Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Not long after the ugliness aboard Pilar, Hemingway, up in his workroom, wrote to Waldo Peirce and said what he said about MacLeish: nose picker, bloody bore, weird combination of senility and puerility. Maybe his bile had something to do with the single page of prose produced that day. Maybe, as others have speculated, he was still nursing a grudge against Archie for declining to go on safari with him. He typed the letter, writing in sentences by hand, and to me it is all a Hemingway Rorschach test. He typed, “It’s too bloody pompous.” He wrote in (does this mean it was entered later?): “I shouldn’t write this. So forget it. But he kept asking for it and asking for it. I only like the people I like. Not the bastards that like me.” He was out of space, so he turned the sheet sideways and wrote in the right-hand margin: “I wouldn’t want to hurt his bloody feelings for anything. So tear this part out and burn it.”

  In the last pages of the manuscript copy of Green Hills, there’s a long meditation about cowardice. Hemingway’s father, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and MacLeish, among others, are in this passage, which was ultimately deleted from the published book. Archie had the most charm of any of his friends, the narrator muses, they’d had wonderful times together, but, you see, “he was really a coward so you were never completely comfortable with him just as he was never completely comfortable with himself.”

  In the late 1950s, the MacLeishes stopped off in Cuba on their way north from a vacation in Antigua to see Mary and Ernest Hemingway. The welcome was so wistful and touching. It was as if Hemingway couldn’t do or say enough.

  And what of “poor Scott,” as Hemingway was ever wont to put him down, once he’d superseded him? On May 28, 1934, two days after the Waldo Peirce letter, Hemingway answered Fitzgerald’s almost pathetic plea of three weeks before regarding Hemingway’s opinion of Tender Is the Night. This is the letter where he reminds Fitzgerald that he’d been too damned stinko for any real conversation when they’d seen each other in New York on the weekend that he’d purchased Pilar.

  Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples’ pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You, who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent that you have to—the hell with it.… Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist.… You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write.… Anyway I’m damned fond of you and I’d like to have a chance to talk sometimes.… We have a fine boat. Am going good on a very long story. Hard one to write. Always your friend Ernest.

  He postscripts: “What about The Sun also and the movies? Any chance?”

  And that very long story he was now going good on, that had crested two hundred manuscript pages? His letters from May to July show his continuing surprise at the way his book seems to want to grow—as if it has its own mind and refuses to be only a “story.” Always, no matter what else is being said, there is the preoccupation with word counts, page counts. Here he is on June 10, writing to his friends Grant and Jane Mason, who live in Havana: “Am on page 100 and think it will run maybe another hundred. Maybe less.” Here he is nine days later, writing to his wife, who’s gone to Arkansas with the children to visit her parents: “Worked hard yest. Am on page 137. Going to write this morning and then go out in the boat this pm.… Sunday went sleepy as hell after getting to sleep on a hot night … to 7 a.m. Mass—then fished in the gulf.… I watered good yest p.m. It hasn’t rained since about 6 or 7 days now.” Here he is, next day, June 20, in a letter to Max Perkins: “Am on page 141 of the mss. (something over 20,000 words of the triply re-written shit-removed mss. so far. Will run another 10,000 it looks.) Am not troubled by the lack of confidence, what will the critics say, general impotence jeebies that seem to be driving the boys to religion.… Get out in the boat in the afternoons when my work is finished and keep my mind off it.” Here he is, the day after that, writing to Gingrich: “Then I’ve been in a damned fine epoch going well on this thing (up to page 147 on the triple re-written shitremoved now and going fine)…. You shouldn’t fish blindly in the ocean any more than in a stream. You can know the damned gulf stream like a trout stream. The holes, the eddies, the shallows are all there. Only you can’t see them.” This is the letter in which he speaks of “loosening,” of getting back “the old 4th dimension,” of becoming a writer yet.

  That loosening: it’s as if an imagination is intermingling salt water with desert, sea with plain, creatures of the deep with creatures of the bush. He’s writing a book about Africa, but with the soundings and color shadings of the Stream. There are phrases and sentences and whole passages that would make you think of Pilar, even though Pilar is nowhere physically present. It’s almost as if he’s summoning Africa every morning through the mnemonic “trick” of getting on his boat and hauling in fish every afternoon. Hemingway was one of the most efficient writers who ever lived—he used everything. Green Hills, like nearly all his work, is about the experience of living your life, and sometimes he’ll state this credo in nearly religious terms.

  I was completely happy. I had been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of getting stronger each day. I was underweight, had a great appetite for meat, and could eat all I wanted without feeling stuffy. Each day I sweated out whatever we drank sitting at the fire at night, and in the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with a breeze in the trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to write, happy in knowing that at four o’clock we would be starting out to hunt again.… The only person I really cared about, except the children, was with me and I had no wish to share this life with any one who was not there, only to live it, being completely happy and quite tired.

