalties between home and homeland. On 25 July 1960, he took the ferry to Key West and sailed away from Cuba for the last time.

  Thirty-eight years on, there is no ferry to Key West or anywhere else on the US coast. The country of Hemingway’s birth and the country he adopted are still squaring up, which is why I’m leaving Cuba on a Jamaican plane, heading south to the USA.

  AMERICAN WEST

  ‘This is a cockeyed wonderful country,’ wrote Hemingway to his artist buddy Waldo Peirce, after two weeks in Wyoming in August 1928. Despite his close acquaintance with Italy, France and Spain, this was the first time the much-travelled twenty-nine-year-old had tasted the wide open spaces of his own country.

  The birth of his second son two months previously had brought him back from Europe and the need to get away and finish his new novel (which became A Farewell to Arms) had sent him out to the American West in search of peace and quiet.

  He returned many times to the Big Country on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. It was a safety valve, a place to hunt and shoot and fish and finish books and read proofs well away from the metropolitan literary environment he disliked so much.

  He never made a home here, that is, until the winter of 1958, when he and Mary first rented and then bought a house on a hillside in Ketchum, Idaho. But by that time the West was no longer the place where he could get away from his problems. It was the place where his problems finally caught up with him.

  In November 1930, when Archie MacLeish flew out to Montana to see his friend Ernest hospitalised in Billings after a serious car crash, it took him two days to get there and he called it ‘the most hair raising flight of my life’.

  My first trip to Montana is not much better. Huge thunderstorms in the Mid-West empty the clouds and fill the airports, and by the time we reach Bozeman there is snow on the ground and hardly a room to be had because of parents’ weekend at the university.

  I’m told that though Montana is the fourth largest state by area, it has a population of less than eight hundred thousand. This should make for wide open spaces, but tonight downtown Bozeman is like Times Square. The only difference is that they treat you better here. However hectic is the bar or the baggage-hall, no one but yourself is going to hurry you.

  By the time I get to bed I haven’t seen a single wide open space but already I feel a deep and inexplicable sense of relaxation.

  When he and his friend Bill Home first came out west in 1928, in a yellow Ford runabout provided for him
by Pauline’s ever-generous Uncle Gus, Hemingway found it hard to settle. Though he thought it ‘damned lovely country’, he couldn’t find a dude ranch (a ranch that took paying guests) which suited him. The first one, Folly Ranch, had fifteen girls staying, which was not what he wanted at all (though Bill Home married one of them). In another he found the peace and solitude too much, and once again confided in Waldo Peirce. ‘Am lonely as a bastard, drank too much last night and feel like anything but work now.’

  When he returned with Pauline two years later, they hit upon a ranch called the L-Bar-T on the eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park, just south of the old mining town of Cooke City, Montana. It was run by a Swede, Lawrence Nordquist, who offered them a cabin in the woods with a view of the mountains. Hemingway loved the fishing in the nearby Clarks Fork River and he and Pauline and the family returned to the Nordquist ranch throughout the thirties, until fame and another divorce lured Hemingway to the lusher pastures of Sun Valley, Idaho.

  This morning, early, we load up and head south to see Yellowstone Park for ourselves. I can’t match Hemingway’s yellow Ford, but given the nature of the weather, have accepted the kind offer of a Ford F250, a big bruiser of a pick-up that, literally, weighs a ton.

  The day looks promising, a big, largely clear sky with licks of grey cloud on the Bridger mountains to the north-east. At Livingston we swing south and follow the Yellowstone River, past turn-offs to places whose names tell you all the essentials of local history. Pray, Emigrant and Miner.

  The valley road, bordered by pale and ghostly stands of silver birch is still dark, but the snow-covered slopes of the high mountains ahead of us shine gloriously in the first brightness of the rising sun. Highway 89 feels like the road to heaven.

  Once we’re inside the park boundaries, there’s a dramatic change of scenery. A third of Yellowstone Park was burned by multiple fires in 1988 and we pass through a desolate and depressing landscape of slopes strewn with scorched and broken pine trees.