Re the tension to get down the words: As noted, on May 26 EH advanced his safari story by less than two hundred words. Three were “strawy dung piles.” At some point between ms. and galley and published book, the phrase became “strawy piles of dung.” Above and below “piles” on the ms. sheet, he wrote the numbers 118 and 472. What they referred to, other than a toting up of some kind, is anybody’s guess.
Finally, re the new issue of Esquire that Bumby brought to his dad’s workroom on that Saturday morning: Three small pen-and-ink drawings illustrated the piece. One has Hemingway tilted back with his rod in his fighting chair, draining a bottle of booze, with a dozen other liquor or beer bottles beside him. On the jump page, two baby fish stare at a very large marlin. This is the caption: “Confidentially, he’s a she.” In light of all we posthumously know, or think we know, or are all too eager to speculate, about Hemingway’s psychosexual conflicts, his hair fetishes, his fascination behind the bedroom door with sexual role reversals, as these themes and fetishes and half-concealed desires seem to speak to us so loudly now from his grave, it’s a little disconcerting—even startling—to go to a library and pull down from a dusty shelf a bound copy of the August 1934 issue of Esquire and come on that cartoonish illustration.
CATCHING FISH
Precede. “One Trip Across” first appeared in the April 1934 Cosmopolitan. The passage from Islands is on page 110.
Chapter. I cross-referenced a dozen sources: among others, Samuelson’s memoir and his two journalism pieces of February and June 1935, EH letters, the Pilar logs, EH’s fishing letter in the October 1934 Esquire, and Havana newspaper accounts. What such cross-referencing mainly gets you is headaches. The Maestro is only too happy to contradict himself all over the place. For instance, re the catching of Pauline’s pint-size marlin on Hemingway’s birthday, he reports in With Hemingway the fish weighed sixty-four pounds and was gaffed in seven minutes. But in his Motor Boating piece (written closer to the actual event, and under the editing eye of his mentor), he says the fish weighed forty-four pounds and was gaffed in fourteen minutes. The Pilar log entry, which was surely written within hours of the catch, must be nearest the truth: a forty-four-pounder, landed in twelve minutes, length “six feet eight.” Bit of pedantry, I know.
The passage re water color is on page 107 of Islands. The quote re David lifting and reeling is on page 110. Linda Patterson Miller’s essay about the Pilar logs is titled “The Matrix of Hemingway’s Pilar Log, 1934–1935,” and is in North Dakota Quarterly, 64, no. 3 (1997). Bruccoli’s comment about EH as restaurant critic is in his Classes on Ernest Hemingway. Doctorow’s quote about EH and food is in his “Braver Than We Thought.” The passage from Green Hills re “cold sliced tenderloin” is on page 111 and the “chop box” passage is on page 110. EH letter to his mother-in-law is August 14, 1934. EH letter to Gingrich re trying to write a novel part-time is August 18, 1934. Second letter to Mary Pfeiffer is August 20, 1934. The Sentence is on page 148–page 150 of Green Hills. EH letter to Murphys re coming back across is November 7, 1934. New Masses smackdown of EH is November 27, 1934.
Portrait of the scientificos: largely from my own reporting. Re the big catch of August 6: writing of that day in his “Genio after Josie” letter in the October 1934 Esquire, EH gave the technical data, as if only the facts, the names of things, had dignity: “This fish was hooked on a trolled cero mackerel bait, on a 12/0 Pflueger swordfish hook, No. 13 piano wire leader, Hardy 20-oz. tip and Hardy 6-inch reel with 500 yards of 39-thread line and was taken on board in one hour and twelve minutes from the time he was hooked.” From the logs of that day: “No. 2 of 1934. 12 feet 2 inches. 420 pounds. Girth 4 feet 8 inches. Head 3¼ inches.”
Re the Pilar logs: As noted, in the late 1980s, the JFK library acquired a carbon copy from the Samuelson estate—some ninety-five pages of gapped text, with a first full entry of July 28. (There was a partial entry ahead of this, thought to be from July 27.) It was assumed that this was all there was. But in the last few years, another eleven pages have come forth, found in the family archives of Toby and Betty Bruce in Key West. So the extant if still incomplete logs are now an even more valuable 106-page document, commencing on July 21, 1934.
