Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Samuelson has Cadwalader announcing, on the first morning he steps aboard, “I venture to say that we will encounter a marlin today.” Maybe he really said that.

  Cadwalader was known back in Philadelphia to have that unctuous and almost unaware attitude of certain patricians who believe their inferiors exist to serve them. Besides, he was from a Quaker city, where being a tightwad with your boodles of money is a high value. On the other hand, he served without salary and at his death in 1959 he left a wad of cash to the academy. But the real reason that C. M. B. Cadwalader—whose people went back nearly to the Mayflower; and who never married; and who lived on an estate called Stonedge, where there were said to be ribbons across the chairs in the parlor so that you couldn’t sit down—drank only mineral water aboard the boat was because he was a recovering alcoholic.

  “You ought to be nicer to Cadwalader,” Hemingway says to Samuelson, and Samuelson answers, “I haven’t said anything to him.” Hemingway: “That’s just it. You might talk to him a little and make him feel welcome. He can’t help it if he’s a stuffed shirt.” Hemingway adds, “We might get him to finance an expedition to Africa.” The ache to get back to Africa is in so many Hemingway letters.

  The other half of this Philly duo, come to Cuba for sport and maritime research, is a far more compelling figure. Henry Fowler—older by two decades than Hemingway; who never learned to drive; deeply allergic to formaldehyde; who’d once played violin in the Philadelphia Orchestra; who was keeping field notes of crustaceans, amphibians, reptiles, and birds by age seven; who helped found the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and served for a time as its president; who used to go on his Sunday collecting expeditions in the wilds of New Jersey wearing a watch fob, three-piece suit, and pith helmet—was fifty-six then. Astoundingly, the full bibliography of this man’s scientific writings runs to more than six hundred titles and nearly nineteen thousand pages of printed text. His career as a student of the natural world began in 1897, with his first monograph, and ended in 1962, when a stroke incapacitated him and kept him from finishing A Catalog of World Fishes. Altogether, he was associated with his museum for seventy-one years. Among his tomes: A Collection of Fishes from Sumatra, The Marine Fishes of West Africa, The Fishes of Oceania. That last one was published in 1928, and is the size of the Manhattan phonebook and is bound in red leather.

  In Fowler’s time, almost everybody in the science part of the fish world had heard of him. He is thought to have illustrated more species of fish than any other person in the history of ichthyology. (He was famed among his counterparts not only for his natural drawing ability and the precision of his renderings, but for his uniquely stippled style that contained elements of pointillism: the Georges Seurat of marine life.) When he died, at eighty-seven, on June 21, 1965, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin wrote: “Dr. Fowler, who for many years hunted fish in oceans all around the globe, was a friend of the late novelist Ernest Hemingway and a frequent passenger aboard the Hemingway yacht.” (He wasn’t a doctor, and he was never again on Hemingway’s boat.)

  From With Hemingway:

  The white-haired ichthyologist brought out the pieces of a net and screwed the segments of the handle together. He dipped up patches of seaweed and shook out little fish half-an-inch long, which he dropped in a jar of alcohol. Juan thought that was a lot of fun. He asked to try … when he made a catch he would come running with the quarter-inch fish flipping in the palm of his hand, shouting, “Mira! Look at the scientific fish!”

  Mira! In the metroplex sprawl of suburban Dallas–Fort Worth, a kindly, upper-middle-aged woman, whose surname is Fowler, is bringing out of a closet shards of a life, not just some of the books, but quills, compasses, paperweights, glycerin bottles, beakers, his personal seal and stamp, bow ties, magnifying glasses, microscopes, his round wire spectacles. Bonnie Fowler is Henry Fowler’s daughter-in-law, not that she ever knew him. She’s the widow of Henry W. Fowler Jr., who was the only offspring of HFW the elder. By the time she joined this family—in the early 1990s—her father-in-law had been dead for almost three decades; and her husband, who’d never had children, upper-aged himself, couldn’t see the point of hanging on to what seemed like little more than junk.

  “I’m the last one there is,” she’s saying. “No more Fowlers, not in this line. It stops here. It’s going to die out with me. I wasn’t even related. I came in by marriage. But how could I throw this stuff away? To me, it was like throwing a life away.”

  She reaches into one of the boxes and pulls out a crusted bottle with a rubber nozzle on it. It looks like something you’d see in the Smithsonian. “Do you know what this is? It’s an atomizer. For his allergies and asthmas, I suppose. I bet this dates from the twenties. The man used to travel with his own drugstore. He had a specially made wooden case for all his ointments and pills.” She pauses. “This is what I mean. Wouldn’t somebody be interested in this life?”

