He looked down. A mess of blood. A discrete hole about three inches below his kneecap. A second discrete hole, more ragged than the first, “bigger than your thumb,” as he put it in Esquire. Plus, any number of birdshot-like small lacerations on the calves of both legs. “Could I have pulled the trigger twice or three times without knowing it the way former mistresses did in the testimony regarding Love Nest Killings. Hell, no, thought your correspondent.” Again, that’s from “On Being Shot Again.”
Apparently, he fired just once. The bulk of that bullet was in his left calf and the fragments of it in both legs. This would become clear once he was back on land and Dr. William Warren at the Key West U.S. Marine Hospital was extracting many of the fragments, although not the largest piece. That one was too far in. To take out the big chunk would have meant removing too much muscle. Doctor Warren gave the patient a shot against tetanus and told Hemingway to go to bed. None of it was particularly serious, he said, as long as no infections set in. And to keep that from happening, he needed rest. The wounds would heal over quickly.
There wasn’t any pain, or not initially, or so Hemingway would tell his readers. Soon after Pilar had been turned around and headed back to Key West, soon after someone had boiled water and scrubbed the wounds with antiseptic soap and had poured a lot of iodine into the two holes, he would retch his lunch into a bucket. This, too, he would report.
Back home (or even on the way home), as John Dos Passos wrote in his 1966 memoir, The Best Times, Katy was “so mad she would hardly speak to him.” This line has been much evoked by Hemingway chroniclers to support the view that Hemingway had recklessly endangered the lives of others. (Dos Passos’s account has several errors of both fact and chronology. For instance, he claimed Hemingway had shot himself with a rifle.) Maybe Katy, who’d known and loved Hemingway ambivalently since his northern Michigan years, was rageful in the way of parents or older siblings once an endangering event is over: you are so relieved that no serious harm has come to your loved one that you end up showing it by turning unspeakably angry at him. Katy, nearly eight years older than Hemingway, often reproached him like a kid brother. What happened aboard Pilar isn’t so much emblematic of Hemingway’s carelessness—he was never known to be careless with weapons—as of his ego: he needed once again to be the whole show. Perhaps if the fisherman hadn’t been trying to land the fish and gaff it and shoot it in the head all at once, the accident would never have occurred. So you could say he’d hoisted himself, not for the last time, on his own petard.†
On Monday, April 8, at home, he wrote to Gingrich. “Am staying in bed today and tomorrow. Will get up Wednesday and leave Thursday if all o.k.—if had to get shot couldn’t have been shot in better place.” He didn’t get away on Thursday, nor did he leave for Bimini on Saturday—the second try would be pushed back three times, until the following Monday. A writer’s mind is working. Suddenly, Hemingway has a story to tell. He knows he owes Gingrich a piece on his $3,000 boat loan, and he’s late with it. “I can write you a piece,” he says, proceeding to set up typographically on the page the suggested title. He centers the words and skips down several spaces on his stationery.
On Being Shot Again
a Gulf Stream Letter
By that Friday, the story is in hand. “Here is the piece,” he says in a covering letter. As to that fuck-the-bastard business, which he’s made into fornicate-the-illegitimate, he asks Gingrich: “If you can’t say fornicate can you say copulate or if not can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consumate I suppose.” Going on: “Wound perfectly clean so far and should be healed tight in another couple of days. Very little pain.”
“On Being Shot Again” appeared in the June 1935 Esquire. This is how it disconcertingly—you’d almost want to say gleefully—opens:
If you ever have to shoot a horse stand so close to him that you cannot miss and shoot him in the forehead at the exact point where a line drawn from his left ear to his right eye and another line drawn from his right ear to his left eye would intersect. A bullet there from a .22 caliber pistol will kill him instantly and without pain and all of him will race all the rest of him to the ground and he will never move except to stiffen his legs out so he falls like a tree.
