Both ship and commander were top notch but Cooper was rapidly realising that the navy in peacetime can be a tedious workplace and, aside from a few coastal trips, the Wasp was by and large idle. The young midshipman’s main role was rounding up reluctant recruits, which must have rankled somewhat.
Cooper therefore cut a frustrated figure, brimming over with thwarted ambition: a man waiting for some meaningful action to occur. Yet all the waiting was to be in vain, for as he twiddled his thumbs and looked forward to the inevitable outbreak of war, something far more momentous occurred; he fell in love with a girl by the name of Susan DeLancey. ‘I loved her like a man,’ he later recalled ‘and told her of it like a sailor.’ If this was so, Susan also signalled the end of his life as a sailor. The couple were married on New Year’s Day 1811, Cooper having already resigned his commission aboard the Wasp. His days afloat were over and Cooper now looked to the land for a living. It therefore must have been galling for the fervent young patriot to have to observe from a distance the dreadful bloody nose that the US Navy gave the cocksure and overconfident British during the ensuing war of 1812–15. Certainly Cooper was later to document much of the action with barely disguised glee. Whether it was a promise to his wife, or simple pragmatism that prevented Cooper from returning to the sea and the heat of battle, we will never know.
Henceforth, Cooper became a landowner, gentleman and businessman, but life was not as simple as it had seemed in the carefree days of his youth in Cooperstown, and he was often under heavy financial pressure. This didn’t stop him from investing in the whaling vessel Union, which made several voyages in pursuit of sperm whales, and certainly seems to have helped to keep him afloat financially. His visits aboard this vessel at the end of her trips were always a source of pleasure to the retired sailor, and his knowledge of the business must have been invaluable. It wasn’t until 1820 that Cooper wrote his first novel, Precaution. The circumstances were spontaneous and off the cuff. He was reading a rather dreary novel and happened to remark to his wife that he could do better himself. Susan responded by challenging him to do just that, and the rest is history.
Cooper slowly established himself as one of the great pioneers of American literature. In doing so, he truly was a pioneer, as prior to this it was largely accepted that novels were written in Europe and it was not financially viable to be a full-time author in America. Cooper proved it was possible and paved the way for Melville, Hawthorne and many more besides, remaining a staunch patriot and retaining that early disdain for the English. It is telling that his first nautical novel – the first nautical novel – The Pilot, was based on the story of John Paul Jones, regarded as the founder of the American Navy and a man who, during the War of Independence, became the scourge of the Royal Navy after leading a number of dashing attacks on English and Scottish ports, which badly damaged British morale.
In later years Cooper became the leading biographer of the US Navy and his cataloguing of the early history of the force remain important historical sources. Yet it was his nautical fiction that was the most striking illustration of his relationship with ships and the sea. He was clearly very much in love with life afloat and this hankering for salt air and open horizons seeps through all that work. Joseph Conrad was later to observe:
[Cooper] loved the sea and looked at it with consummate understanding. In his sea tales the sea inter-penetrates with life … His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon. They embrace the colours of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of silent coasts, and the alert readiness which marks men who live face to face with the promise and the menace of the sea.
Ernest Hemingway
A strange fish
You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and sell food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after.
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
By the time of his death, Ernest Hemingway had become a hideously bloated parody of himself. The year was 1961 and Hemingway was the most famous author in the world. He was 62 years old; his faculties were shot to hell and he was utterly dissipated. Years of boozing had frayed his nerves to the point where he was utterly paranoid. He had become deluded, obsessed with the idea that the FBI was tapping his phone. In the meantime, his legendary writing powers were so diminished that his last attempt to write a meaningful paragraph had reduced him to tears. Evidently deciding it was time to sign off, he took his own life by putting a shotgun to his head.
Since then, Hemingway’s larger-than-life persona has been stretched and distorted still further, until the myth surrounding this hard living, hard drinking, self-hating ball of machismo and ego is hard to make any sense of at all. He clearly had a mean streak a mile wide and made plenty of enemies – even among his friends. Since his death, there have been so many hatchet jobs on his personality that it becomes hard for any Hemingway scholar not to end up hating him. Yet for all the bluster and swagger, and his wanton treachery towards his friends, there comes a point when only the hardest hearted could not feel a bit sorry for the man. For me, this point is around 1951, the moment when the façade of all those years of boasting and braggadocio starts to crumble and you see him for what he really is: a confused, pathetic and rather desperate middle-aged man capable, now and again, of creating literary magic. This was also around the time he sat down to write to The Old Man and the Sea, his final masterpiece and a work of real sensitivity and beauty. The book distilled all that Hemingway loved about the sea and deep-sea fishing into one story, stripped bare of everything but a profound understanding of nature, the sea and the magic of man’s relationship with both its unfathomable depths and the creatures therein. It is unquestionably one of the great pieces of maritime literature.
