In a first-rate book titled Profiles in Saltwater Angling, fishing historian George Reiger makes the case that the mid-thirties represented such an age for deep-sea fishing, and that for many reasons, not least ecological, such a period probably won’t be around again. The rise of the age very much had to do with the astonishing abundance of fish, but just as much, maybe more so, with the attitudes of the fishermen, who understood that they were doing something well and first, and were willing to share with one another what they knew. Big-game fishing wasn’t a competition so much as a passion undertaken for its own sake. The waste and depopulation of these great nomadic creatures hadn’t quite yet begun to haunt sporting consciences—the ocean was still thought illimitable.* There’s a beautiful shipboard letter Hemingway wrote to a fellow Bimini fisherman named Michael Lerner several years later, on his way to cover the Spanish Civil War. He was crossing the ocean once again on the SS Paris. He longed to be on Bimini with his boat. He spoke of fishing as “a sport where the competition should be all inside yourself.… It’s serious while you’re doing it but we have to remember it’s fishing.” This was the idealist talking, willing to betray his ideals at nearly every turn. But also a man headed to the battlefront.
At Bimini, in the summer of 1935, you could run into Tommy Gifford, a charter captain, who, among other innovations, helped to develop the concept of the outrigger, for skipping the baits clear of the boat’s wake. (Hemingway had never tried an outrigger until he came to Bimini—Mike Strater made a gift to Pilar for her first rather primitive pair.) You might run into Tommy Shevlin, whose family had vast lumber concerns in the Pacific Northwest, and whom Hemingway came to regard as his protégé. (They were fifteen years apart.) You could run into Farrington, a large egoist. You could, not least, run into Mike Lerner, the best of them all, in terms of his generosity and commitment to the values of the sport and also for the modesty with which he lived his life, no matter his wealth. He’d made his fortune in a chain of women’s clothing stores. His wife, Helen, was as gracious and serious a fisherperson as he was. At the end of the thirties, both Lerners, but especially Mike, would become the driving force behind the founding and establishment of the International Game Fish Association, which remains the essential governing body for ocean fishing. (The first organizational meeting was held in an office of the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan, on June 7, 1939. Hemingway had intended to be in the room but couldn’t make it. In 1940, Lerner took over as IGFA president, and Hemingway became first vice president, in which office he remained, if in a mostly titular way, for the rest of his life.)
It was Hemingway’s friend Lerner who built, in 1933, “solid as a ship,” the great house at Bimini with the three-sided screened-in porch that sat on the tongue of land between the harbor and the sea, the one “shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind,” the one that would end up lasting through not just three hurricanes, but through an aborted novel that was put into a Cuban bank vault in 1951 and that took another two decades to find its light of print. It was Lerner, who, three years after Hemingway’s suicide, sat in a room of his great island house, speaking to Hemingway’s most troubled son, no longer a dopey little guy with his rolls of baby fat. It was midday and the blinds were drawn. The house was in some disrepair. He didn’t look well. He didn’t go out on boats much anymore. “There are so many things I’d like to tell you about your father, Gregory,” said Lerner. “God we had fun in those days.” That’s on page 37 of Papa: A Personal Memoir.
Tuna dreams. In the May 1935 Esquire, on newsstands and in mailboxes just as he had arrived at Bimini, Hemingway wrote that marlin have something on or in their noses that sharks are afraid of, and consequently they never come for a big marlin until they know that it is tired or bleeding badly. But it’s different with tuna, he opined. The main defense a tuna has against a shark is its speed. In this same piece he said, “Your correspondent is as ignorant of giant tuna as any man can be.”