The beginning of the second paragraph: “If you ever have to shoot a shark shoot him anywhere along a straight line down the center of his head, flat, running from the tip of his nose to a foot behind his eyes.” The piece goes on like this for about another thirty lines, providing instructions on the right bones to sever in the neck or the spinal column when you wish to take down large creatures cleanly.
And how does Gertrude Stein fit into all this? With her own taking down. Not razor-clean, but a wounding for sure.
In the fall of 1934, and through the winter and spring of 1935, Hemingway’s onetime Paris mentor and godparent to his oldest child, now a sworn enemy, along with her sour, diminutive secretary-lover, Alice B. Toklas, had crisscrossed and barnstormed America. It was Stein’s first time back in thirty-one years. They had left Le Havre on the SS Champlain in October in their crocheted hats and heavy coats, and they didn’t return to the badly heated comforts of 27, rue de Fleurus—where those avant-garde canvasses shimmered in the hallways and above the mantels—until May 11, 1935. Stein had said that she wished to experience the land of her birth from coast to coast, which is just what she did. As she later wrote, “People always had been nice to me because I am pleasing but now this was going to be a different thing. We were on the Champlain and we were coming.” That seemed a limpid enough thought, unlike this one: “I will be well welcome when I come. Because I am coming. Certain I come having come.”
In America, the seer with the obscure flashes of something or other had belted into an airplane for the first time. She had lectured at something like thirty colleges and universities, among them Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Bryn Mawr. Pathé News produced a newsreel—they nearly had to get in line. On NBC radio and at the Museum of Modern Art, she had made many literary pronouncements, not all of which were immediately clear (headline in The New York Times: “Miss Stein Speaks to Bewildered 500”). In New Orleans, she had dined with Sherwood Anderson. In Chicago, she had stayed at Thornton Wilder’s apartment on Drexel Avenue. In California, she had driven a rental car through Yosemite. In Monterey, she had sat like a stone contemplating the Pacific. At Berkeley, a University of California student had asked her why her prose was so much more difficult to comprehend than her spoken words. She’d replied: “If they invited Keats for lunch, and they asked him an ordinary question would they expect him to answer with the ‘Ode to the Nightingale’?”
Oh, how this boatload of press coverage must have galled Hemingway. At a dinner party in Beverly Hills (the guest of honor got to choose her own guests), she’d had a séance with Dashiell Hammett, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, Anita Loos, and Paulette Goddard. She’d declined a movie offer from Warner Brothers—Hollywood didn’t interest her except as a passing spasm of contemporary life. Finally, the summer having almost come, having patchworked and crisscrossed America to her satisfaction for nearly seven months, shed of those coarse-nap woolens designed for dank French winters, longing only to get back to the other side of the ocean (where she had once strolled Bumby Hemingway in a big black pram in the Jardin du Luxembourg), she and Alice had returned to New York.
On Friday, May 3, 1935, the day before the pair had sailed again for Le Havre on the Champlain, Stein had granted one last stateside interview. By then the ex-acolyte and his boat had been on Bimini for something like two weeks. He hadn’t been able to fish yet, not for big ones out in the Stream, just some small stuff around the docks. But he was a happy man, even if he was still a little wobbly on his feet. His wife had just been over on a brief visit, and other friends were shortly due. His wounds, as he’d just reported to Max Perkins in a letter, had all but stopped “suppurating,” which was a word his physician-father would have appreciated. In Chicago, “On Bein
g Shot Again” was set in type—subscribers would have the story in their hands in another twelve or thirteen days. In New York, Scribner’s Magazine had just come out with the first installment of its serialization of Green Hills of Africa, which would appear as a book in the fall, containing some tart comments about Miss Stein. (Through that summer, and into the early fall, Max Perkins would try to get him to remove, or soften, some of the Stein passages—with mixed results. Hemingway did relinquish on the word “bitch” in one passage.)