ON BEING SHOT AGAIN
Precede. Time review of Les Hemingway’s novel is November 2, 1953, and EH letter about it six years later is September 14, 1959. EH’s yelling at his little brother aboard Pilar is described in Vernon (Jake) Klimo and Will Oursler’s Hemingway and Jake. As said in the text, the passage from Islands forms that novel’s perfect first paragraph. EH’s letter to his brother re forbidding publication of any kind of book about him while he was alive is September 14, 1959.
I am staring at a curling photograph of Les and me taken by my wife with Les’s camera, a Polaroid; it’s more than thirty years old. Les and I are saying good-bye at the Chalk’s seaplane ramp. A bright red hibiscus petal is stuck in the buttonhole of my denim shirt—Les has reached over and put it there. He has on his black horn-rims, a plaid woolen shirt. He could be my best older friend, or the favorite uncle always looking out for me. I can’t really see his brown eyes—they’re obscured by his thick lenses. The man who did what he could. The apparition, free of the disease.
Chapter. I drew on EH letters, accounts of others (John Dos Passos, e.g.), EH pieces in Esquire, logs, film footage. (A cache of footage is housed at the museum-library of the International Game Fish Association in greater Fort Lauderdale.) First epigraph is from letter to the very ill Patrick Murphy, April 5, 1935. Second epigraph is from EH’s “a.d. Southern Style” in May 1935 Esquire. Letter to Gingrich re “Here is the piece” is April 12, 1935. Stein in America: details were culled from news accounts and several biographies, including Janet Hobhouse’s Everybody Who Was Anybody. Re EH and eight-millimeter home movies: In one of the sequences of Pilar getting away from the dock en route (on the first try) to Bimini, you see the boat turning around. The figures on shore are waving; the figures on the boat are waving back. But now Pilar’s making a long, slow curve in the navy yard harbor. EH needs to retrieve the movie camera. What’s this about? He wishes to document his leaving, and somebody on land has obliged him, but he’s now coming back to collect the camera for all the anticipated catches on Bimini.
Re size of EH’s reels: A few years ago, in Jupiter, Florida, I spent a happy afternoon with one of America’s foremost antique tackle experts and collectors. Ed Pritchard not only had the tackle, he had the vintage catalogs from Abercrombie and Hardy. He owned both a 14/0 Vom Hofe and several of the larger Zane Greys. He took one of the latter from a cabinet—I think it was a seven-incher—and set it in my hands. It felt like a bowling ball—I was worried I’d drop the thing. I played with the spindle and listened to the oiled whir and click of its wheels and bearings. “How much do you want?” I joked. “Oh, give me fifteen or twenty thousand,” he said.
OUTSIDE WORLDS
Precede. July 20, 1935: The JFK library has many photographs, which aren’t dated but are unquestionably from that day. Extremely helpful was the eight-millimeter footage donated to the International Game Fish Association museum by legendary Bimini angler Mike Lerner. Lerner’s footage has these old-timey title cards: “That Memorable Day July 20. Four big blue Marlin on Bimini’s Dock.”
“And meanest” quote is on page 10 of Islands. “Something about him” quote is on page 144. “Smallest boy” passage is on page 53. Re the never-completed trilogy of war novels, and re scholars still trying to sort out time frames of composition: I am not alone in thinking that the best work done on this entire period is by Rose Marie Burwell in her Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. I am not only indebted to her 1996 book, but to the time she gave to me in an interview at her Oak Park home several years ago, with elegant refreshments.
