Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  In April 1932, Russell had taken Hemingway and Charles Thompson (the easygoing hardware store owner) and Hemingway’s Kansas City cousin Bud White and one or two others across to Cuba. What was supposed to have been a two-week holiday with some big-game fishing thrown in turned into a two-month marlin marathon. Pauline came over twice, but Hemingway was there for the duration, wild in his new passion. He kept a log in a book of Western Union cable blanks. During this trip, Hemingway met Carlos Gutiérrez for the first time and gathered in everything he could about the ways of marlin. On May 30, to his pal Dos Passos, he wrote: “Well, you played it wrong not to make this trip. Damn I wish you could have made it.… You ought to see them strike, Dos. Jump more than tarpon and fast as light—one jumped 23 times.… Have had 17 strikes in a day—never less than 3.”

  In Esquire’s inaugural issue, Autumn 1933, in his first contribution to the magazine, Hemingway speaks of marlin “traveling along the edge of the dark, swirling current from a quarter of a mile to four miles off shore; all going in the same direction like cars along on a highway.” Finest life you could ever know.

  During that Saturday morning in his workroom, on the eve of crossing over for the third campaign, Hemingway’s oldest son, Bumby—his child by Hadley, who was down for his summer visit with his dad and half brothers—came in with the mail. There was the new issue of Esquire, the August edition, about to hit newsstands, with his latest piece, “Out in the Stream: A Cuban Letter,” featured at the front of the magazine. He’d written it in May in anticipation of the summer’s fishing season. A couple of days before he sent it off, Hemingway had written to Esquire’s editor: “It seems to be about fish and is I’m afraid a little bit scientific. Will try to ease off the science and let a good gust of shit blow over it in the re-writing.” He’d also said in that letter, dated May 25, “Am on the 59th page of a long story in which am very interested. Looks as if it would be considerably longer.” Here is the first sentence on manuscript page 59 of Green Hills of Africa, as it exists, after changes, on page 50 of the published book: “[In] the glasses it was a rhino, showing very clear and minute at the distance, red-colored in the sun, moving with a quick waterbug-like motion across the hill.” And here is more from that page: “So we went back to the camp, down the hill in the dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot, walking along that deep trail, that wound through the dark hills, until we saw the firelight in the trees.” Again, that’s how the sentence appears in its published form. Hemingway had made about a half-dozen edits, simplifying, streamlining, crossing out, inserting, replacing seven words (“under the rubber of our shoe soles”) with just two (“under foot”). In all, he seems to have taken his story forward by about one manuscript page in what I am guessing was four or five hours of effort. And the next day, judging from his correspondence, same thing: one more page, less than two hundred words. This was the day, May 26, Hemingway wrote to his angler friend Waldo Peirce, in Maine, and said he now had about sixty pages done on a long story, and that their mutual friend, Archie MacLeish, who had been down visiting, was one of the great poet–nose pickers of all time and wondering, by the way, Waldo, what the hell is it that American writers turn into?

  If the magazine piece that ten-year-old John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway brought to his dad’s workroom on July 14 was only perishable journalism, it was also a piece seeking to be serious in its own way, in and amid its boasting, in and amid its gratuitous cracks about movie actresses and homosexuals. Edmund Wilson, were he alive, would probably be jeering at this statement. He believed Hemingway helped ruin himself as an artist with his “rubbishy” articles “for a men’s-wear magazine.”

  Hemingway tells his readers it’s his hedging belief that almost every known variety of marlin, the white, the silver, the striped, the black, maybe even the blue, are only color and sex and age variations of the same fish. The different colors represent different growth stages, not different marlin species. The white is the first stage and the black is the last stage. The black marlin is always a female even if in its earlier life it had been male. “The jewfish becomes a female in the last of its life no matter how it starts and I believe the marlin does the same thing,” he writes. “Now you prove me wrong” is the article’s last sentence. Black marlin are very old fish, he explains, and you can always tell by the coarseness of their hide and bill, but above all by the way they tire, after the initial struggle, which you’d swear is going to crack your back when they sound. Except that the phrase “the way they tire” had come out as “the way they live.” The typo was infuriating.

