Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Later, Henry Fowler draws sketches and helps Hemingway with the steel-tape measurements. Later, too, Arnold is sent for an extra quart of whiskey. From With Hemingway:

  [W]hen I got back the boat was full of people. Everybody we knew was on board drinking and admiring the marlin lying on the fish box, and when it became dark we turned on the cockpit dome light so they could still see the fish. When it got late, Carlos sawed off the marlin’s sword and tail for E.H. to keep as trophies, cut a few pieces for his friends, saved a slice and ten pounds of roe for the ice box and cut the rest of it into chunks small enough to row ashore and cart to the market, where he would sell it for ten cents a pound.

  The cutting up of the fish into chunks will keep the fisherman from coming back to the dock later in the evening, when everyone has cleared away, to punch the dead thing into further oblivion. But in Bimini, year after next, Hemingway will famously do just that: show up at the dock close to midnight in a jubilant drunk to find his 514-pound giant bluefin tuna that he’d fought for seven hours (sweating off something like a pound an hour), and pound his fists over and over into the strung-up raw meat in moonlight the way prizefighters in the gym slam at the heavy bag.

  Three days later, Cadwalader hooks into an even bigger fish, a monster black marlin. Carlos, standing on the roof of the cockpit when it strikes, swears the fish would have gone six or seven hundred pounds, maybe more. From With Hemingway: “E.H. would have traded the whole fishing season for such a strike.”

  On August 13, a week after his blue marlin, Hemingway stayed in to write. He wanted to work on his book, but there was an odious magazine deadline to honor. That day he also answered a letter from MacLeish. They were both trying to patch up their most recent feud. “Was awfully glad to hear from you,” he wrote to Archie. “Had your letter on top of the desk to answer every day but fishing with all these scientificos no could do. Up every morning at—and too pooped at night. Scientificos, very good guys.… [W]e landed (E.H.) a $fuck that dollar sign 420 lb marlin in one hour and twelve minutes.” Half a dozen stream-of-consciousness paragraphs later:

  Am a pretty good Man. Probably, as you suggested justly, consider myself even better Man than am but still can unman several of them and write the pants off all. Modestly. Need I add.… Big postoffice strike here. Maybe no can mail. Had to stay in today and write my Desquire piece. Feenish thank god. Much love from all. Scientificos agree completely with my marlin theories. Whoopee. Pappy.

  Another distraction: Les Hemingway, with his seeming need to get attention, particularly his big brother’s, has gone missing at sea—again—with a new sailing companion. The pair had shoved off from Key West on Saturday at midnight, trying for Havana. Now it’s Tuesday (the day after Hemingway’s letter to Archie), and they still haven’t shown. So far, everybody’s keeping a calm face. Jack O’Brine is covering the story for the Post. Two more days elapse, and then Hemingway himself is out searching for the “youthful mariners.” Late on Thursday, he finds them, twelve miles off the coast. He escorts them in, and for the last mile or so, as they’re trying to make the harbor, he has to throw out a line and tow them in behind his own boat. In O’Brine’s page-one account the next day, Les is popping quotes to the Havana press corps as his boat settles at the dock. Nah, he wasn’t scared. Anybody got a smoke? “By the way, what day is it?” He’s flashing the old Hemingway grin. Whatever tongue-lashing his brother gave him that night hasn’t been recorded, but in plenty of letters between the two in later years Hemingway speaks to his sibling in the way you might speak to an irksome dog. (There are also letters through the years in which Hemingway sounds generous, solicitous, and big brotherly, even though the thinly veiled contempt never seems far away.)

  In the middle of the Lester-the-Pester fiasco, Hemingway wrote a letter to his mother-in-law in rural Arkansas. “Dear Mother: Thank you and Pauline’s father very much for the birthday present. It was the largest looking fifty dollars I ever saw,” he began. He and Mary Pfeiffer were so totally different—she was a strict Catholic, conservative, provincial, a well-bred upper-class mid-South woman whose main obligation was to keep her home going smoothly—but he’d won her over and, as with the scientificos, enjoyed loosening her up. He railed at the way FDR’s New Deal was ruining the country. He said that he now had about twenty-three thousand words done “on this thing I am writing on.” He couldn’t stop himself from getting a little dig in at the relatives. “It was something of a blow to learn that an unknown cousin had been invited to spend two or three weeks with me at a time when I was hoping to finish a book but have found Ward no strain at all and very good company on the boat.”