That was hardly true, but what was true was that until then, he’d never had one on the end of his line. In December 1921, on his way to France as a twenty-two-year-old freelancer (with Sherwood Anderson’s letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein et al. in his hind pocket), he had witnessed giant tuna leaping on a curve of bay in Vigo, Spain. They’d come down and hit the water with the smack of a stallion. Hemingway had absorbed it all—the way the peasant fishermen baited their hooks with silvery mullet, the way schools of sardines seemed depth-charged out of the water when a bluefin rose. In the town’s fish market, he and Hadley had gawked at an eight-hundred-pound tuna laid out on a slab. About two months later, in Paris, from the newly rented cold-water walk-up at 74, rue du Cardinal Lemoine, near the place de la Contrescarpe, where the drunks and working poor of the Left Bank lived, workmanlike sentences got written for readers of the Toronto Star Weekly: “A big tuna is silver and slate blue, and when he shoots up into the air from close beside the boat it is like a blinding flash of quicksilver. He may weigh three hundred pounds and he jumps with the eagerness and ferocity of a mammoth rainbow trout. Sometimes five and six tuna will be in the air at once in Vigo Bay, shouldering out of the water.” A tuna, wrote the stringer in his seven-paragraph color piece (for which he was paid at space rates, meaning not much), was “the king of all fish, the ruler of the Valhalla of fishermen.”
The handsome little thirteen-foot sea skiff that had bobbed along to Bimini in Pilar’s wake was part of Hemingway’s tuna plans. The skiff was a Lyman, about half as broad as she was long. Like Wheeler, that name instantly meant something in the thirties boating world. Founded by cabinetmaker Bernard Lyman in 1875, and eventually headquartered in Sandusky, Ohio, the company offered small and extremely durable vessels mainly of a lapstrake construction. Lapstrake planking has to do with the way the boards get attached to the frames and to themselves. In a lapstrake hull, the planks are “lapped” one edge over another, in contrast to conventional hulls where the boards get butted together at their edges in a batten-seam construction. This provides more stability and sea-kindliness than in a flat-bottomed boat, because each protruding lap serves as a kind of shock absorber to the force of the water, the more so at high speeds.
Hemingway’s notion was, once he’d hooked into the giant bluefin of his fantasies, to pass off his rod to one of Pilar’s crew and then to get quickly into the little boat, where a fighting chair would be rigged up and ready. The rod would be passed over; he’d screw down tight on the drag. Somebody from the mother boat would get in beside him to help with the steering. They’d un-umbilical the Lyman. He would set his feet against the sides of the boat and try to hold on for life while the tuna took him like a hydroplane through the ocean. The lapstrake construction would afford him better odds against flipping over. Sooner or later the dumb fish would exhaust itself. He’d let it tow itself to death, and afterward they’d bring it over Pilar’s stern, no matter that a dead weight in a fish is just like a dead weight in a human. For nearly two years, Hemingway had this towing vision in his head—it’s there in the letters. The plan never materialized.
But his theory of might-against-might did, and it changed the rules for tuna. Simply stated, the theory was this: from the instant the fish is on your hook, you have to dominate it. You must make the fish understand it’s dealing with a superior force. Pump and wind without ever taking a break. Don’t give a foot of slack. Don’t play the fish, as you might a lesser species, but horse it in, right to the breaking point of both your rod and your back. It’s a simple proposition: either defeat the thing or break it. It’s your only chance against the sharks. If you end up losing your tackle in the bargain, so be it.
He got his first one in clean. He did it in about seventy minutes. It happened in the latter half of May, after he’d been on Bimini roughly a month.
He was fishing with the 14/0 Vom Hofe. The bait itself—a baby tuna—weighed almost eight pounds. His boat was heeling into a southwest breeze, when he saw “a big yellowish brown fi
sh pass alongside the boat traveling with the swells.” He thought it was a marlin. The fish hit the bait and the reel began “to scream in the special high register a man attains when he is dying of lockjaw.” The rod broke off at the tip. The fish was still on the line; they managed to get another rod tip in its place. He worked the fish to the side of the boat. The sun was blinding his vision. It’s a mako shark, he thought. Before they could get the gaff in, the fish pulled the leader free and sounded. In fifteen minutes Hemingway had the fish back up at the surface, belly side up. He saw now it was neither a mako nor a marlin but a tuna, with “a head that seemed made of chromium, a dark blue back, silver sides, was streamlined like a bullet and there were little bright yellow finlets that ran from his anal fin to his tail and still quivered when we got him in the boat.” They covered the fish with canvas and put it on the deck. That evening, on shore, it weighed out at 381 pounds, hardly a one-tonner but nonetheless Bimini’s first recorded unmutilated tuna. Writing about it that August in Esquire, in “He Who Gets Slap Happy” (the quoted lines above are from the article), Hemingway began with this thought: “It is all just as serious as you take it. Certainly a fish is only a fish while a man is more than often a sonofabitch.… What is a sportsman, anyway? In what does he differ from the average four letter man?”