  The self-taught naturalist, son of a physician-naturalist, writes of having a lot of time to think out on the water, while the sun slants in like molten lead, as the teasers dip and dive in the wake. If he’s caught ninety-one marlin in the last two years, he’ll have to land and open up several hundred more before any serious conclusions can be drawn. In the meantime, he has his questions, about many kinds of fish, although especially marlin: Why is it that they always travel from east to west against the current? Where do marlin go after they reach Cape San Antonio at the western tip of Cuba? What makes them decide to migrate down from the Bahamas in the first place? Could there be a countercurrent hundreds of fathoms below the surface current—and do they return working against that? Do they make a circle through the entire Caribbean? Why, in the years of abundance of marlin off the California coast, have the fish been equally plentiful off Cuba? Is it possible that all marlin are following all the warm currents of all the oceans on the earth? Why does the south wind keep marlin from biting off the coast of Cuba when the same wind makes far lesser fish bite off the Florida Keys? And as for a striped marlin, with its “small head, heavily rounded body, rapier-like spear,” with its broad lavender stripes that encircle its body from gills to tail like bands on a barrel, well, the market fishermen of Havana would swear to you the striped are all males. And yet: “This time last year we caught a striped marlin with a roe in it. It wasn’t much of a roe it is true. It was the sort of roe you would expect to find in certain moving picture actresses if they had roe, or in many actors.”

  Hemingway’s marlin theories, advanced with seriousness and some low humor, have been proven wrong by time and natural scientists. But he had the theories, he had the bent of scientific mind—that seems the point to appreciate.

  The next afternoon, Sunday, July 15, home from Mass with Pauline and his sons, again up in his workroom, the congenitally restless man wrote another letter to Esquire’s editor.

  How many pieces do I have to write after this one before I am paid up? The only thing I have had to be proud about this year due to the failure of the cuban marlin season, the arkansas quail season etc. has been the fact that owe-ing you pieces and money I have steadily written you goddamned good or even swell pieces on time or a little ahead of time no matter how badly have needed dough or how easy to make it writing something else. Or perhaps I simply have the braggies. But what I want now is dough in a sufficient sum safe somewhere so I can get out to africa. Because really Mr. G. I do not give a shit for anything except to get out to Africa again and especially on this Sunday afternoon.… As far as I know I have only one life to live and I have worked hard and written good stories, pieces etc. and by Jesus I want to live it where it interests me; and I have no romantic feeling about the American scene. Also pretty soon I will be a long time dead and outside of writing I have two well developed talents; for sea fishing where there is current and migratory fish and shooting with a rifle on targets at unknown ranges where the vital spots are not marked but have to be understood to be hit and for Christ sake why not go where I can use them instead of go out here and play around with chicken shit sailfish that I feel sorry for interrupting when I catch and never put my hand to a rifle from one year’s end to the other. Also why not take kids out there and let them die or have fun rather than grow up in this F.E.R.A. Jew administered phony of a town.

  “Out there” in the last
sentence refers to Africa. The “F.E.R.A. Jew administered phony of a town” is the place he’s about to be shed of for the next several months. On July 2, 1934, Key West’s city council and the board of commissioners of Monroe County had declared a state of local emergency. They petitioned the governor to take over the city. What had once been close to the richest little town in the United States in the late 1800s was now at the edge of financial collapse. The Mallory Steamship line, the cigar industry (which in its prime had twenty-nine local factories going), the sponging business, the sea-freight business, the pineapple business, the commercial fishing business: all kaput, or mostly so. Governor David Sholtz had called Commissioner Julius F. Stone, FDR’s federal fund agent for the state of Florida. The New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) would now be in control of Key West’s immediate future, minus one of its most prominent citizens.

  “Chicken shit sailfish”? Back in May, you’ll remember, twelve days after he’d brought Pilar down from Miami, a record-busting sail of 119 (and one-half) pounds was a lot of cheese to the man who’d caught it—well, co-caught it, along with that hooky-playing Jesuit. But that was May. Around Key West, you could expect to take kingfish, tarpon, bonito, sharks, amberjacks, dolphinfish, permits, snook, wahoos, groupers, yellowtail, bonefish, barracuda, sails—but what were they next to marlin?