  Only to live it. He wrote this passage in the period when he’d humiliated Archie and then attacked him in a letter and then hectored and counseled and lectured Scott in another letter, two days after.

  Three weeks after, on June 21 (the day he writes to Gingrich of his belle epoque and of his general “loosening up”), he completes a six-page burst, concluding with:

  It was cool in the shade, but if you stirred into the sun, or as the sun shifted the shadow while you read so that any part of you was out of the shadow, the sun was heavy. Droopy [one of the trackers] had gone on down the stream to have a look and as we lay there reading, I could smell the heat of the day coming, the drying up of the dew, the heat on the leaves, and the heaviness of the sun over the stream.

  The word “stream” appears twice here. The word will keep finding its way into his text—which can be almost unbearable to read in places: all that macho killing, all that unnecessary ego—but never more mystically than in the greatest Stream sentence in American literature. That sentence, with its 497 diagram-defying words, won’t be about Africa at all, even though it appears in a story about Africa. It’ll get itself onto paper at some point within the first month after the crossing to Havana, when his general progress on the book—because of his nearly nonstop fishing; because of how many people are crowding both his boat and life—has narrowed to a trickle.

  The art of slacking, of holding back before you try to set the hook, is counterintuitive, counterreflexive, which is probably why Hemingway was so damn good at it—in both fishing and literature. This immense thing is coming at you, his back projecting out of the water like a submarine, a submarine with wings, and then he hits it, smashes at the bait, explodes and boils the sea around him, and all you can think to do—against every instruction and mental reminder—is to jerk back on the rod. The most natural impulse in the world. But if you do this, if you sock without first trying to slack, almost certainly you’ll lose the fish—and maybe your line as well. You’ll horse the bait right out of his mouth, or, worse, you’ll snap your line like a matchstick.

  There’s so much to remember, in split seconds of timing, and al
l of it’s apt to go out the window at the instant of the thrill and the strike.

  Once the fish has got it in his mouth, but realizes what’s up, what’s off, and has started his run, it’s important to screw down lightly on the drag—but not too much. Too much tension drag on the reel and it’s over. The line won’t bear it.

  Sometimes the immense thing will only be rolling and lolling the bait around inside that cavernous gullet, gumming it, finning slowly away, as if trying to know whether there’s something a little bit off here, as if trying to decide, even as the taste of the meat is quite satisfactory, whether there’s another kind of taste mixed in here, something foreign, something hard and bitter, iron-like, although I realize that this will sound far-fetched to a nonfisherman. It presupposes that something as dumb as a fish could reason, could know what alloys of metal taste like. Yet it has often seemed that way to me, when I’ve got a rainbow trout tethered to the other end of my fly line, but not yet firmly hooked, and his intelligence is about to outshine mine once more.

  Sometimes a rainbow will just instantly spit out the fly, knowing it’s a fake, an imitation, and then there’s nothing you can do but reel in, and start your hopes over, start your loops over, arcing your line back and forth across the stream.

  “One Trip Across” could be read almost as much for its marlin instructions as for its taut drama: “If you don’t give them line when they hook up like that they break it. There isn’t any line will hold them. When they want it you’ve got to give it to them.… What we have to do is use the boat to chase them so they don’t take it all when they make their run. After they make their run they’ll sound and you can tighten up the drag and get it back.” If you could remember that, you’d likely have your fish.

  At an earlier point in the tale, Harry Morgan is providing more instruction to his wealthy and ignorant and thieving client, whose name is Johnson, and who has booked Harry’s charter boat for the day. Harry’s at the wheel.

  He put on his belt and his harness and put out the big rod with the Hardy reel with six hundred yards of thirty-six thread. I looked back and his bait was trolling nice, just bouncing along on the swell and the two teasers were diving and jumping.… “Keep the rod butt in the socket on the chair,” I told him. “Then the rod won’t be as heavy. Keep the drag off so you can slack to him when he hits. If one ever hits with the drag on he’ll jerk you overboard.”

  But Johnson doesn’t keep the drag off—he screws it down too tight. And he takes the rod out of the chair socket. And he gets out of his leather harness and foolishly places the rod across his knees because he’s grown tired of holding it steady in an upright position in the socket. A few minutes later, when the fish hits, Harry sees Johnson “rise up in the air off the chair as though he was being derricked.”

  The finest fishing passage from the story may be this:

  Then I saw a splash like a depth bomb and the sword and eye and open lower jaw and huge purple-black head of a black marlin. The whole top fin was up out of water looking as high as a full-rigged ship, and the whole scythe tail was out.… The bill was as big around as a baseball bat and he slanted up, and as he grabbed the bait he sliced the ocean wide open. He was solid purple-black and he had an eye as big as a soup bowl.