Before that saw print, the news of his feat made the rotogravure of the Sunday New York Times. With a photo, on page 2 of the June 16 edition: “THE AUTHOR’S BEST FISHING STORY: Ernest Hemingway, With a Blue-Fin Tuna Weighing 381 Pounds, Which He Landed Intact Aboard His Cruiser Pilar Near Bimini, to Establish a South Atlantic Record for This Kind of Fish.” The picture was copyrighted in his name.
Soon after, he got a second one in whole. It weighed 319 pounds and he boated it in forty-eight minutes. Pauline as well as the Blixens were aboard. He hooked into the fish late in the day on the way back from Cat Cay. Now other charter captains and their clients were bringing tuna in clean at Bimini, using the new concept of horsing rather than fighting. Hemingway had shown the way, and he knew it. In a June letter to Max Perkins he’d say, “[W]e’ve changed the whole system of big game fishing by the way we work them. Anyone can catch the tuna here now since we’ve showed them how.… This sounds awfully bragging but only write it because you might be interested.” Earlier that month, he’d written to Gingrich: “All the boats … had been fishing four years and nobody caught any. Have won 350 bucks betting we would with the rich boys. Plenty rich boys. But now no bets.” In his August Esquire dispatch, the man who loved everything up to a point said of his long-awaited experience of fighting the ruler of the Valhalla of fishermen: “They are tremendously strong, run beautifully, do not jump, ever, after being hooked, and can and will bend your back and your rod plenty. But for enjoyment of the fight and for a thrill a marlin has them beat three hundred ways.”
Plenty-rich boys. For nearly all of his life, the son of an Oak Park doctor and a socially pretentious mother hated and pitied and feared the very rich as a class no less than he did women. At bottom, the same instinctive belief: you get too close, these people will destroy your art, even if on another level all you wish is to get close, to have their approval.
On May 26, the queen’s birthday, when the whole island was drunk, some “worthless sporting characters” with loud mouths and too much money were shooting off flares with Very pistols. “Worthless sporting characters”—that’s a line from Islands in the Stream. A fight, such as it was, ensued, probably lasting less than thirty seconds—something like six shots: three pop-pop-pop left hooks, and then a couple of dirty clubbings behind the ear (this wasn’t Marquis of Queensberry), and then the roundhouse finishing right. The clubbings behind the ear caused his victim’s ear to swell up like a bunch of grapes, like an overripe fig. The fight took place in the dark with bare hands on the government dock. Hemingway devotes a twenty-eight-page chapter in the “Bimini” section of the novel to a thin fictionalizing of this half-minute brawl, which, in real life, instantly entered island myth. They still sing about it in the waterside bars of Alice Town. The tune’s called “Big Fat Slob.” The Biminite who wrote it, Nattie Saunders, said to have been on the dock that night, has passed. His lyrics go like this:
Mr. Knapp called Mr. Ernest Hemingway
A big fat slob
Mr. Ernest Hemingway balled his fist
And gave him a knob
Big fat slob in Bimini
This is the night we have fun.
Mr. Knapp, who got the knob on Queen Mary’s birthday, was Joseph Fairchild Knapp. His friends knew him as Dodi. He was the son of Joseph P. Knapp, chairman of the board of Crowell-Collier, publisher of magazines like Collier’s, Woman’s Home Companion, and The American Magazine. Dodi had come over to Bimini with his wife from their winter home at the Isle of Palms in Fort Lauderdale in their fifty-three-foot trunk cruiser. He is said to have retired, at thirty-seven, in 1929, from his father’s lithograph company, another branch of the family publishing empire. Not that Hemingway knew any of this when he put him into the big sleep. Not that he even knew his name. He’d find that out afterward.
It’s been said that Hemingway was on Pilar when the excessively ripped Dodi appeared on the deck of his boat and began hurling invectives across the transom. But Hemingway wasn’t on his own boat; she was tied up down the way. He was visiting on another boat belonging to yet another worthless sporting character with a pet WASP name and way too much money and time on his hands—Woolworth Donahue, called Woolie, descendant of the five-and-dime tycoon. That Hemingway was on the boat in the first place, among these idlers who weren’t true sportsmen and for whom he would have had fairly undisguised contempt, only suggests he was spoiling for a fight. There had to have been quantities of self-contempt, too.
