Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  A cook-cum-mate named Juan got hired. He was about thirty, “hungry-looking, with high cheekbones, hollow cheeks and shoes that were cracked open” (again, Samuelson’s description), and his one major flaw, apparently, was that he talked way too much. In the photographs, he looks lecherous and wears sleeveless undershirts and smokes little penny cigars only a little less skinny than he is. But it turned out that he could prepare marlin steaks five ways. Also, in the coming days Juan, who spoke a pure and old form of Spanish, would prove himself more adept at handling the wheel (when Hemingway was in his chair, fighting a fish) than the excitable Carlos. Carlos could gaff and scout and bait better than anyone around, but he had little experience at piloting a cabin cruiser. There are times when it seems as if everybody’s running in circles in the small space of the boat, yelling at the top of his lungs.

  The busted pump got attended to. The mechanic’s Spanish nickname was Cojo, which means “cripple,” and he was a round little Cuban, who, like Juan and Carlos, would come in and out of photographs and log entries of the next several months. Cojo was missing his toes and so walked stiff-legged and pitched back on his heels. He told Hemingway he knew of Havana metalworkers who could replace the brass on the interior parts of the pump without having to send the pump to the factory in the States, and that he’d see to it that the motor was back in operation by the next midday. He kept his word, and to boot refused to take payment. For the rest of the summer, this chubby government employee, longing for a wife, was good for all the liquor he could down on the afterdeck when Pilar was in for the night and the owner hadn’t yet headed to his hotel, with or without company.

  That evening, while the boat was under repair, Pauline crossed over. Her husband met her at the ferry slip, and together they went off to room 511 at the Ambos Mundos. Early the next morning, the Hemingways came down to the wharf to see about progress on the engine. They retrieved Arnold, and the trio toured town, walking single file through the tight and still-cool streets of the old quarter, with Hemingway in the lead. “I don’t care if I ever see the United States again,” the deckhand announced to the air. They left Habana Vieja and came toward Centro Habana, turning up the Prado, with its wide marble promenade in the middle, its overhanging trees, its lovers’ benches, its lanes of darting traffic on either side. The Prado is Havana’s Fifth Avenue, or maybe its Champs-Élysées. The tourists sat down at an outdoor café, near the Capitolio Nacional, across the Prado, while a nameless street photographer, nameless to history, came up and stopped time in a box. It’s the photograph at the start of this chapter.

  The instant survives in its original form on the front of a small postcard in a white folder in an acid-free box at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. It survives in soft brown hues, a surprisingly clear printed image on what had to have been ready-made photographic stock, handy for mailing by turistas. Dian Darby has a copy of this photograph on her living room wall, and the photograph is also on the dust jacket of her father’s memoir. (Pauline is cropped out—it’s just Hemingway and his protégé—but you can see part of her arm hanging at the edge of the frame.) What’s revelatory is how much there is to see and muse on when you’re holding the cheap-cum-glorious original in your hand.

  A cloudless July morning in Havana, temperature mid-seventies. (I checked.) Most likely the three are sitting at the Hotel Inglaterra, a Havana landmark, close by the Gran Teatro de La Habana, an even greater architectural landmark. (It was built to be one of the world’s largest opera houses.) Samuelson doesn’t name the place—he just says a café off the Prado, where “they served beer on the sidewalk in the shade.”

  Beggars pass by and importune the people at the tables. Pedicabs go up and down. Foreign correspondents trade their rumors. Dogs seek shade up against the hotel’s walls, until the white-jacketed waiters curse them off. In a way, it’s like being in the heart of Montparnasse—or maybe at Rick’s in Casablanca. Across the street is Parque Central, a leafy, open space, with its throngs of all-day debaters, arguing baseball, politics. There’s a statue in the park of José Martí, Apostle of Independence, poet-revolutionary.

  Three norteamericanos, in their light-colored and loose-fitting clothing, in the Saturday sun, at their glass-topped wicker table (actually, they seem to have taken over two tables), the table space strewn with saucers and cloth napkins and stemware and three bottles, the dark contents of which have been partially consumed, each bottle with a cork stopper in it. Look more carefully: isn’t that a folded-over newspaper on the back of the table, between Hemingway and Samuelson? Part of another newspaper is just behind Pauline’s arm. In the background are stacked chairs and curtained panels of glass, an upright piano with the lid down.