  For about a year after the scientificos were in Cuba, they would correspond with Hemingway. The fisherman would send northward to the museum iced specimens of fish that he’d caught in Cuba and Bimini and Key West. Some of these specimens—tuna, marlin, swordfish—remain in the academy’s collections. Long past their intersection with Hemingway, the scientificos would state, in conversation and letters and published remarks, that he had significantly helped to advance the knowledge of marine life in the Atlantic Ocean. In February 1935, in partial gratitude, the chief ichthyologist named a small and previously unclassified scorpion fish that had been caught by a market fisherman in the waters off southern Jersey. He named it Neomerinthe hemingway. Pretty ugly fish. But still.

  The Pilar logs. There seems little doubt that Hemingway would have started them on the day his boat weighed anchor at Key West—it’s just that the first two days of entries haven’t survived. What we have, as noted earlier, is a typed log, and a poor carbon at that, of one hundred-plus pages, with gaps. This raises a sticky scholarly question: since we don’t possess the original document, and since that original document wouldn’t have been in Hemingway’s hand anyway, how do we know for certain that what’s in the logs are exactly the words as he dictated them, rather than a pupil’s typed approximation several months later? The answer is: we don’t know. But Hemingway scholars tend to believe that except for where otherwise noted in the entries themselves, the words, or maybe 99 percent of them, are Hemingway’s, and that Samuelson took them down faithfully, and then just as faithfully typed them out, in Key West, before he left Hemingway’s company and headed home. (There are several places in the logs where you see a parenthetical note: “Log by Arnold.”) In 1989, the JFK Presidential Library—or, more precisely, the Friends of the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Presidential Library—acquired the logs from the Samuelson estate.

  What distinguishes this record from earlier and also some later Hemingway fishing logs is its fullness. He’s writing, in the third person, in the usual telegramese, but in another way he’s crowding the margins, filling up his prose line, recording far more than what the weather was, or what equipment was being used, or who was aboard. There is always that data, but a kind of emotional texture, too. It’s as if he’s creating a raw, immediate, documentary novel within the larger novel of his life, a work with its own storytelling arc. A small wooden boat is daily tossing on a large sea, and here is some of what it tastes and looks and feels like. Somewhere in the background you can hear the revolutionary turmoil in the streets of Havana. If there’s the occasional fishing victory, there’s more often the palpable disappointment. A Hemingway expert named Linda Patterson Miller, whose scholarship is much to be admired, and who has studied these logs in depth, has said that, in effect, two Hemingway manuscripts were evolving simultaneously in Cuba: Green Hills and a ship’s diary. As Professor Miller has demonstrated, one manuscript synergistically reinforces the other. There are distinct parallels in terms of structure and theme. Essentially, they’re both about one thing: the hunt. You can read these log
s and imagine a man composing his book up in the fifth-floor room—or trying to, if only he could find more time, if only there weren’t so many people to be looking after, to be playing host to, both friends and near strangers. As with all of Hemingway’s work, you end up feeling more than you necessarily understand: another core Hemingway writing value.

  The fullness and richness of the thirty-four logs are partially explained by the presence of Samuelson himself. The teacher is dictating to the novice, who’s taking it down with the silver pencil in the big notebook. Hemingway intends to show how a writer must observe it all.

  “Out at 8:10,” he notes on July 28. Water is clear and cool, barometric pressure at 30.10. On the lunch menu: corn beef hash, good salad (shrimp and cucumbers), custard pudding. Alas, there will be no caught fish, hardly a strike, nothing the whole afternoon. On the way home, they troll for tarpon—no strikes. To add to the insult, Pilar runs out of gas in her port tank at the harbor, but the captain cuts in another tank. Dinner is on board, with some good talk beforehand. The leftover hash, beans, an avocado salad, more of the pudding. There’s a letter from Pauline. Also a message from “Mrs. [Jane] Mason” that, alas, she’s headed out of town and can’t join the fishing party tomorrow.

  Next morning: At 11:05 (they’ve gotten away from the dock by 9:40), Cadwalader has “a marlin strike which he failed to hook, possibly by not slacking freely.… Was a big bait for small fish.” Lunch is in a cove. Three other fishing boats are anchored there and all the fishermen are lamenting the poor luck. Coming back in at 6, the head scientifico snags a horse-eye jack just outside the harbor. The log writer doesn’t note whether Cadwalader is thrilled. (Must be.)