Apparently, the uniformed crew of Dodi’s boat never made a move to intervene. That seems telling. In the fictionalized version, written at least a decade after the actual event, the mean drunk isn’t given a name. He just appears out of the darkness from his stateroom in his white-duck trousers and begins calling over in a choking voice. “ ‘You slob.’ … ‘You rotten filthy slob.’ … ‘You big fat slob.’ … ‘You phony. You faker. You cheap phony. You rotten writer and lousy painter.’ ” Earlier the drunk had appeared in his pajamas and cried, “ ‘Listen, you swine! Stop it, will you? There’s a lady trying to sleep down below.’ ” What’s aroused him are the Very flares falling too close to his boat. It’s not Thomas Hudson, but Hudson’s writer friend, Roger Davis, who climbs up on the dock to take care of the drunk. As already noted, both Hudson and Davis are Hemingway manqué—barely manqué.
In real life, something about the way the back of his victim’s head banged down, with his eyes rolling around like pennies in a doll’s head, caused alarm in Hemingway—and this, too, plays out in the fiction. Remorse sets in. But Dodi was just out cold. His boat is said to have slunk out of town before dawn, bound, as Hemingway later put it, “for Miami for doctorage.” According to Hemingway, Knapp admitted to a charter captain in Florida that he had it coming.
Nine days after the coldcocking, briefly back in Key West, to see his kids and clean up the mail, still terribly thrilled and unable to hide it, Hemingway told Arnold Gingrich in a letter:
[C]lipped him three times with left hooks didn’t understand why he didn’t go down … backed away and landed Sunday punch making him hit ass and head at almost same time on planks.… On the other hand it is called limiting one’s market. Still the son of a bitch never touched me once and he started it and weighed 200 lbs, had shoes on and I was barefoot. Lost 2 toenails. If you have any curiosity about this thing it is very easily verified. The nigger band that sings was on the dock, saw it all and have a fine song now that you can hear if you will come to Bimini.
Actually, Dodi didn’t weigh more than 180. And he was no more than five-foot-eight or five-foot-nine. And he was forty-three to Hemingway’s nearly thirty-six. In other words, he gave away about seven years, four inches, and twenty-five p
ounds to somebody whose haymaker right arm had been bulking up even more than usual due to the pulling in of some large fish. And as for Hemingway’s line about limiting his writing market: not true. In World War II, he’d be credentialed as a war correspondent for Collier’s.
In Islands, remorseful for the beating he’s administered, Roger Davis says to Thomas Hudson:
“I humiliated him and I ruined him a little. But he’ll take it out on someone else.… You know evil is a hell of a thing, Tommy.… Being against evil doesn’t make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming in just like a tide.… I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you’re fighting.”
Ever the cross-graining.
The first draft of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was written at the end of Hemingway’s first summer on Bimini. Of course, it’s a tale about the corruptions of wealth, and of what those corruptions have done to a man named Harry, who once thought of himself as a serious artist. Now he’s just full of his poisons.
*From his letters and other writing, it’s clear that the waste and depopulation had begun to haunt Hemingway. In that same Esquire piece in which he omitted his use of a tommy gun, he wrote: “In Havana you give the meat away or you sell it for around ten cents a pound. In Bimini it is wasted scandalously.… [I]t is disgusting and sickening to see edible game fish slaughtered and wasted.… Killing fish for no useful purpose, or allowing their meat to waste, wantonly, should be an offense punishable by law.” He urged the Bimini government to build a smokehouse. The fishermen could pay a fee for the curing and take the meat themselves; the rest of it could be sold at market or distributed free by the government. But, true to character, the sense of appalling waste wasn’t going to keep him from catching every fish he could, from besting every fisherman in sight. This was the same cross-grained man who’d written to his friend Waldo Peirce in Maine and called their mutual friend Archie MacLeish one of the world’s finer nose-picker poets and then added quickly that he wouldn’t wish to hurt his feelings for anything and so “tear this part out and burn it.” His remorse may have been eating at him, but not enough to keep him from mailing the letter.
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