  The plain-looking woman in the striped sleeveless sundress has on her usual thin smile. (Pauline, who once worked for Vogue, had a knack for wearing simple clothes that made her look stylish.) The dress is tied at her shoulders with little string loops. In the coming months, in an effort to please her husband, she’ll bleach her hair and grow out the close-cropped cut into an entirely new look. Something about her body language seems just slightly pulled back. By contrast, her husband (who knew next to nothing about clothes), with his thick right leg crossed over his left, in his Basque sandals without socks, with his left arm resting on the table, is gazing straight into the camera. His coal-dark mustache is neatly parted at the middle. He looks to have gotten a recent haircut—possibly last week, before coming across. He’s at ease, but isn’t there something poised, ready, almost coiled?

  Between the older man and woman, as if he could be their son: the luck-struck apprentice with the porcupine hair, from the Twin Cities via White Earth, North Dakota.

  Up in the States, a midwestern heat wave has taken 206 lives in three days. Tomorrow, John Dillinger, ace badman of the world (as the pulps like to say), will buy it on the sidewalk outside a Chicago movie house. Roughly seventeen million Americans are on relief. But down here a threesome is about to go out on the Stream, hoping to christen Pilar with her first-ever marlin.

  July 21, 1934: his thirty-fifth birthday. On page one of today’s Havana Post—the only English-language morning newspaper in Cuba—there’s a two-column feature by a staffer named Jack O’Brine. The headline: “Ernest Hemingway Returns to Cuban Fishing Grounds.” Twenty-some stories are crammed onto A-1. O’Brine, who must have gone enterprisingly down to the docks yesterday, has outdone himself, beating even those hyperventilated accounts from the New York press boys clotted at the bottom of the gangplank at Pier 57 three months ago.

  The lure of deep sea fishing, coupled with the desire of a master fisherman to top his formidable records of past seasons, has again brought Ernest Hemingway into Cuban waters.… So quietly and unheralded, however, did Mr. Hemingway make his return to Havana this year that only a few were aware of his presence yesterday morning when he put in for the clearance papers on his piping new motor yacht Pilar, in which he entered Havana Bay Thursday night.

  The start of the third paragraph: “Designed by Mr. Hemingway, the trim 38-foot yacht is specially equipped for the quest of marlin and other big fish. It is named after his daughter.”

  Piping right along, two paragraphs down:

  With the arrival of Mrs. Hemingway, it was recalled that the writer of “Death in the Afternoon,” and other novels, chalked up the remarkable record of 54 marlin during the mornings and afternoons he spent in the quest of the “big ones” along Cuba’s palm-fringed coasts last year. His 468-pound catch is registered as the largest swordfish ever landed on the Atlantic side of the North American continent.

  In the sixth paragraph:

  Despite the writer’s prominence in the literary world, scores along the waterfront of the Cuban capital know him only as a good sport and an extraordinarily good fisherman. During his previous visits, Mr. Hemingway supplied hundreds of families with marlin steaks. Once his trophies are recorded the food part of them always goes to the “boys” at the docks.*

  On page
74 of With Hemingway, the man in the middle of the frame is remembering this café-idling moment. The Maestro doesn’t say it’s Hemingway’s birthday. He doesn’t mention the feature in the Havana Post, which may be folded over on the table in front of them. He just says, “It was a very marvelous life, I thought, when you can make a business of living for the pleasure there is to be got out of it, and I was having a fine time.” An undeniable Hemingway truth.

  They took a taxi back to the waterfront. They got bonged on the fare.

  Pump working, noses coated against the sun, baits in the fish box, food and drink cooling in the galley, Pilar and company got away from the dock at 11:35 a.m. The current was strong to the east. They puttered out into the purple-looking Stream and turned right with the current. Often, in Cuba or Key West or Bimini, it’s possible to look out and see the belt of blue or black or purple just a couple hundred yards offshore: the tide has pushed it in close. In Islands in the Stream, Thomas Hudson is talking to his eldest son, Tommy (Bumby Hemingway, in real life), who’s just asked his father, “What makes the Gulf water so blue?”