  A few days later he wrote to Gingrich, who was trying to edit a magazine by day and to write a novel by night. Can’t be done, Hemingway told him. If you’re serious about your craft, you need four to five hours at it every day. “What makes it is when you go over the whole piece each day from the start to where you go on from rewriting it really and then going on. Even then the actual writing is probably only about an hour and a half. Of course lots of times you can’t write but nearly always you do. Each day you throw away what turned out to be shit in the stuff you did the day before.” Eight or ten paragraphs later: “Have to get out on the wasser now.… [T]his looks like a bad year. We may hang a huge one but so far they aren’t running and it is hard work finding them.”

  He wrote again to his mother-in-law, the second time in six days, and it’s clear what’s eating him. He said he had torn up two earlier letters to her because they were full of political invective. He thanked her again for the cash gift. He reported that Pauline had just been over and had gone back to Key West but was coming back on the ferry tomorrow. And then he said: “When I am writing a novel I am making nothing and am probably regarded by the family intelligence service as a loafer. On the other hand when I am all through with a novel I make plenty of money and then, while I am loafing, am regarded with respect as a Money Maker. Have 23,000 words done on this.” It was the second time in less than a week he’d mentioned that number.

  Hemingway had said on Bastille Day, five days before crossing, that he had 201 manuscript pages. Not quite a month before that, on June 20, he had told Max Perkins he had “20,000 words of triply re-written shit-removed mss. so far.” So if he had twenty-three thousand keeper words by August 20—one month after crossing—he had written damn little in Cuba, even allowing for some overly generous estimates back in June.

  But the sentence—The Sentence—had to have been part of the damn little. If it’s an amazing sentence, it’s also an entirely absurd and ill-fitting sentence to the book itself. It’s not known whether it was written on Pilar or at a Havana café or up in the white-curtained fifth-floor room of the hotel whose name means “both worlds.” What can be said is that the sentence begins five lines down on manuscript page 223 in the acid-free archival box in Charlottesville and isn’t over until the third line of sheet 228. Immediately before, the author is talking about trying to make yourself responsible only to yourself, and the feeling that comes of that when you’re a writer. He starts out arrogantly and defensively but along the way seems to catch up to himself to say what he really wants to say. Was he even fully aware of what he was doing, or, as with the best of all writing, had his subconscious done its work in his sleep, so that in the actual writing a kind of autodidacticism, a sort of trancelike state, had taken over? Ostensibly, the sentence (The Sentence), which has very few cross-outs and revisions, is about the Gulf Stream, that mythic warm current named by Ben Franklin two centuries ago, deep as the bottom itself in places, sixty to eighty nautical miles wide in places, which forms in the western Caribbean Sea, flows into the Gulf of Mexico, courses through the Straits of Florida, hooks left, and moves up the southern coast of America to Cape Hatteras, before switching directions again, to the northeast, and breaking up into several other currents and crosscurrents of the Atlantic system.

  He starts out so calmly, in the middle of a paragraph with the wor
ds “That something.”

  That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that 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 and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because 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 as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and 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; well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream.

  On September 5, Hemingway went over to Key West to see the family and now the book caught fire. (In Havana, Carlos and Arnold had put Pilar in dry dock to scrape and paint her bottom.) In three days, he piled up seventy-two manuscript pages. Carlos sent a wire that he should come back as quickly as possible, because it seemed as if the big ones would run at last. The new moon was up. On the fourteenth, the fisherman rode back on the car ferry with his satchel of burning prose only to encounter the same lousy fishing luck. The bad luck even extended to the crew: while he was away, Juan had to be taken to the hospital with a perforated ulcer, and Pilar’s new cook, Bollo, was one step up from disaster. And yet writing, when it’s going, will cure everything, anything. To the Murphys, Gerald and Sara, he writes, on September 30:

  We (I) have caught 10 of these fish—420—324—243—228—etc etc—down to 104 pounds. The weather is still good and there are no hurricanes yet—Have gotten through fifteen days of the bad hurricane weather and if we get through next 20 are all right.… Hope to get a big fish at 900–1200 lbs. Boat has been lovely—comfortable and a marvelous sea boat—all we hoped for and more.… Have been working hard on this long thing and now have 50,000 words done—

  Three days later, he wrote to Perkins:

  Dear Max.

  We have had a good summer—Have 50,000 words done on this long thing—Have caught 11 big marlin (none over 420 lb. though) and done a hell of a lot of work for and with the Philadelphia Museum—Cadwalader, their director and Fowler, the ichthyologist, were down for a month.… I went to Key West for two weeks early in Sept to write on this thing and with so much juice went very well.