  Three days onward: Away from shore at 8:30. Barometer’s at 30.02. Things look propitious. But no: “Sheared pin in pump. Found engine heating badly. Pump not functioning.” They come back in and Cojo supposedly fixes the problem and they’re right back out. Damn thing still isn’t working. They glide in on the small engine and send the pump to be fixed. “Promised for 7 a.m. Thursday.” We’ll see, you can almost hear Hemingway saying.

  The next day (this is Thursday, August 2): “On board at seven thirty, waiting for pump.… The day looks very good for marlin. Water the darkest it has been. First time we have seen fish traveling on the surface since Pauline’s marlin.” Once again the day doesn’t prove to be good for marlin. On the following day, this terse entry: “Yesterday a very disappointing day. Saw nothing all afternoon.…”

  Seven weeks hence, on September 24, when the year’s fishing pattern is too painfully clear (he’s lately been over to Key West on the ferry for eight days of intense book-writing and family-visiting and is now back, piling up pages in the hotel room in the morning and hoping for luck in the afternoon), he’ll write: “Nine days since we’ve seen a fish on top of the water or had a strike trolling.… A sooty tern flew toward us from the stern passing close over the boat, looking like a flying symbol of bad luck.”

  In rare moments, you hear the simplicity and serenity—the hell with this obsession for monsters. This entry, from August 29: “Awake early. Pauline and Bumby slept on until seven while Carlos was swabbing down. Had breakfast out on the cockpit … with the tide and the early morning sun on the bay and the hills.”

  Your stomach could start to growl from reading passages in this document, just as it could from reading passages of Green Hills. Hemingway scholar Matthew Bruccoli, in writing about Hemingway’s “pleasures of the senses,” once said something to the effect that, had the boy from Oak Park not turned into an immortal novelist, he might have made a decent living as a restaurant critic for his hometown paper. The novelist E. L. Doctorow once wondered whether “Hemingway’s real achievement in the early great novels was that of a travel writer who taught a provincial American audience what dishes to order, what drinks to prefer and how to deal with the European servant class.”

  From manuscript page 151 of Green Hills (Hemingway worked on this page in the third week of June, not quite a month before he crossed): “When they woke up we had lunch of cold sliced tenderloin, bread, and mustard, and a can of plums, and drank the third, and last, bottle of beer.” He’s waking up ravenous in the parch of Africa, but you can imagine him just as easily waking up starved after a nap on one of the cushioned settees on Pilar. On the previous manuscript page, sounding almost like a second-rate film star in the thirties shilling for a product in a radio commercial: “[F]rom the chop box one of the natives … produced, in its straw casing, a bottle of German beer.… Its neck was wrapped in silver foil and on its black and yellow label there was a horseman in armor. It was still cool from the night and opened by the tin opener it creamed into three cups, thick-foamed, full bodied.”

  In Key West, in the first weeks of the boat, it seemed as if the whole world was coming aboard—opera singers, prizefighters, fellow writers, in-laws, kid brothers, navy brass, local wharf rats. Still, he’d managed to advance the work in the second-floor room. Now, in Havana, he’s entertaining avant-garde artists, Venezuelan sportsmen, Cuban sportsmen, Havana social figures, correspondents for stateside papers, a bullfighter, consular folk, employees at the Ambos Mundos—not to say a pair of prim Philadelphians, whom he’s grown quite fond of and is seeking to loosen up a little. Hemingway’s dandified fellow egotist Sidney Franklin was down from Brooklyn for something like three weeks, arriving the week after the scientificos, partly to promote bullfighting and partly to visit with Hemingway. Uncounted numbers were on the dock after Pilar was in, when the bottles were being unstoppered, when a dead-on-his-feet fisherman must have felt caught between wishing to be hospitable and wanting only to go to bed, whether bed on that particular night would have been down below or two blocks away in room 511 at the Ambos Mundos, where his neglected manuscript sat on a desk in the middle of the room. But Hemingway, a man in a solitary profession, could barely stand to be alone, no matter how he’d curse at the world for not leaving him alone.

  August 6, 1934: a fishing day to remember.

