The result was a kind of alcohol-fuelled Caribbean version of Dad’s Army. Gathering together all of his most notorious drinking pals, Hemingway patrolled the stream with great diligence. Pilar was too small to mount proper machine guns, so she was kitted out with a couple of Tommy guns. To augment this armament, his drinks rack on the flying bridge was neatly filled with hand grenades. His crew included a millionaire polo player, a couple of Spanish musicians and an old Catalan sergeant who was a relic from the Spanish Civil War. There was only one professional among them, a marine communications expert named Don Saxon. This unlikely bunch chugged around Cuba apparently waiting for a submarine to surface in front of them. While they waited, they passed their time fishing, drinking and firing grenades at wooden targets roughly hewn into human form and named ‘Hitlers’ by the crew. A log entry at this time gives an insight into the kind of caper they were up to: ‘Left Cabanas at 8:30. Out 6 miles for practice – Win[ston] erratic – Paxtchi same – Fernando N.G. [no good] Win bothered by gas in stomach – Fernando stood ground swell OK. Into Bahia Honda 1 pm.’
The Pilar’s motley crew did get one shot at glory. On 9 December 1942, they sighted a Spanish vessel moving slowly as if for a rendezvous. Peering through the glasses, the crew swore they could see the low outline of a sub approaching her stern. They moved in for the kill, trolling fishing lines in order to look as innocent as possible. Unfortunately, as they headed toward the mysterious craft, they suddenly got a bite, a barracuda, and while they battled to land the fish, the mysterious visitors disappeared. That was the only ‘action’ they were involved in, and in 1943 the Pilar’s orders ran out and the navy refused to renew them. One can only think of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. These activities were constantly lambasted by his wife who – engaged as she was in serious journalism – saw them as ridiculous. Some of the experiences, portrayed in a less ridiculous light, did find its way into Islands in the Stream a series of stories about the sea, which was published posthumously.
Eventually Hemingway did make it to Europe, as a leading reporter on the conflict for Colliers magazine. Many commented on his recklessness in the field, and he was heavily involved in the Normandy invasion. He also personally ‘liberated’ the Ritz Bar in Paris. This story has little to do with Hemingway and the sea, but it’s just too priceless to leave out, recalled as it is by an eyewitness, Lucienne Elmiger:
He entered like a king, and he chased out all the British people who had arrived an hour earlier. He was dressed in khaki, but his shirt was open on his bare chest. He had a leather belt under his big stomach, with his gun beating against his thigh.
Hemingway marched through the lobby and the restaurant, in a shouting match with his foes: ‘I’m the one who is going to occupy the Ritz. We’re the Americans. We’re going to live just like in the good old days.’
He barked at the British in the language of the former German occupiers: ‘Raus, raus [get out, get out]!’
Hemingway’s rivals quickly gave up and fled, and he made a bee-line for the bar where he ordered drinks for the fellow correspondents who had conquered the Ritz with him.
He and Martha Gellhorn divorced shortly after this exploit. Hemingway really needed a bit of care and softness and he settled on Mary Welsh, his fourth and final wife. They returned to the comfort of Cuba, Pilar and the stream and Hemingway retreated back into that horrible, uncomfortable myth of himself, which seemed to make him so miserable. His marital life descended into a sniping match with many ugly scenes and often the only solace Hemingway got was aboard his boat. By now his trustiest and most reliable companion had undergone numerous refits and ridden out many storms, including a full-blown hurricane that had wrought havoc on Havana. This reminiscence from 1949 clearly illustrates the satisfaction Hemingway gained from his fishing trips:
Coming out of the harbour I will be on the flying bridge steering and watching the traffic and the line that is fishing the feather astern. As you go out, seeing friends along the water front your feather jig is fishing all the time. Behind the boulevards are the parks and buildings of old Havana and on the other side you are passing the steep slopes and walls of the fortress of Cabanas, the stone weathered pink and yellow, where most of your friends have been political prisoners at one time or another.
Sometimes you will leave the gray green harbour water and as Pilar’s bows dip into the dark blue water a covey of flying fish will rise from under her bows and you will hear the slithering, silk tearing noise they make when they leave the water.
He also wrote much of his next book, Across the River and into the Trees aboard Pilar. This was released a full decade after For Whom the Bell Tolls and was, by and large, mauled by the critics. Everyone concluded that the author had finally and completely ‘lost it’ – even Hemingway must have seriously pondered the possibility. He seethed – when his rapidly ailing health would allow it – and turned more and more to the bottle. In between bouts of taunting his wife by parading the prostitutes he used in front of her, Hemingway spent his time dreaming of Adriana Ivancich, his beautiful Italian ‘daughter’.