  “It’s a different density of water. It’s an altogether different type of water.”

  “The depth makes it darker, though.”

  “Only when you look down into it. Sometimes the plankton in it make it almost purple.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they add red to the blue I think. I know they call the Red Sea red because the plankton make it look really red.”

  Hemingway shut down the engines and coasted across the piles of garbage that were hauled out and dumped wholesale into the ocean every day by the Havana scows. Carlos baited up Pauline’s rod, spitting for luck on the two-pound cero mackerel. Almost immediately she had a fish. From With Hemingway: “She slacked, screwed the drag and struck into something alive that bent her rod and ran the vibrating line off her spool in long jerks.” From the first surviving log entry of that Cuban summer: “Raised a small marlin five minutes off Morro. Pauline hooked him on third slack.”

  The core rhythm and mechanics, as you’re trying to work the fish toward you, is to pump on the way up, wind on the way down. Meaning: if you’re right-handed, you pull the rod backward with your right as you wind the reel with your left (and vice versa if you’re left-handed). Pump on the way up, wind on the way down, this strange waltz with your hooked partner. In the great broadbill fight in Stream, the author writes: “David was lifting and reeling as he lowered, lifting and reeling as he lowered, as regularly as a machine, and was getting back a good quantity of line onto his reel.”

  This animal, it turned out, was very small, but it was a marlin all right, a striped. “Yi! Yi! A marlin! He’s after you, Mummy! He’ll take it!” Hemingway had shouted, even before the first slack. In the twelve-minute fight that followed (was someone keeping a stopwatch?), the fish made several jumps. It went on a deep run. It tried to sound. Pauline kept pumping and winding. They got it to the boat and rolled it over.

  Despite the quick luck, there were no more catches on Hemingway’s birthday afternoon, only a couple of strikes. Later, they anchored the boat at Playa Bacuranao, a cove at the mouth of the Río Bacuranao, where the British had first landed three centuries before, when they’d come to conquer Cuba. The beaches east of Havana are famously soft and white as pancake mix. Arnold and Ernest and Pauline climbed an old watchtower, swam in the bath-like waters, while Juan and Carlos tended the boat. Back on board, the captain poured Castilian wine into tumblers filled with chopped ice. He toasted his wife. Juan brought up a meal from the galley and stood in the companionway admiring his efforts. The group sang along with Jimmy Durante—something about “hot potatas”—whose a-dink-a-do voice was scratching from the portable phonograph propped on a shelf in the cockpit next to the wheel. They trolled westward, back toward Havana, past the harborside village of Cojimar. They steered into the early evening sun, feeling little of its blister, since they were fishing off the back of the boat and were protected by the long shade of the cockpit. They were at the dock by six. After a birthday dinner in town at El Pacífico with Jane and Grant Mason, the Hemingways came back to sleep on the boat, drifting into dreams in the main cabin, while the pupil stretched out on one of the long cushions in the cockpit. Thus, Pilar’s first-ever angling day in Cuban waters, with a marlin in the bargain—her first.

  Two days later, Samuelson saw the sea turning black with porpoises and was yi-yi-ing. Apparently, Hemingway’s reaction was only a little less religious. When he’d recovered, he’d tried to take pictures with the big Graflex while the Maestro was all thumbs with the Kodak.

  A fishless day followed. The next day Pauline left for Key West on the ferry. Then, on Thursday, July 26 (with Jane Mason on board), about an hour before sunset, a real marlin, of at least several hundred pounds, came up, showing purple on the surface, fins spread out on either side like gull wings. Throughout that afternoon, the wind, out of the northeast, had been kicking up the sea. Quickly, the crew pulled in the teasers—the fish had been chasing the teaser on the starboard side. Perhaps this confused the fish, because he planed the water and charged the stern until his sword was inches from the propellers. Hemingway, standing atop the live fish well and holding his rod out for as far as he could reach, practically dangled the bait into the fish’s mouth. Without slacking, Hemingway pumped. Samuelson’s description rises to the poetic:

  The fish suddenly disappeared, tearing line off the reel with a scream of metallic brakes straining against a terrific burst of speed, bending the rod like a buggy whip. Then he came up less than ten feet from the stern, flinging himself clear out of the water, dancing erect on his tail, shaking his head with his pointed jaws wide open, trying to throw the hook, his striped sides glistening silver.… He turned a somersault, went down in a splash of spray, came up again and again, throwing white spray in a rapid succession of somersaults. Every jump was a picture lost. I was paralyzed by the action. My bait was still out and by the time I had reeled in and opened the Graflex, the marlin sounded and headed for Havana in a run that kept the reel at a high-pitched shriek. E.H., sitting in the fishing chair with his feet braced against the side, screwed down the drag as tight as he could without snapping the line and tried to stop him.

  “Get me the harness! The harness!” he said.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the locker, for chrissake!” Then to Carlos in Spanish, “Turn around! Turn around! Head toward Cojimar!”

  In the middle of it, Hemingway’s glasses got fogged. His clothes soaked through. The crew kept holding the back of his chair and bringing him ice water to rinse his mouth. He kept screaming orders to swing the boat around, but Carlos, perhaps in panic, didn’t heed. At one point he had nearly five hundred yards of thirty-six-thread line out. Toward the last, when he’d gotten the fish close to the boat, Hemingway held the rod with one hand and fired the Mannlicher with the other, trying to fight off the circling sharks. The Mannlicher had an extraordinarily long eighteen-inch barrel—maybe he felt something like General Custer at the Little Bighorn. One of the fins from one of the sharks came up and sliced the line close to the leader swivel. That ended the battle. The fisherman cursed and slowly reeled in and went below to change and rub himself down with alcohol. As Samuelson would put it tersely in his piece in Motor Boating: “We ran back to Havana in the dark.” As he’d write in With Hemingway: “I pondered all the cussing and excitement over a fish. I couldn’t see it.”

  The scientificos had come—those Philadelphians from the Academy of Natural Sciences whom Hemingway had met back in April. Charles Meigs Biddle Cadwalader, the museum’s chief officer, and Henry Weed Fowler, its head ichthyologist, had sailed on the Ward Line, arriving early on July 24, when the phone lines on the island went dead from a work stoppage. The Post put the arrival at the top of page one the next day: “Two American Scientists Here to Join Hemingway in Search for Rare Fish.” For the next month, the pair lodged at the Ambos Mundos and most days went out with Hemingway
on the boat. In fact, Hemingway got them out on the day they arrived. They hit Havana at eight, were aboard Pilar by eleven.

  It isn’t hard to squint and see them disembarking from their New York steamship, in their suits and ties and pasteboard suitcases, stepping lightly among the whores and garbage of Havana. Samuelson wishes from the start to make them into a WASP cartoon, probably because they represented in his mind everything he was not. And yet, for all his caricature and instant dislike (especially of Cadwalader, the genuine blueblood of the two), he manages to convey essential truths.

  Cadwalader, forty-nine then (fourteen years older than Hemingway), was a short, thick, pontificating, bull-necked figure with a pipe that seemed fixed on the right side of his jaw (judging from the many surviving photographs). He wasn’t a trained scientist. His main work at his museum—which was far older than the better-known and deeper-pocketed American Museum of Natural History in New York—was separating other wealthy Philadelphians like himself from their money so that the underfunded institution could go forward with its mission. From With Hemingway:

  Cadwalader, short-legged, slightly pot-bellied, always wore the same club-room conversationalist expression on his freckled face.… I had not yet been told [he] was the last of a distinguished line of money-making, money-hoarding Cadwaladers.… This was the first man I had run into who had so many ancestors and so much money, and I had difficulty understanding him. He would not drink vermouth with us before dinner or wine with his meals or whiskey in the evenings, but would only drink bottled mineral water, and half the mornings he forgot to bring his mineral water and E.H. would have to send Juan ashore for it before we could leave. Cadwalader never gave Juan any money. He must be worried about his investments, I thought.