Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  In 1934, a room at the Ambos Mundos cost Hemingway two dollars a day. The hotel boasted one hundred rooms—with one hundred baths.

  On one side of 511 there are three floor-to-ceiling windows with white louvered shutters opening onto a balcony. The bed, low to the floor, is in an alcove, giving it a protected feeling. There’s an old hulking black phone in the room and also a black typewriter on a wooden desk. In the carriage of the typewriter is a blank page. On a wall is a framed photocopy of the purchase order for Pilar. Hemingway couldn’t glimpse his boat from his balcony, but he must have been happy knowing she was down there, waiting for what big fish and fight the next day might bring.

  He once described room 511 in Esquire.

  The rooms on the northeast corner of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana look out, to the north, over the old cathedral, the entrance to the harbor, and the sea, and to the east to Casablanca peninsula, the roofs of all houses in between and the width of the harbor.… You look out the north window past the Morro and see that the smooth morning sheen is rippling over and you know the trade wind is coming up early. You take a shower, pull on an old pair of khaki pants and a shirt, take the pair of moccasins that are dry, put the other pair in the window so they will be dry next night, walk to the elevator, ride down, get a paper at the desk, walk across the corner to the café and have breakfast.

  The elevator he speaks of is still operating—a 1926 Otis, with a black wire cage.

  Sitting in the Plaza de Armas, on one of the smooth slabs on the south side of the square, resting your back against the iron grillwork, you can look to your left, up Calle Obispo, and make out the entryway to the Ambos Mundos. And if you turn your head in the other direction and crane your neck, you can catch the sun’s glare glinting off the harbor between the buildings. You can feel yourself, with some imagination, secretly and privately suspended between the San Francisco wharf, where Pilar slept, and the room where her owner slept and where pages of Green Hills of Africa got shined like stones.

  So imagine him, on mornings he didn’t go out in the boat, on the fifth floor, behind the white balcony, the windows open, the curtains billowing inward, after having read the papers, after a glass of Vichy water and maybe a tumbler of cold milk and a piece of hard Cuban bread, seated now in a straight-backed chair, working in longhand, the intense concentration, advancing the book he’d begun back in his Key West workroom, right after getting home from Africa. By the time he came over to Cuba in the third week of July, he was three months into it and had more than two hundred manuscript pages. In the beginning he hadn’t even known it was a book—perhaps only a long short story. The original sheets of the 491-page handwritten manuscript of Green Hills—the copy that Hemingway gave over to a typist in late 1934—are preserved in a maroon-colored, acid-free slipcase in a belowground room in a special collections library at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It’s thrilling to untie the ribbon and lift out the first sheet and peer at the several strike-throughs and one circled insertion of his simple, declarative, action-starting, opening sentence: “We were sitting in the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs and branches at the edge of the salt lick when we heard the truck coming.”

  Could he have anticipated the degree to which some writers and critics in New York and elsewhere would be lying in wait for this book? Maybe, for he called them—in the book itself—“angleworms.” He said that critics were the lice crawling on literature. The following year, fall of ’35, he’d go up to Manhattan for the book’s launch, only to slink back home in rage when it was clear the reviews were starting to turn against him—the “black ass,” Hemingway used to call these rages, which could last for weeks, cause stark-awake insomnia, prompt not just new expressions but seeming promises, guarantees, of self-destruction.

  HOME

  Key West, 1934 or 1935

  THE NEXT DAY he was writing—at least letters, which had always tuned him up, cooled him down. His writing studio was directly behind the main house, and its second floor was reached via a curved iron stairway. It didn’t have its catwalk built yet, which, when finished, would run right off the master bedroom.

  The house (Uncle Gus Pfeiffer had bought it for Pauline and her husband for $8,000) was one of the grandest in Key West—two-storied, Spanish Colonial, set back from the street, on not quite an acre of ground. It had been built in 1851 from white pine brought in from Georgia and also from coral rocks quarried right on the premises. The house had wide, wraparound verandas, with iron railings on the second floor, giving it a touch of New Orleans. Each side of the house featured four arched windows, with hurricane shutters, and these symmetrical windows were so tall that they were like doors in and of themselves.