  It starts out with no portents. The sea is “lumpy”—to use Samuelson’s word in the piece he’ll soon write for Outdoor Life. There’s ten gallons of fresh gas in a lower tank; the barometer reading is good. The owner slept on board last night. Yesterday he went to Sunday Mass. Six people are going out with Hemingway, including the head scientifico. (Fowler has stayed in to organize his notes.) They get away from the dock by 9:50 and plan to troll in the blue water about three miles off Cojimar. In town today, three Americans, including a soldier of fortune known for fomenting revolutions, will be arrested on suspicion of smuggling in a shipment of arms. Tomorrow Pauline’s due here on the ferry, bringing along her young Arkansas cousin Ward Pfeiffer Merner, one more landlubber to whom he’ll need to try to explain the basics of deep-sea fishing. On the society page of the Post this morning is an item reminding local matrons that the Book and Thimble Society meets at 3:00 p.m. at the home of Mrs. Guillermo Arguedas.

  Shortly before noon, Arnold has a strike, but doesn’t sufficiently slack. In the next instant, though, everything has changed, because that same fish has crossed over to attack one of the other lines. From the logs: “Something hit E.H. bait and he slacked, missed, slacked again and hooked a big marlin, blue and silver color.” Samuelson, in his Motor Boating piece: “E.H. stood up, let out fifty yards of line, struck three times hard, missed and slacked again. The next time he struck the fish was solidly hooked.” From his piece in Outdoor Life: “Hemingway stood up between his chair and the fish box, feet wide apart.… Pressing his finger tips lightly against the spinning spool to prevent a backlash, he let out fifty yards of line.” From the logs: “[The fish] jumped four or five more times and waggled his spear, showing parts of his wow out.… Carlos turned tiller over to Juan and took gaff. Cojo held chair and exerted calming influence on Carlos and Juan. Lopez Mendez got water and held chair. Arnold took pictures.”

  When the fish jumped, he “shot upward, stiff as a ramrod, blue on top and silver below, the two
colors divided sharply by a line down his body,” Samuelson wrote. The fish came down on its tail and shot up again. It seemed to hang there, a blue vision against a blue horizon with the blue water below.

  “Harness,” Hemingway has commanded. He’s now got the butt of the rod in the chair socket. Earlier, he’d been steadying the rod in a leather crotch cup affixed to his belt—but you don’t want to fight a fish of this size with a crotch cup. The fish is liable to break your back, or haul you over.

  In about thirty minutes, he brings it close enough to gaff. But the fish breaks free and carries away the gaff. The gaff floats to the surface and is retrieved by two market fishermen, who are watching the fight from a small skiff. The fish, still hooked, is pulling desperately for the bottom. Six times Hemingway gets it close, but for all his strength, he can’t raise it. Then suddenly the animal is at the surface, an apparition. It’s terrifying. From Samuelson’s piece in Motor Boating: “Carlos buried the gaff into the marlin’s head and we all took hold of the gaff handle and pulled him over the stern roller. When the marlin was well up it came forward so fast that its spear narrowly missed going through my middle before he flopped down on the deck.”

  In a drizzle, the boat and occupants ran back to Havana. They weighed the fish at Casa Blanca, the village underneath La Cabaña fortress across the harbor from the city: 420 pounds. “Took pictures in rain. Hope we got something,” writes the log keeper.

  The big Graflex gets positioned on a barrel. Dick Armstrong—an American correspondent for the Hearst chain, who lives at the Ambos Mundos and has been out on the boat often—is taking the pictures. (They’ve sent for him because he’s a pro with a camera.) He keeps shooing away the local urchins, but they keep peeking back into the frame. There must be twenty-odd Cubans, young and old, in and amid the recognizable faces, trying to line up for a posterity snap. Cadwalader, shirt collar open, pipe in place, is crowding in close, as if he’s the one who’s caught it. Arnold, the lank of bone and hank of hair, has his hands in his pockets. Carlos is squatting in front of the catch, with a rain parka over top of his sailor suit that’s got “Pilar” on the front. Bullfighter Sid Franklin is duded up in a suit and tie and dark beret. And not least, here’s the fisherman, in one frame looking predatory, in another relaxed, in another punch-drunk with fatigue. His white trousers are rolled at the cuff. Hanging down between his legs, resting against his fly, is his leather fishing belt and crotch cup. He’s got his rod and reel in one hand, and in his other is his long-billed cap, and with this same hand he’s reaching up and holding out the pelvic fin of the fish, in the center of everything, hung upside down by block and tackle, the great mouth open, the tip of his sword two inches from the slick pavement, that eye looking big as a soup bowl. Pictures and more pictures. And here’s a funny thing: the man with the rage for data will write the wrong date on many of them, consternating his future chroniclers.