Stein’s interlocutor on the third was John Hyde Preston, a semi-obscure Canadian writer who was almost as pretentious-sounding as she was. Most of the talk was in Stein’s suite at the Algonquin Hotel, although some of it took place while they were out marching on Madison Avenue. “Walk on my left,” she commanded, above the traffic, “because my right ear is broken.” The “conversation,” as the piece was titled when it appeared in print several months later, was about the terrible thing that happens to American writers: how they feel they must create a new literature; how they get to be thirty-five or forty and the juices dry up, and then what happens? They stop writing altogether or they begin to repeat themselves formulaically. It was all so sad and tragic.
You could almost hear what was coming next. “What about Hemingway?” the interviewer asks, venturing his own opinion that Hemingway was good merely until after A Farewell to Arms—say, into the first years of the 1930s.
Oh no, Stein says, he wasn’t really any good after 1925. In the early short stories, he had it, but then he betrayed himself. You see, she said,
When I first met Hemingway he had a truly sensitive capacity for emotion, and that was the stuff of the first stories; but he was shy of himself and he began to develop, as a shield, a big Kansas City-boy brutality about it, and so he was “tough” because he was really sensitive and ashamed that he was. Then it happened. I saw it happening and tried to save what was fine there, but it was too late. He went the way so many other Americans have gone before, the way they are still going. He became obsessed by sex and violent death.
She elaborated, testing a stubby finger in Manhattan hotel-room air.
It wasn’t just to find out what these things were; it was the disguise for the thing that was really gentle and fine in him, and then his agonizing shyness escaped into brutality. No, now wait—not real brutality, because the truly brutal man wants something more than bullfighting and deep-sea fishing and elephant killing or whatever it is now, and perhaps if Hemingway were truly brutal he could make a real literature out of those things; but he is not, and I doubt if he will ever again write truly about anything. He is skillful, yes, but that is the writer; the other half is the man.
Obsessed by sex and violence. Developing, as a shield, your big Kansas City–boy brutality, because your sensitivity to life deeply shames you. A mask for the thing in you that’s really gentle and fine.
I’ve always wondered if at least part of the reason that Ernest Hemingway so grew to revile Gertrude Stein was because he understood how close to the bone she could scrape. A writer and Hemingway friend named Prudencio de Pereda (mentioned earlier) once used a baseball analogy to describe some of the better psychological tries by Hemingway’s detractors: the ball looks beautiful from the instant it leaves the bat, seemingly headed straight for the upper deck, clear homer, only to veer off in the last seconds to just this side of the foul pole. It ends up only another strike on the batter, but, damn, wasn’t it fine watching that thing fly?
Pilar departed the Key West docks again early on April 15 and this time the fishing party made it fine. The two newly hired crewmen, who’d been aboard the week before, were again along, and of course they had their nicknames. They were Albert “Old Bread” Pinder (engineer and pilot) and Richard “Saca Ham” Adams (cook and mate); both were both longtime Key West hands. Hemingway’s Cuban mate, Carlos Gutiérrez, wasn’t making this trip, but Hemingway planned to send for him later in the summer, if things on Bimini turned out to be as good as he hoped. All winter Carlos had hung the cleaned fishing lines in loose coils in a muslin bag from a rafter in his Havana home where he knew the sun wouldn’t hit them but the breezes would. Both Dos Passoses were aboard. But in place of Mike Strater—who’d gone back to his winter residence in West Palm Beach and intended to fly over early in May—was Charles Thompson.
They trolled well out into the current and rode the Stream in the way of an airliner catching a tail wind, letting it carry them eastward and northward along the Keys, for the first leg, which is to say about 150 north-by-northeast miles, past Molasses Reef and French Reef and Dixie Shoal and what’s known on nautical charts as the Elbow. They caught some small yellowfin tuna and some dolphinfish with rainbow-colored tails. At night they came inside the coastal barrier reef for safe anchorage in Hawk Channel, which runs all the way up on the Atlantic side of the Keys. The year before, when Hemingway and the Wheeler rep from Brooklyn and Captain Bra Saunders had first steered Pilar down from Miami, they’d come via the protected Hawk Channel passage, staying close in to shore. Now he was a much more confident captain.