  Pauline must have been somewhere about. And great-bosomed Isabelle, the cook, and Jimmy, the yardman, and Lewis, who brought whiskeys when the writing was done. At times there were as many as five servants for the four people residing in this house.

  Shading the grounds were weeping figs, African tulips, royal poinciana, and an aged sapodilla tree. Not quite two and a half years before, during the move-in, on a December afternoon, the head of the house had taken a spade and planted coconut trees.

  “Dear Mr. G.,” Hemingway began to Arnold Gingrich on the twelfth, while his townsmen were reading about him on the front page of the Citizen. Immediately, he took up the matter of the $3,000 loan/advance. He typed the letter, apparently fast, with his usual erratic spacing (going to single to double and back to single), and occasional uncorrected misspelling, and made-up words, and abrupt shifts of thought. “As I understand it you want to be covered in case I bump off without writing ten articles without a raise in price on same. O.K. If I bump off (which gord forbid) owing you money my wife will pay you what is due.” In the seventh paragraph: “I saw Balmer in N.Y. The little skiff is costing 7 G without putting anything in that I really want or any bloody luxuries. But is going to have eveything a fishing machine needs. You better come down sometime this summer and get some use out of it.” Two paragraphs from the close: “Never had a better time in my life than in Africa, never felt in better shape in spite of that damned amoebic recurring all the time, and feel so bloody removed from all that literary crap that was getting on my nerves.”

  The following day, April 13, his second full day back, he wrote a penny postcard to a young fiction writer just out of college named Prudencio de Pereda, who’d been born in Brooklyn, but whose Spanish ancestry traced back to an Old Castilian family. The two hadn’t met yet (they’d meet in Spain, several years hence, during the Spanish Civil War, and would collaborate on two important film projects), but de Pereda was hoping that Hemingway might agree to look at some of his work. The postcard writer crammed in the words in a small, neat hand, finishing in the margins. He invited de Pereda down to Key West, suggesting alternatively that they might meet in New York in the fall. “[A]bout looking at stuff I can read it and talk to you about it better than I can write letters as am working like hell and with the best intentions in the world to write a letter always end by not doing it. The only thing, anyway, is to keep on working. If the stuff is good it always comes through.”

  “Am working like hell” suggests Hemingway was already sweating out, or his subconscious was, the first scenes and sentences of what would turn out to be his next book-length work. Maybe sentences or fragments of sentences had already been written, at least in his head, back there somewhere, in Africa, or on the boat coming home, or in that long weekend in New York.

  Within four days of arriving home, possibly even before that, he was back out on the Stream. In the way that it must have felt so good to reclaim the old morning rhythms in the room above the garage, it must also have felt so good for a lifelong fisherman to reclaim the afternoon rhythms of home waters. Once again, we can be grateful for the density of his documentary detail:

  “April 15,” he wrote, under Date, in his fishing log. “Boca grande, Turtle Channel,” he wrote under Waters. “5 grouper—2 mutto
n fish—1 mackerel, 1 Jack—1 Barracuda,” he wrote under Catch.

  He made notes of the weather conditions, and listed the names of the people in his fishing party. (John Dos Passos and his wife, Katy, who were renting a large “conch” house at 1401 Pine Street in Key West, were on board on the fifteenth, and so were Pauline, Sara Murphy, and Archibald MacLeish’s wife, Ada.) Since Hemingway didn’t yet have his own boat, he was enlisting, as he’d done numerous times in the past few years, the boat of his friend Bra Saunders, a lean, leathery, white Bahamian from Green Turtle Cay. Bra knew all the fishing grounds from Bimini to Key West and out to the Tortugas.

  “April 17,” the fisherman wrote in the log, “gave Bra 6.00 for gas.”

  Hemingway doesn’t note what fishing tackle he was using, but it can be safely assumed that one of the rods and one of the reels he’d reclaimed from storage was his six-inch “Zane Grey” Hardy nickel-plated reel and his No. 5 Hardy hickory rod with the twenty-ounce tip. It was one of his favorite rigs—fast, not too heavy, able to handle very large fish but good enough for medium-size ones as well. Whether you’re angling for rainbows in freestone mountain streams or for big game in the Atlantic, a fishing rod has to be sized to its reel, and the same goes for the line, or “thread”—all three components must work together in their improbable, fragile way if they’re going to succeed against something so wild and alive and furious at being fooled.