This was the broken, disappointed man who sat down at his writing desk in 1951 and started a new story: ‘He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty four days now without taking a fish.’
Suddenly writing seemed to come to him easily again; the words flowed off the pen and onto the page. All those years out in the stream came to him and through him with such clarity, and the cruelty and beauty and futility of those years were all there in this one short novella. He seemed to shake off the disappointments and begin afresh, and while the style was unquestionably Hemingway, there was a softness, a lack of posture and toughness to his writing. The presence of the young Adriana was to be a key to this burst of inspiration, as he noted to his son, Gregory, in a letter:
God I feel strong and I don’t even need to sleep, but Adriana is so lovely to dream of, and when I wake I’m stronger than the day before. And the words pour out of me. They come so fast I can’t keep up with them and I don’t want to stop, but force myself to, after five hours, because I know I must be getting tired.
So he went on, day after day pounding out this seminal story of the sea. He had carried the idea around in his head since he had first met Carlos Gutierrez back in the early 1930s. Back then, he had even mentioned in passing making a story out of it and recognised that it was important to ‘make a good job of it’. He was doing just that. For the uninitiated, the story centres upon an old fisherman, Santiago, who, although he is hugely experienced, has been out at sea for 84 days without catching a fish. Santiago is based on the fishermen of Cuba, who used to drift for marlin in small, flat-bottomed sailing boats known as cuchuchas. These wooden craft were generally around 18ft long and were sailed out to the fishing grounds off the ports of Cabanas and Santa Cruz del Norte. Once out in the stream, the sails were lowered and the fisherman dropped his lines and lures and drifted gently eastward with the current in search of big fish to sell in the market in Havana. In the book, Santiago hooks into a giant marlin, which dives deep and proceeds to tow his skiff many miles offshore. Following an epic battle, Santiago manages to kill the giant fish, but, unable to bring the creature aboard for fear of swamping his boat, he then has to watch this beautiful creature be consumed by the rapacious sharks, which circle constantly as he sails agonisingly slowly back to the coast. When he reaches shore, half mad with grief and exhaustion, all that is left is the marlin’s head and upper body, his bony spine stripped of its flesh, and its tail fin still attached, hanging forlornly. Just like that giant fish that Mike Strater landed all those years ago in Bimini.
It could be a macho story, but it isn’t. True, Santiago is strong and resolute, ‘A man can be destroyed but never defeated’, Hemingway writes, but he is also a Zen-like figure, at one with the ocean, and this is a story full of empathy and softness. A story that overflows with the belief that man is at one with the sea.
He look
ed across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky and water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew that no man was ever alone on the sea.
Thus, this is a new Hemingway coming through with a distinct lack of ego in the text. In the past, the hero could clearly be identified as Hemingway himself on some level; Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan, all of these tough men had thick strands of his own character on show. Yet Santiago owes little to the easily-identified caricature of Hemingway. Yes, he is a very strong man physically, but there is a softness to him.
He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her … Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man thought of her as feminine and something that gave or withheld great favours.
Ultimately the book is about being at one with the sea, and Hemingway – the veteran of all those years out in the stream – when stripped of his old machismo and ego was able to convey this feeling of being part of something that is bigger than us in a unique way.
In actual fact, the book was meant to be the final chapter of an ambitious ‘sea’ book that Hemingway had been planning to put together for years. Other sections of this book can be found in Islands in the Stream, which was posthumously published after his death. Yet Hemingway immediately saw the potential of The Old Man and the Sea and published it as a standalone piece in 1952. The response was rapturous. All those years of stagnation, self-doubt and critical savagery were washed away on a wave of rave reviews. The old master was back at the top of his game, and the plaudits poured in thick and fast; first came the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, followed by the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Yet the book was a final flourish, and, shortly after its completion there was another hammer blow to his battered psyche. Gregory Hemingway, a son from his second marriage, had developed a penchant for dressing up in women’s clothes. Initially this was merely an embarrassment to his macho father, but in October 1951 he was arrested for entering a ladies toilet in a cinema dressed in drag. Hemingway’s ex-wife Pauline called him to break the news and he hurled abuse at her down the phone. Later that night he received another call to tell him that his ex-wife had died of shock. He blamed his son, but must have known that he too was culpable. It was just another blow upon a bruise and another marker on the path of his seemingly inevitable demise. Between the Old Man and the Sea and the day Hemingway took his own life in 1961, he did not publish any new literature. He was spent, and his physical decline in those last years was alarming – certainly not helped by an extraordinary day out in Africa when he managed to be involved in two serious plane crashes in the space of a few hours. All those decades of hard living caught up with him with a vengeance in his later years. His last fishing trip aboard the Pilar was sometime in the spring of 1960, and shortly afterwards the Cuban revolution prompted the Hemingways to leave the troubled island and settle in a rather drab apartment in Idaho. A few months later he was dead. Meanwhile Pilar still lay at her anchor, awaiting her master’s return. Mary Hemingway ordered that the boat be taken out into the stream and sunk. Thankfully, this did not happen, and the smart little cabin cruiser is still on view, sitting bolt upright on the tennis court of Hemingway’s home, La Finca Vigia in Cuba, which is now a museum.