Given the reflective beauty of the book, it is interesting to understand the circumstances in which it was written and what made the man who wrote it. Hemingway’s story has been told so many times that I don’t really want to go into too much detail about his youth, so I will be brief. He was born many miles from the sea in Illinois in 1899. The second of six children, his father was a doctor and a stern disciplinarian who often handed out brutal beatings to his kids. Hemingway rapidly grew to hate his rather eccentric mother, perhaps because she insisted in cladding him in girl’s clothes in his early years. Young Hemingway showed an aptitude for writing, and after leaving school was a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star. He had a longing to travel, and World War One gave him a great excuse. He tried to enlist, but failed on account of bad eyesight and instead signed up for the Red Cross in 1918, serving on the Italian front. He was only 18 and witnessed first hand the horror of one of the most brutal conflicts the world has seen. He was injured badly and also commended for his bravery. Returning home, he married Elizabeth Hadley Richardson and the couple soon headed to Paris after Hemingway, now a reporter for the Toronto Star, was made European correspondent. It was in decadent Paris that Hemingway was to become a leading light of what became known as ‘the lost generation’: a group of bohemians, artists, writers and intellectuals. Surrounded by writers and poets such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, Hemingway began to find his own voice as a writer. His clipped narrative and lean, hard, athletic prose was new and exciting. He published his first full-length novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1925 and was immediately propelled to the forefront of his profession. It’s a book that is pure Hemingway: sex, death, drunkenness, bullfighting, fishing and machismo are all there in spades. Lionised in the press for his talents, Hemingway worked hard to live up to his reputation and it didn’t seem to have a great effect on his personality. Perhaps success came too easily to the young author. Certainly there seems to have been a horrible price to pay down the line.
By the time he had published A Farewell to Arms in 1929, Hemingway’s fame was assured and he w
as showered with plaudits, already marked out as one of the great authors of his time. Something else happened in 1929. Back in Illinois, his father shot himself. Hemingway may never have liked his father, but his suicide understandably left profound scars. It is perhaps no coincidence that around this time he suffered something of a crisis of confidence as a writer. Throughout the 1930s he struggled with where to go and how to evolve. He did all this with the eyes of the world on him – some willing him to fail. His huge ego and the raw machismo that he paraded around won him many enemies and when he tried to evolve and adapt, the critics savaged him. Hemingway was furious.
He rallied in 1940 with For Whom the Bell Tolls, but following that, writer’s block and self-doubt seemed to bite hard. He produced only one book in the next decade, Across the River and into the Trees, and it was panned. He retreated to his home in Cuba, and into himself, his booze and his great love, deep-sea fishing. By the time 1951 rolled around and he sat down to write The Old Man and the Sea the general perception was that he was a spent force. He was now over 50. His heavy drinking, always seen as an essential part of his macho persona, was now simply embarrassing. He generally got through a quart (roughly a litre) of whiskey a day in later years. His love life was also a huge embarrassment: while his fourth wife, Mary, stalked the corridors of the couple’s well appointed Cuban home, another woman vied for the author’s attention. This was Adriana Ivancich, a beautiful Italian who, at 21 years of age, could very easily have been Hemingway’s daughter. In fact, this sad old man referred to her as just that, ‘daughter’, but lusted after her in a most unfatherly manner. He had already declared his love for her earlier that year during a visit to Europe. Since then, he had been imploring her to visit him in Cuba and she had obliged, arriving there with her mother. Hemingway had been eyeing her covetously ever since and, although their relationship was never consummated, he sat down to write his seminal piece of literature in an atmosphere that must have been charged with sexual tension, frustration and fury. These circumstances were clearly favourable to the author, for the result was a book overflowing with purity, simplicity and beauty. Very few writers have managed to articulate the almost symbiotic feeling that comes from being intimate with the sea. The book is all about love, respect and being part of something great and unfathomable, and he put his whole being into it. He himself recognised this, as he wrote to his publisher: ‘This is the prose I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit. It is as good prose as I can write now.’
To understand how a man with such a reputation for being a colossal boor could have come up with prose of such delicate sensitivity, one has to understand more about Hemingway and his relationship with the sea. We have already touched upon his complicated romantic life, but in all honesty on the morning he decided to end it all, there was probably only one true love left for him and that was his little fishing launch, Pilar. She had stuck with him through three marriages and innumerable crises. She had also provided him with some of his happiest and most contented times when he and Pilar had whiled away the days off the Cuban coastline, fishing the Gulf Stream for hours at a time in search of marlin, tuna and mako sharks. It was these hours out in the ‘stream’ that provided Hemingway with the knowledge and understanding to write his final masterpiece.