  To try to land the thousand-pounder of your saltwater dreams, you sit in a ladder-back swivel chair with your feet braced against footrests and with somebody pouring ice water on your wrists and with your shoulders encased in a leather harness that almost looks like something from an electric chair. (The straps of the harness, which goes around your shoulders, are buckled to the sides of the giant reel. A lot of the weight is thus directed to your shoulders and back and legs. This takes the pressure off your arms. The bolted-down chair is supporting the weight of the rod, which is in the socket, sometimes referred to by fishermen as the “gimble socket,” or just the “gimble.” You see that expression in Hemingway. The word is said to be a corruption of “gimbal,” which in nautical terms refers to a device that allows an object—such as a ship’s compass, mounted in or on it—to remain suspended in a horizontal plane. A gimble socket on a fishing chair is just an iron cavity built into the middle of the seat.)

  In almost forty years of wedging fast, pure water in many beautiful mountain places in obsessive search of rainbows and browns and brookies and cutthroats, I’ve probably landed and released (most of the time) several thousand trout in the ten-inch and half-pound range—and I’ve lost, in the same period, probably five times, ten times, twenty times that many fish. Why? Well, for many reasons, but not least because I came back too fast. Because I tried to implant the hook before I’d sufficiently slacked. All my experience and self-reminding as I stepped into the stream couldn’t stop me at the instant of the hit and thrill from jerking backward. The fragile thing came darting out of the shadows of some gorgeous pool, striking the little blow-away wad of hackle and glue affixed to the end of my two-ounce Sage graphite rod and Orvis reel and tapered, lime-colored, weight-forward, high-floating line. And what did I do? I reflexively pumped, jerked, socked. I hauled the fly right out of his mouth.

  When you’ve actually had him on the hook and have been fighting him for a minute or two or five; have been edging him, in between his various deep runs and spray-filmed leaps, ever closer to your net, and he then suddenly gets off, wriggles free, is gone, disappeared, vanished, well, the loss feels monumental. You want to go bawling and trembling in your waders to the closest boulder to sit down and try to get your life back—or I do. Damn, you lost him. Oh, you would have set him free anyway. But he beat you. Again. On bad winter days, when I’m up to my knees in the trout pools of memory, I usually wind up thinking—even laughing—about all the times I have failed at this wretched and exquisite sport, which, like writing, you could work at for the rest of your life and never come close to mastering.

  “One Trip Across” is both a taut story and a marvelous instruction manual—and yet perhaps surpassed by Hemingway’s account of David Hudson’s six-hour losing battle with the giant broadbill swordfish in Islands in the Stream. David is transparently Ernest Hemingway’s middle son, Patrick.

  Davy’s broadbill battle goes on for pages. It’s in the “Bimini” section, which opens that wobbly-connected, three-part, autobiographical, posthumous novel. The account of the battle is almost breathtaking for its tension and utter fishing authenticity, not the least of which is the prayer of a ten-year-old once he knows the living thing is on the other end of his line.

  “Hit him now, Dave, and really hit him,” says Roger Davis, who, as I have already noted, is partly Hemingway, just as the novel’s central character, Thomas Hudson—Davy’s father—is even more unambiguously Hemingway.

  “ ‘Do you think he’s had it long enough?’ David asked. ‘You don’t think he’s just carrying it in his mouth and swimming with it?’ ”

  “ ‘I think you better hit him before he spits it out.’ ”

  The boy’s father, narrating the fight, says: “David braced his feet, tightened the drag well down with his right hand, and struck back hard against the great weight. He struck again and again bending the rod like a bow. The line moved out steadily. He had made no impression on the fish.

  “ ‘Hit him again, Dave,’ Roger said. ‘Really put it into him.’ ”

  Davy does. Then, “ ‘Oh God,’ he said devoutly. ‘I think I’ve got it into him.’ ”

  And three paragraphs later: “ ‘I’m wonderful, papa,’ Dave said. ‘Oh God, if I can catch this fish.’ ”

  CATCHING FISH

  At a café off the Prado, July 21, 1934, Ernest’s birthday

  SO THEY’RE IN CUBA.

  The quarantine people have come and gone. The immigration officers, in their casually insolent way, have opened a few lockers and poked in a few drawers. Had they been more intent, they might have found the 12-gauge pump, and the 1903 Austrian Mannlicher Schoenauer hunting rifle, and the Colt Woodsman automatic revolver with its extra-long barrel, all of which, w
ith their rounds, were hidden in sheepskin cases under the bunk mattresses, saturated with Fiend oil so the salt air wouldn’t rust them. When the doctor left the boat and the yellow flag was hauled down, Carlos Gutiérrez, waiting in a dinghy with “Bumby” painted on the bow, clad in his spanking white sailor suit with “Pilar” stitched on the breast, oared up alongside. The owner went ashore to send a cable to his wife and to hunt with Carlos for a mechanic for the busted water pump, while the Mice kept watch over the boat and looked across in the middle distance at “the dark faces and white suits of Cubans riding past the gray apartment buildings in small street cars and open automobiles on the waterfront boulevard.”