  The priest and the writer and several others had departed the navy yard at 2:30 that afternoon. There’d been an earlier sailfish on Father McGrath’s line, not nearly as big, but a shark got hold of that one after forty-five minutes and fifteen jumps. About 4:30 p.m., they were fishing on a flood tide in ten fathoms of heavy, dark water. They’d put on a new strip of mullet bait, and the 119-pounder came smashing at it. After a few minutes, the arm-aching cleric shouted for Hemingway to take the rod; Hemingway resisted. When he did take over, he was certain that the fish was foul-hooked, because no sailfish could pull that hard on twenty-one-thread line. But it was a sail. A 50-pound sail, Hemingway afterward enthused, was a good fish. A 75-pound sail was a hell of a fish. But a 119-pound sail? Six times they got the creature close to the boat, and each time the fish eluded the gaff. At twilight, they tooted in with her to the submarine pens (they didn’t know she was a female until they’d cut her open), loaded her onto the rear bumper of Charles Thompson’s roadster, drove her across town to the Thompson icehouse, made many pictures at the dock, uncorked the whiskey and the champagne. Father McGrath stayed out of the pictures, although not out of the champagne. Later that night came the official weighing before a horde of inebriated witnesses.

  Two days later, on the front page of the Citizen: “Ernest Hemingway, the author, is anxious to know the record catch for sailfish in the Atlantic Ocean, as he has just made a catch which he thinks is near, if not the record. While out trolling Tuesday afternoon [sic] in his Cabin Cruiser ‘Pilar,’ he caught one of the finest specimens he has ever seen. The fish was perfect in every way.” The celebrity of Whitehead Street must have spoon-fed the words to the reporter. And yet, almost immediately, the egoist began refusing credit for the catch, perhaps the flawed conscience of an honorable sportsman doing the pricking. On the day the Citizen ministory appeared, Hemingway wrote to Gingrich and described the fish and misspelled the priest’s name and also momentarily forgot the fish’s sex. “He was so beautifully proportioned he didn’t show his weight. I won’t claim him because I didn’t hook him so am trying to get Father MacGrath to claim him. Anyway will enter him for the Atlantic record as a fish.” The priest went back to Miami and wrote up an anonymous account, which he hoped to place in The Miami Herald, under the byline “Eye Witness.” Hemingway sent him a cable: “Story and picture ok with me provided story states Hemingway has steadily refused to make any claim to the record for himself since another person handled the fish but claims Atlantic record for the fish since it was weighed on tested scales before eight witnesses. Stop. Thanks pictures. Send bill. Regards.”

  Yes, Hemingway was “congenitally restless,” but is it possible he had set out purposely in this high moment of his life (new boat, new book ticking along, a father reunited with his boys) to destroy some of his closest friendships? Did Hemingway want “a wholly different kind of human association—one he could dominate as a matter of course?” Those are Archibald MacLeish’s words, in a letter, four years after Hemingway’s suicide, speaking for himself and his spouse, Ada. What is inarguable is that so many of Hemingway’s deepest relationships, especially literary friendships, going back to Paris, and even before Paris, would never be the same after the 1930s. One by one he’d lose them all—well, if not lose, exactly, estrange them all, in lesser and greater ways: F. Scott Fitzgerald (never mind the mentally broken Zelda, who’d pretty much always despised him, and vice versa); both MacLeishes; John Dos Passos and his wife, Katy (whom Hemingway had introduced to Dos Passos, and whom he had known and loved since teenage summers up in Michigan); Mike Strater; Gerald and Sara Murphy. The losing, or at least dropping off, happened with Gingrich, too, although he had never been a member of their expat Paris life. There’s no question that Hemingway knew what he had done—it’s remorsefully there in the letters. In 1943, by then living in Cuba, his third marriage all but finished, he’d write to MacLeish: “Why don’t you come down here sometime.… I could take you to some odd places and you could have a change. I will promise absolutely not to be self righteous, no-good and bastardly as in my great 37–38 epoch when alienated all my friends (who I miss like hell) (not to mention my sonofabitching epoch of 1934 when was even worse). How is my lovely Ada?” That double parenthesis, that quick switch of thought, speaks gulf streams.