Growing up in Illinois, Hemingway had always loved the great outdoors and particularly fishing, which he undertook on the many rivers that surrounded his home in the town of Oak Park. The family had a number of rowing boats and later a powerboat to engage in this pursuit. Yet it was not until the 1920s, when Hemingway was based in Europe, that he was fully introduced to the joys of big-game fishing. Big-game fishing is a sport that has been around since the beginning of the twentieth century and involves heading offshore and ‘trolling’ lines with bait or lures at slow speed in the hope of attracting big fish such as tuna, marlin and shark. Hooking these fish can be difficult, as they often simply nibble at the bait. While the fish is toying with its food, the fisherman has to ‘slack’ the line in order to allow his prey to fully swallow the hook. Once this has happened, the fisherman can ‘strike’, pulling the line tight and dragging the hook deep into the innards of the fish. From hereon it is a battle between man and fish, the fisherman constantly slacking and reeling in until his prey is exhausted and can finally be landed on deck. The struggle can go on for hours at a time and is hugely physical. With his brawny physique, love of manly pursuits and relish for a good set-to, it was only going to be a matter of time before Hemingway got involved. His first forays came when he was working as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and he wrote about it in one of his lifestyle features in that paper. The year was 1922 and Hemingway was not even on the radar as a novelist, but his promise shines through in his narrative:
A big tuna is 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 300 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 like porpoises as they herd the sardines and then leaping in a towering jump that is as clean and beautiful as the leap of a well hooked rainbow.
This was written after an early fishing trip from the port of Vigo in northern Spain, and shows that Hemingway was already entranced by the great beauty and power of the fish. Yet it wasn’t until he returned from Europe in 1928 that he was able to take up the sport in earnest. The now-famous author had moved back to his home country and settled in Key West, at the very tip of Florida. It was a ramshackle backwood in those days and Hemingway revelled in the pleasant climate and azure seas, ‘… the best place I’ve ever been anytime, anywhere, flowers, tamarind trees, guava trees, coconut palms. Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks’.
He couldn’t have chosen a finer spot to take up fishing, for the 75-mile-wide channel between Key West and Cuba marks the beginning of the Gulf Stream, a warm, swift flowing current. Funnelled up from the Caribbean by the trade wind, this river of warm water can rush through the Straits of Florida at anything up to five knots. This great current then races on up the US coast all the way to Newfoundland before splitting in two, one half flowing down to the African coast and the other racing across to Northern Europe. The meeting places of great bodies of water have always contained multitudes of fish and the Gulf Stream is no exception. Its waters have provided a rich food source since man first began to fish. Hemingway had located himself at one of the great pulsing jugulars of fishing and as the years slipped by this great swirling vein of water was to become his lifeblood. He described it in an article he wrote for the gentleman’s magazine Esquire:
In the first place, the Gulf Stream and the other great ocean currents are the last wild country there is left. Once you are out of sight of land and of other boats you are more alone than you can ever be hunting and the sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats. In a season fishing you will see it oily flat as the becalmed galleons saw it while they drifted to the westward; white capped with a fresh breeze as they saw it running with the trades; and in high rolling blue hills the tops blowing off them like snow.
Truly this was a wonderful playground, but it would not be until 1932, some four years after he first arrived in Florida, that Hemingway would discover the full potential of his position. Prior to this, he had simply messed around, dipping a toe into the mighty stream now and again. But in 1932 he took the plunge. Joe Russell, proprietor of Sloppy Joe’s, one of Hemingway’s favourite bars in Key West, also owned a small fishing launch, the Anita, and the pair decided that they would take this vessel on a two-week fishing trip with a few friends. During the prohibition years, Russell had used the Anita to smuggle vast quantities of illegal alcohol from Cuba into Key West, so he was intimate with the Straits of Florida. He headed the Anita out into
the stream and across to the coast of Cuba where they could fish for some of the monsters of the deep, particularly Marlin. Hemingway was rapidly hooked (pun intended). Two weeks turned into two months and still the writer was entranced. Days fishing in the stream were followed by wild nights out in the magical old city of Havana, where there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air. The daiquiris and mojitos flowed, the streets throbbed to the rhythm of the rumba and Hemingway revelled in it all. He wrote of this time with great enthusiasm:
We fished along that coast for 65 days… It is wonderful. The Gulf Stream runs almost black and comes right in to the shore. The marlin swordfish go by, swimming up the stream like cars on a highway. You go in to shore on a boat and look down to see the wrinkles in the white sand through the clear water. It looks as though you would strike bottom. They have beaches miles and miles long, hard white sand and no houses for twenty miles. We go out in the morning and troll the stream go in to swim and get back somewhere at night. Sometimes sleep on the boat, sometimes on the town.
‘The town’ was one thing, but it is clear that daytime fishing remained the main draw for Hemingway and he pursued the sport with enormous diligence. Quite simply, he wanted to be the best fisherman on the planet, and he studied the art with all the intensity of a man possessed. Although at first he was fairly indiscriminate with what sort of fish he hooked, he soon realised the greatest prize out there was marlin and his love affair with hooking and killing this fish lasted the rest of his life. Marlin is a breed of swordfish, coveted by sport fishermen the world over due to its size, elusiveness, strength and speed. Blue and black Marlin are the most sought-after of the breed, and a female marlin can exceed 450kg (1,000lbs) in weight and can swim at speeds of up to 80km (50mph). To take on such a creature with a rod and line is not something to be sniffed at, and Hemingway loved the physicality of the fight and the satisfaction of showing off your catch at the end of the day. He articulated the excitement of hooking such a beast with great eloquence:
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