There is little doubt that Pilar was Hemingway’s sanctuary: the swirling, dark water soothed him through his furies and took him out of the caricature of himself, allowing him the occasional moment of peace. Hemingway himself said that The Old Man and the Sea was the best of him in terms of writing, but it also conveyed the best of him as a person; deep down somewhere in that troubled man there was still something worthwhile and it all surged to the surface as this story flowed onto the written page. After all those years of fighting with himself and everyone else, it was to be the sea, Pilar and the stream that allowed him, at least for a while, to forget what he had become.
Jack London
The call of the sea
Few authors have written with greater abandon about the exhilarating freedom and sheer joy of being at sea than Jack London. To London, the sea was life and being ashore was a suffocating death. In everything he wrote on the subject he strove to convey this notion. This tenet was borne out time and again in London’s own life and, ultimately, in his alcohol-ravaged death at the age of 40, when it seemed that life ashore had finally wrung out the last drop of vitality from his soul.
Jack London was an adventurous man of dash and dare, but he had escaped the grinding poverty of America’s late nineteenth century underclass through the somewhat staid activity of writing literature. By 1903, he was the most successful author in America and devoted three hours of every day to composing new epistles with a skill and fluency that earned him the accolade of being America’s best-paid writer. Yet it is telling that when London was at this peak, he reflected on his achievements and emphatically concluded that all of his literary plaudits meant little compared to those rare moments of total satisfaction derived from carrying out a practical activity with real finesse. As he summed up with his usual bravado: ‘I’d rather win a water-fight in the swimming pool, or remain astride a horse that is trying to get out from under me, than write the great American novel.’ And when he wasn’t winning water fights or riding horses, this attitude generally brought him straight back to that great leveller, the sea. Seafaring and all of the brutish and manly values that used to come with a sailor’s life cut right to the heart of the great paradox that was Jack London. Reflecting on this, when all the world lay at his feet, London wrote the following:
Possibly the proudest achievement of my life, my moment of highest living, occurred when I was seventeen. I was in a three-masted schooner off the coast of Japan. We were in a typhoon. All hands had been on deck most of the night. I was called from my bunk at seven in the morning to take the wheel. Not a stitch of canvas was set. We were running before it under bare poles, yet the schooner fairly tore along. The seas were all of an eighth of a mile apart, and the wind snatched the whitecaps from their summits, filling the air so thick with driving spray that it was impossible to see more than two waves at a time. The schooner was almost unmanageable, rolling her rail under to starboard and to port, veering and yawing anywhere between south-east and south-west, and threatening, when the huge seas lifted under her quarter, to broach to. Had she broached to, she would ultimately have been reported lost with all hands and no tidings.
I took the wheel. The sailing-master watched me for a space. He was afraid of my youth, feared that I lacked the strength and the nerve. But when he saw me successfully wrestle the schooner through several bouts, he went below to breakfast. Fore and aft, all hands were below at breakfast. Had she broached to, not one of them would ever have reached the deck. For forty minutes I stood there alone at the wheel, in my grasp the wildly careering schooner and the lives of twenty-two men. Once we were pooped. I saw it coming, and, half-drowned, with tons of water crushing me, I checked the schooner’s rush to broach to. At the end of the hour, sweating and played out, I was relieved. But I had done it! With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and guided a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of wind and waves.
You only have to read that once to see the sort of life London aspired to as he sat in his comfortable study dictating stories to his wife. His refined existence was a million miles from that visceral, brutal storm off the Japanese coast, yet he clearly pines for that simplicity with every sentence he writes.
Growing up in Oakland, California no doubt gave the aspiring young sailor a head start in these ma
tters, for the town’s heart could be found down on the seedy wharves of this gold rush port. Jack would wander the bustling, vice-ridden streets trying to escape his poverty-stricken home life, and the bustle of ships and the swagger of the tarry old salts seemed to promise a life richer and stranger than his current existence: he wanted a part of it.
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