They slept on board and cooked up what they caught. On the morning of the third day, when they were up near Key Largo, Hemingway cut his boat directly across the Stream, taking his bearing from Carysfort Light (which is how it’s listed on nautical charts), steering east-northeast for Gun Cay, and then on up to Bimini itself.
Within days, he was inhaling it whole, claiming it for his own. Within days, he was junking his original plan, which was to stay for only a couple weeks on this first visit. No, he’d probably stay right on through and send for the family later in the summer. Maybe Cuba would have to wait this year until late summer or even the fall. He wouldn’t catch up to Gertrude Stein’s near-miss of a homer until he’d gotten back home and had unwrapped several months’ worth of magazines and newspapers. (The piece appeared in the August 1935 Atlantic.) It isn’t known whether he read her piece up in his writing studio with the door closed and began suppurating all over again. (The medical definition means to form or discharge pus.)
Now and again in the years ahead, he’d claim he’d not turned around and gone back to Key West after he’d shot himself, but had wadded up his wounds and taken shots of whiskey and gone on fishing and steaming toward that speck of British-held soil on the eastern side of the Stream whose original settlers (somewhere around AD 500) were said to be seafaring Indians from South America called Lucayo. Maybe Hemingway forgot he’d written “On Being Shot Again.” More likely, he didn’t care.
*“Bimini Island” is a misnomer. It’s a tiny island chain within the Bahamas themselves. Bimini should be called “The Biminis.” Some do call it that, actually. The name itself is said to mean “two/small.” The natives like to speak of North Bimini, South Bimini, East Bimini, although the last is mostly uninhabited mangroves and sandbars and occasional outcroppings of limestone.
†At the beginning of this paragraph, I put in parentheses the words “or even on the way home” because I don’t know for sure if Katy was aboard on the first try for Bimini. Many Hemingway chroniclers and chronologists have assumed she was. But Dos Passos’s text doesn’t explicitly say that, and neither Hemingway’s letters nor his wife’s letters confirm it, and indeed the film footage seems to suggest otherwise: all the women look to be waving from shore as Pilar leaves the dock. I know for certain that Katy was aboard with her husband a week later, when the party set out for Bimini again. Does such a trivial fact matter one way or the other? Only to the extent that it seems to reveal unwittingly the animus of those latter-day experts who wish to seize on practically any Hemingway negative they can find—and God knows, there are so many. Kenneth S. Lynn, in his unforgiving 1987 biography—which is often as absurd in its psychosexual interpretations of Hemingway as it is brilliant in its critical analyses of the work—wrote: “Katy was so mad at Hemingway that she barely spoke to him the whole way.” Well, maybe.
Go back for a moment to the photograph at the start of t
he previous chapter. He had been on Bimini three months when it was taken. The following day he’d turn thirty-six. That’s Pilar flying her American colors in this back-of-the-moon Crown Colony, where there’s one policeman; where two-thirds of the population is black; where the native kids go to school barefoot but also in clean white uniforms; where drinking water and ice and the fresh vegetables and mail for the visiting anglers arrive every Tuesday on the pilot boat from Miami; where the slattern little waterside bars are so inviting and dark when you’ve ducked in from the glare of the white coral road; where wedding parties strut and jive through the center of town to calypso beats, with the whole island taking a holiday; where it’s an almost unheard-of thing for a house or a school or one of the Protestant missionary clapboard churches to have glass in its windows—they have wooden hurricane shutters instead. They get propped outward with a stick, so that the light refracts in at a cooling slant.
In this early-evening Bahamian light, the fisherman stands proudly, victoriously, with his three boys, ages seven, eleven, and three. This is at Brown’s Dock, which is where he usually parks Pilar after her labors. Just out of sight is a pole with a saggy wind sock, and close by a sign with large block lettering: ENTRANCE DOCK GAS AND OIL. In wider shots, you get the pleasing ricketiness.
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