Re EH’s use of title page of The Magic Mountain for a fishing log: Literature professor and bibliographer James D. Brasch, retired now from Ontario’s McMaster University, sent a close-up slide of t
hat title page, and he was also generous on the phone and in correspondence with what he knew. In 1977, shortly after New Year’s, Brasch and a fellow McMaster professor, Joseph Sigman, went to Cuba to work in Hemingway’s library as part of an ongoing effort by bibliophiles to try to gauge how many books Hemingway had owned through the moveable feast of his life, from Oak Park to northern Michigan to Paris to Key West to Havana to Idaho, and all the Hemingway places in between. (Essentially, Brasch and Sigman were concerned with the personal libraries of Key West and Cuba.) The truth is we’ll never know the total number of books EH owned in his lifetime. Like people, he left too many behind. According to the Boston-based Finca Vigía Foundation, which works privately with Cuban conservators to preserve Hemingway’s home (including Pilar—see the end of these notes), there are about nine thousand items—books, magazines, pamphlets—in his personal library, and it’s estimated that about 20 percent have something written by Hemingway in their margins.
Chapter. I charted the timelines by again cross-referencing letters, movie footage, logs, EH pieces in Esquire, Islands in the Stream, books about Bimini in the thirties and the years beyond. As for broader history, about Bimini and also big-game fishing, I’ve mentioned in the text George Reiger’s Profiles in Saltwater Angling, but mention should also be made of Ashley Saunders’s two-volume History of Bimini. Saunders is the nephew of the composer of “Big Fat Slob,” and I have pedaled a bike with him up-island from Alice Town to another little clot of Bimini life called Bailey Town, to dine on a late dinner of fry bread and plantains and deep-fried grouper at a wobbly table covered with oilcloth—and listened to Nattie’s nephew, on the way home, through the starry midnight blackness, singing verses of his uncle’s song.
Re EH letter to Mike Strater of July 1933 re hoping to go eventually to Bimini for tuna, and of the boat he hoped to buy on his return from Africa: it’s a pity we don’t have an exact date for this letter, for it’s important in the history of Pilar. I think it’s primarily from this letter—ten months before Pilar was in EH’s possession—that a lot of misinformation about her has barnacled itself to biographies.
Passage from For Whom the Bell Tolls re coded reference to Mike Strater is on page 380–page 381. Shipboard letter to Lerner re competition should “be all inside yourself” is March 4, 1937. EH Toronto Star Weekly piece is February 18, 1922. Letter to Perkins re how he’s “changed the whole system” is June 19, 1935. Letter to Gingrich re “plenty rich boys” is June 4, 1935. The “slob” passages in Islands are page 35–page 39. Letter to Gingrich about “clipping” Dodi Knapp is June 4, 1935. Quotes re “I humiliated him” etc., appear on page 46, page 47, page 48 of Islands. A Knapp researcher named Ken Spooner has done invaluable work on the real-life Dodi, as opposed to the EH fictional creation, and I am grateful to him for making some of it available to me.
Re the question of EH’s first-ever tuna catch: On page 272 of his bio, Baker describes a different and much larger tuna that he didn’t hook but fought for hours. The suggestion is that this was EH’s first battle with a bluefin, and that the fight occurred in May. But Dos Passos, who witnessed the fight, wasn’t on Bimini anytime in May. He and his wife were there the month before, but then left and didn’t come back to the island (and then only for a week), until the second week of June. Katy and Dos watched the battle from the top of Pilar’s cabin, and Dos describes it in The Best Times. So I think that the tuna catch I’ve told of—and that EH wrote of in his August Esquire letter—was his first one, as well as Bimini’s first-ever recorded bluefin that was brought in unmutilated. In the Esquire piece Hemingway says, “I was steering into the sea with a big southwest breeze blowing when we hooked the first one.” (Italics mine.) He then tells of this 381-pounder with the head that seemed made of chromium. EH doesn’t give a date for the historic catch, and neither do his letters, but, as I say in the text, it had to have happened in the latter half of May. Incidentally, the other fish was hooked by a local named Charlie Cook, caretaker of Cat Cay. The fight lasted something like ten hours and ended in darkness with a circle of boats shining their searchlights on Pilar’s stern. By the time they got the fish into the boat, only backbone, head, and tail remained: apple-cored.