  If his word count was accurate, he’d more than doubled the size of “this long thing” in less than six weeks, from August 20, when he wrote to his mother-in-law and for the second time used the figure twenty-three thousand. So much juice. It’s the writing mystery itself, of course: how for weeks and months nothing, or almost nothing, seems to be happening, and then you locate the storytelling groove, get the juice, and suddenly it’s as if you’re highballing on Interstate 80 in Iowa in the middle of the night in an eighteen-wheeler, not a state trooper in sight. Christ, you’ll make Los Angeles by morning. It’s anybody’s guess what kicked the Hemingway rig into fifth gear, but at least part of the juicing might have been his belief that the scientificos wished him to lead a gorilla expedition to Africa. (He mentions the prospect in his letter to Max.) But who cares what it was? The second wind had kicked in.

  He fished on, wrote on, for three more weeks, sustaining in the process a small cut on his index finger that swelled into a bad infection. (From With Hemingway: “Then his whole fist swelled so that it was smooth across the knuckles with red streaks spreading up along the veins of his arm.”) Even without that mishap, it was clear the Cuban fishing year was done. He filed exit papers with the American vice consul, testifying that he was bringing no infectious diseases back to the States, that his boat had remained thirty yards from shore while he’d been a three-month guest in Cuba. (It’s why they needed to use the dinghy named Bumby to get to and from Pilar every morning and evening.) Well before dawn on October 26, Hemingway and his apprentice puttered out of Havana Harbor and took Pilar across. As Hemingway wrote to the Murphys a couple weeks later:

  We picked a good night to come across as soon as the hurricane warnings were down and before a norther should start and raised sandkey in nine hours forty minutes lead on the shipchannel buoy. Pretty good with a five knot current to figure and it rough as hell in the middle of the gulf with a beam sea.… I had an infected finger then hand for about a month so didn’t write. Wrote on my book mornings then kept it in a sling and now is o.k.

  Sometimes Hemingway will contradict himself in successive sentences: he didn’t write at all, he wrote every morning. Postscripting to the Murphys: “It is lovely indian summer weather here now—Place looks beautiful—Have lots of pep for working—”

  From With Hemingway: “We only went out in good weather half days and, after the marlin, catching sailfish and dolphin was more like play than a sport.”

  One day when they’re out, the apprentice asks, “Do you think I’ll ever make a writer?” The teacher: “You’re getting better. Much better. If you have talent, it will show up later.” The pupil presses a little more. “I was thinking about a few years from now if I find out for sure I don’t have any talent.” Just keep working, the teacher says.

  On November 16, Hemingway proclaimed his book done. (He’d continue to obsess on it, naturally, up until its publication the following October.) He immediately wrote to various friends. To Gingrich: “Finished the long book this morning, 492 pages of my handwriting. Going to start a story tomorrow. Might as well take advantage of a belle époque while I’m in one.” To Perkins: “I finished the long bitch this morning, 492 msspages, average, I suppose, something over a hundred and twenty words to the page.” To the Murphys: “The weather here is perfect now, cool and fresh and swell for working. I finished my long thing, 492 pages, today.” Writing well is the surest revenge.

  Four days later, he wrote again to his book editor, having made exact word counts of sixteen random pages. He decided that the work averaged out to 150 words per page—some, because of narrative, had a lot more words, while other pages, straight dialogue, added up to only eighty or ninety words per page. “There are 491 pages which would make it 73,650 words—” he wrote. In the counting, you can get a sense of what the cost of 73,650 words had been.

  New Masses, the Communist-leaning weekly, which had never been hesitant to attack his work, took off the gloves in a signed piece by Robert Forsythe. (It was a pseudonym.) It was titled “In This Corner, Mr. Hemingway” and was all about how he couldn’t take it. “Quite the most delicate thing in the world is an author and quite the most delicate of all authors is Mr. Hemingway,” it began. “He is, for example, the most hones
t man alive in telling the truth about a friend. He will not shirk his duty, he will hide no grisly detail even if it ruin the friend, but art will be served and literature will be enriched.” The piece, so entertainingly written, so close to the mark, kept up its body blows:

  The suspicion that Mr. Hemingway may have slipped slightly south of genius is calculated to throw the great man into furious exercises on the punching bag.… [H]e has since enjoyed himself on various occasions in slitting the throats of his hated ones, but he will tremble in rage if a reviewer on the Tuscaloosa (Ala.) Times so much as mentions him without reverence. As a prize fighter, he must have been a spectacle.… [I]t may be said that Mr. Hemingway so cherishes a lukewarm review that he will be in a mood to resent it physically ten years later. Like an elephant and a Bourbon, he forgets nothing. As for learning anything, Mr. Hemingway quite scorns the notion. I have been told by Mr. Hemingway’s friends, and his works bear out the rumor, that he will not read a book for fear of the effect on his art. What he does is go about masquerading as a photographic plate, acquiring impressions and giving them off like a tin-type man at a fair. As a general thing he uses the personal tragedies of his friends for his fictional masterpieces and his hatred for his enemies for his non-fiction works.