  If you turn back to the first page of the prologue to this book, you’ll be able to see a portion of the No. 5 Hardy rod and the Zane Grey six-inch reel, with the heavy line going through the first guide. Hardy fishing tackle, crafted in Alnwick, England, was generally regarded as the finest in the business, outfitting serious sportsmen since 1879. This stubby well-wrapped rod was a little under seven feet in length, and Hemingway probably got it at Abercrombie & Fitch in New York City or by mail order from England. We know from his writings in Esquire and other places that Hemingway liked using this particular big-game rig when going for marlin off Cuba, and that he often fished it with a trolled cero mackerel bait, on a 12/0 Pflueger swordfish hook and a No. 13 piano-wire leader, with five hundred yards of No. 39 thread. He was inclined to put such technical information into journalistic pieces written for general audiences. Even in his fiction he’ll work into the plot his proven method, say, of how to affix live bait to the hook so that it won’t come off. This, on baiting up, from “One Trip Across,” a tale about fishing and murder and smuggling and Cuba, just out in Cosmopolitan magazine, earning him his biggest paycheck to date for a short story: “The nigger came on board with the bait and we cast off and started out of the harbor, the nigger fixing on a couple of mackerel; passing the hook through their mouth, out the gills, slitting the side and then putting the hook through the other side and out, trying the mouth shut on the wire leader and tying the hook good so it couldn’t slip and so that bait would troll smooth without spinning.”

  Maybe it was a reporter’s instinct to include such lore, maybe it was damnable perversity, maybe it was an inability to resist showing off to other anglers what he knew. Perhaps he thought to himself: If I bore the ass off of nonfishermen, so what? Real fishermen will appreciate the piece more. The editor of Esquire (himself a serious fisherman, as already noted) may not have liked the inclusion of technical details in Hemingway’s hunting and fishing letters, but, as we know, Gingrich had promised not to tamper with the copy. (In the letter mailed to New York in which he’d enclosed the $3,000, Gingrich had made sure to tell Hemingway of having cut an upcoming Theodore Dreiser story by one-third—and battling with Dreiser about it, and to boot paying him $50 less than he was paying the uncuttable Hemingway.)

  A man both happily and not happily back home, at 907 Whitehead Street in Key West, did this, did that, over the next four weeks, while awaiting the arrival of his new boat, while seeking the storytelling channel of his new book. (On that—Hemingway wrote to Max Perkins on April 30: “Am going well but it is hard going. Have 20 good pages now on a story and 30 bad ones discarded. Some are certainly easier to write than others.”) Then, on May 9, in the Citizen, page 4, there was this in the Personal Mention column: “Ernest Hemingway left on the afternoon train yesterday and will return to Key West in a launch which he will use for fishing and recreation.” Of such small notices are momentous occasions sometimes made.

  Just as he was leaving, his nineteen-year-old kid brother, Leicester, known to Hemingway as the Baron, arrived in town with a companion on a homemade sloop. Les Hemingway of Oak Park and Al Dudek of Petoskey, Michigan, had spent the winter in Mobile, Alabama, building a top-heavy sailboat named Hawkshaw. The plan was to stop over in Key West for a few weeks, visiting the sibling Les Hemingway barely knew (the two were almost sixteen years apart, and Hemingway was essentially gone from Oak Park when the Baron was still in short pants), and then to work their way down the coast of South America. Early in April, they had started out across the Gulf of Mexico with thirty gallons of fresh water and rations for a couple weeks and also with a one-cylinder backup motor. The Florida leg was supposed to take about ten days in their rudimentary seventeen-footer, but bad storms came up and for something like a week they were thought to be lost at sea. This made the papers. They got within forty miles of Key West before turning back. Regrouping, they started out again across the Gulf and this time made it to Fort Myers, Florida, and from there sailed down to the bottom of the Keys, apparently coming through the front gate on Whitehead on May 8 at about the time big brother and his wife were heading out the door. “Our mishaps had been comical and the fact that we had survived on a diet of wormy water and half a potato a day won genuine admiration from Ernest,” remembered the Baron, many years later, in a worshipful, fanciful, factually unreliable, but nonetheless engaging and surprisingly well-written biography-memoir titled My Brother, Ernest Hemingway. The book came out within months of the suicide, its lock on best-seller lists assured. I once met Les Hemingway, a hearty and likable and generous and essentially sad man, wreathed in his great Hemingway beard and stomach. We spent part of a weekend together. The meeting was entirely by chance, on the island of Bimini, a few years before the Baron, like the sibling he idolized and never quite got enough back from, shot himself with a borrowed pistol.