Finally: The original document of Baker’s Strater interview is in the Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
EXUBERATING, AND THEN THE JACKALS OF HIS MIND
Precede. Re question of whether EH and Sara Murphy were ever lovers: my own hedge is yes. Nearly from the start, they seemed to have connected with each other powerfully, and you can get it from their letters, in coded and less-coded ways. Such as this one, of April 27, 1934, a fortnight before he claims Pilar: “Dearest Sara: I love you very much, Madam, not like in Scott’s Christmas tree ornament novels but the way it is on boats where Scott would be sea-sick.”
Chapter. Letters, logs, diaries, movies, photographs, oral histories. Also works by other Bimini anglers as well as of some general Hemingway hangers-on. In the former category, S. Kip Farrington’s Fishing with Hemingway and Glassell was helpful, and in the latter Ben Finney’s Feet First. (Both are self-aggrandizing.) Letter to Max re “lovely spot” is July 2, 1935. EH midnight wire to Max is February 18, 1935. Letter to Gingrich re birthday catch is July 31, 1935, and one re his “piles” to Max is the day before—July 30. Letter re “the Knapp thing” is to Gingrich, July 31. “Who Murdered” piece is in New Masses, September 17, 1935. “Writers should work alone” quote is from page 21 of Green Hills, and Mark Twain quote is page 22. EH’s letter to Janet Flanner is April 8, 1933.
PART THREE. BEFORE
Quote from A Moveable Feast appears on page 76.
EDENS LOST AND DARKNESS VISIBLE
Precede. Grace’s family albums are too fragile to be examined any longer in the original. But a transcript and reproduction of their contents will give new awe for her will, energies, abilities, suffocations, egotisms, loyalties. Her son’s second album charts his life from age twenty-three months to five years, five months. On page 8, a picture of EH fishing on a log at Windemere, with this caption: “Gonna cats a big back bass.” (He’s in overalls, boots, straw hat.) On page 11, he’s naked on a boat, pointing to a tree, with this caption: “little mercury, quite unconscious.” On page 30, seated in a chair with his newly born sis, Ursula: “I wuv her to pieces.”
Chapter. I have stood on the shoulders (metaphor I used earlier) of more than a dozen Oak Park and Michigan historians. For the canoe trip down the Des Plaines, the family of Ray Ohlsen was crucial. His three daughters and one son, all proud midwesterners in upper age, had vivid memories of their dad. So did several middle-aged midwestern grandsons and grandnephews. The Ohlsen family provided a copy of a 1974 tape recording that Ohlsen made with his grandson, Steve Rae, and also a transcript. The historians and archivists at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, housed in the Oak Park Public Library, had a copy of EH’s January 15, 1961, letter from Mayo. The foundation also had photographs of the canoe trip; JFK as well. After I had studied these photographs for a while, a dumb question occurred to me: Who took the photographs of EH and Ohlsen along the stream bank and at their campsites? It must have been their fellow high school buddy, Toy Ullman, who joined them briefly on the trip. (Ohlsen speaks of Ullman in the tape recording, but makes no mention of how he caught up with them and if he had his own canoe.) I’m guessing he came overland, perhaps on the train, camped out with them for at least a night, and then went on his own back to civilization.
I said in the text I had a second postscript: Ray Ohlsen himself. What was the rest of his life like? At Class Day in graduation week, Hemingway had delivered the class prophecy and said that Cohen—he called him by his real name—would end up president of Harvard. What I ended up learning about the history of the real man moved me. If his story—and I can only suggest the bare outline of it—sounds ordinary, un-Hemingway-like, sane, decent, midwes
tern, banal even, well, that’s pretty much my point.
His grandkids—sixteen at his death, twelve great-grandchildren—used to call him Dad-o. In retirement Dad-o drove this rancid old 1964 Rambler station wagon, and he loved loading up the kids on an airless Peoria summer night and carting them off to Velvet Freeze, “Home of the Wonder Dog.”
He was married to the same good woman for sixty-two years, not without heartache and temporary separations due at least in part to his difficulties in holding steady work. Instead of getting hitched in Illinois, he and Angeline had run off in 1925 to a justice of the peace at the Lake County Courthouse in Crown Point, Indiana, because that’s where Rudolph Valentino got married.
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