  He and MacLeish had been friends since the summer of 1924. (They met at La Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse.) They went to Pamplona, to Saragossa, to the snow slopes of Gstaad, where Hemingway became devoted to the MacLeishes’ young son Kenny, and vice versa. When Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley fell apart, the MacLeishes took him in, kept his “god damned head working” (Hemingway’s words) all through that emotional Paris winter of 1926–27. Archie and Ada were living then in an expensive borrowed apartment on avenue du Bois, and he and Hemingway kept their bicycles in the ornate front entrance, which disgusted the butlers of the other tenants.

  The Depression forced the MacLeishes home—“Exile’s return,” to use critic Malcolm Cowley’s phrase and book title about the Left Bank lives that had to be reinvented back in America in the thirties. MacLeish went to work for Henry Luce’s Fortune. This brought rebuke from Hemingway about selling out, which made Ada cry.

  In November 1930, when Hemingway suffered a compound spiral fracture of his right arm in an auto accident near Billings, Montana, MacLeish flew to his side (on a wind-flapping Northwest Orient airliner), only to be accused later by his friend of having come out to see him die so he could make literary jack out of it for some crappy magazine. Hemingway spent seven weeks recovering in a Montana hospital, growing a silky black beard, and here is some of what that accident had felt like:

  my right arm broken off short between the elbow and the shoulder, the back of the hand having hung down against my back, the points of the bone having cut up the flesh of the biceps until it finally rotted, swelled, burst, and sloughed off into pus. Alone with the pain in the night in the fifth week of not sleeping I thought suddenly how a bull elk must feel if you break a shoulder and he gets away and in that night I lay and felt it all, the whole thing as it would happen from the shock of the bullet to the end of the business.…

  That’s from Green Hills, in a passage written not quite four years removed from the accident, after the crossing to Cuba for the season that was going to disappoint severely.

  If the pattern through much of the thirties was for Hemingway to brutalize a friendship, and then to feel terrible about it, the pattern for MacLeish was to feel rage—then to swallow it and come back. There are two well-known fights between Hemingway and MacLeish worth describing. Both incidents involved fishing, and one was on his new b
oat. The first: March 1932, right before Josie Russell took Hemingway over to Havana on the Anita for marlin. Hemingway and Bra Saunders (the Key West and Bahamian fishing captain) and Mike Strater (painter pal from Paris, via Princeton) and Uncle Gus Pfeiffer went to the Dry Tortugas on a fishing holiday (Uncle Gus probably financed the whole thing). They got marooned by a norther; tempers frayed. After they were back in Key West, MacLeish told Hemingway that somebody should prick his ego balloon; Hemingway said MacLeish’s prick wasn’t big enough. The poet walked out of Whitehead Street and moved into a hotel and then flew back to New York.

  The second rupture came around the third week of May 1934 (Pilar would have been in Hemingway’s possession for about two weeks). MacLeish, feeling seasick, but trying to hide it, hooked into a sail. Pilar’s master started screaming commands, while Arnold Samuelson watched open-jawed and took his mental notes: “Hi. A sailfish! He’s after you, Archie.… Get ready to slack to him. Don’t strike until I tell you. There! He hit! Slack to him. Slack to him!! Shit! Why the hell didn’t you slack to him? He’s spooked now and he will never come back.” Enraged that he wasn’t heeded, Hemingway took out a shotgun and began killing seabirds. “Ernest took to shooting terns, taking one on one barrel and the grieving mate on the other. He was fed up with the world and I was fed up with him,” MacLeish remembered years later, in a letter to Carlos Baker. (He seemed to be confusing the earlier fight in the Tortugas with the ’34 humiliation on Pilar. No matter. What had burned itself in was the sight of the birds plopping in the water, two by two.) In an earlier letter to Baker, MacLeish had said: “It would be so abundantly easy to describe Ernest in terms, all of which would be historically correct, which would present him as a completely insufferable human being. Actually, he was one of the most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creatures I have ever known.” The one other person he’d ever met who could suck up all the air in a room just by entering it was FDR.