  In Miami, on the morning of the ninth, Hemingway met his boat and the Wheeler representative who’d accompanied Pilar south on a steamer. Two days later, Pilar strutted into her new home port for the first time, a vision of fresh paint and gleaming varnish. They came down via the old Hawk Channel, with Captain Bra doing most of the piloting through the markers, but with the new owner getting his hand on the wheel, too.

  Assembled that afternoon on the docks at the largely deactivated Key West Navy Yard was another small crowd of waving and horn-tooting friends and family, including the Baron, Pauline, and the two children. (She, or her husband, had apparently decided it was best not to be part of the tryout trip, and so she’d returned home by land.) The Citizen wasn’t there to cover this Hemingway arrival (or at least there wasn’t a story in the paper the next day), nor was there a jazz band. The boat herself was the jazz.

  The next day he paid off the balance of $4,495. Inked across the typed bill of sale was the signature of the boatyard official who’d helped out on the shakedown cruise and was now handing over Pilar to her owner before heading back to Brooklyn by rail: “Rec. May 12. Rep. Charles Johnson. Wheeler Shipyard Inc.” Hemingway had his boat.

  Over the next few weeks would come uncounted hours of fishing and cruising and picnicking on the open water aboard what must have seemed the shiniest prize in town—at Cosgrove shoal, out at the Western Dry Rocks, in the kingfish flats above Little Sand Key. Many guests would be invited aboard. Many noses would get coated with the zinc oil and end up getting sun-cracked anyway. Many cases of beer would bead with sweat against diamonds of melting ice kept in the shade of the cockpit or down in the galley. The trays of deviled eggs, the hampers of baked chicken, the stacks of fried yellowtail sandwiches
slathered with mayo and onions (kept fresh in double thicknesses of wax paper) would get consumed by the ravenous salt-air eaters, trying to balance paper plates in their laps while sitting in wicker chairs on the afterdeck or on the long cushioned seats on either side of the cockpit. (The afterdeck chairs, brought from home as makeshift fishing chairs, slid their occupants all over the afterdeck as the boat bucked the swells.)

  “Mr. H. is like a wild thing with his boat,” Pauline will say in a letter to Sara Murphy on May 17, when Pilar has been in his possession for eight days. “I see him at ten minute intervals, hours apart and from notes on doors saying why he cant get home until 3 instead of 12:30.”

  Six days later, a Jesuit priest, Father McGrath, down from Miami, who has more or less invited himself aboard for an afternoon’s fishing, hooks into a record Atlantic sailfish in a place called the Ten Fathom Bar, about eight miles from Key West. But a dockside angler more than an oceangoing one, the priest can’t land the fish because of bad arthritis in his left arm. So Pilar’s captain takes over and finishes the job, in forty-odd minutes of slacking and pumping the line, until the defeated beauty is gaffed and hauled over the stern by several hands in all its oily slickness. That night, the prize is officially weighed in front of eight witnesses on tested scales at Charles Thompson’s icehouse at the foot of Margaret Street and then sliced open: a female, 119½ pounds in weight; 9 feet, ¾ inches in length. She’s round and thick, thirty-five inches in girth, beautifully proportioned, not slab-sided like the big sails of the Pacific. But the largest sailfish ever known to be caught on a rod and reel in the Atlantic Ocean will have to have an asterisk beside it in record books of the day: hooked by Thomas J. S. McGrath of the Southern Jesuit Mission Band, landed by Ernest Hemingway of Key West. It’s a coclaiming, which really is no claiming at all.