Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  On August 12, 1982, thirty-one days before his suicide, Les Hemingway mailed a mimeographed letter to his subscribers. It seems so characteristic of what he must have wished to project to the world. “Dear Friend and Subscriber. I’ve been hospitalized four times in the past five months. Three serious leg operations, two in the last 40 days. Now I can no longer drive a car, or go in a boat or airplane. So the Bimini News is having to suspend publication. Am sorry, but this is life. Cheers, Les.”

  In the months after the funeral, Les’s family helped put together a memorial edition of his best-selling 1962 book about his brother, which had made Les a semi-wealthy man, at least for a time. In the appendix of the 1982 commemorative edition, Jack Hemingway wrote:

  He was a fine writer who was forced into the ring too early against a tough pro and made to suffer the inevitable comparisons. He and his brother came out of the same nest and both had fine qualities as human beings. Somewhere along the line, success and other things killed a lot of the finest qualities in Papa. Leicester remained unspoiled.

  One of Les’s daughters, Anne E. J. Hemingway Feurer, wrote:

  After the first few operations last Spring, he periodically lost sight of his reasons for living. He was extremely irritable, but this allowed me to see through his cheerful shell, and I was finally able to talk seriously with him a few times before he died. The thing he wanted least in life to do was to commit suicide. He hated the idea that the world could corner him into that choice—of dying slowly, without dignity, while medicine tried futilely to repair him. He made his choice at the end of a very hot August, becoming cheerful, and eagerly participating in discussions for another week and a half.

  The cover and inside flap of the commemorative edition of My Brother, Ernest Hemingway narrate so much of Les’s story. In the jacket photograph, Les, in his late twenties, is looking eagerly at his brother, who’s now in his forties, and who isn’t looking at Les, but at the camera. They’re on a sailboat. It’s as if all Les desires, still desires, is approval. On the inside flap is an author’s picture of Les, now in late-middle age, in full Papa mock-up, hunched at a typewriter, hunting and pecking. It’s a mimic of the celebrated photograph of Hemingway on the jacket of For Whom the Bell Tolls. That picture, which took up the entire back cover, was shot in a hotel room at Sun Valley in December 1939. There he is, the real thing, sleeves rolled, hair licked down, one-day growth of black whiskers, the thick hairy arms, the laser concentration, hunting and pecking on his portable.

  Hemingway refused to allow Les to publish My Brother, Ernest Hemingway while he was alive. Les had been working on the book in semi-secret for five or six years before the Boss shotgun went off in Ketchum. After a time, Les let his brother know he was writing it. There’s a 1959 exchange of letters between them in which Hemingway says:

  As of today I forbid absolutely any such publication. If you are short of dough let me know by return mail.… Sorry to be so stuffy and formal about something in the family but privacy is more limited each day and I want to keep what I have and it is damned little as it is and if your brother starts invading it things could be, should we say, semi-intolerable and I was never one to refuse to put in the counter attack when it is called for.

  Six months after Hemingway was dead, there was Les, back in the limelight, entertaining the New York press about his just-published work.

  I remember something he said during that weekend on Bimini, a line so seemingly right about Ernest Hemingway: “He loved everything up to a certain point, and then nothing was any good any more.” Les stole the line from himself. The sentence is on page 169 of his book. He was writing of a spring Sunday in 1934 when they’d been out on Pilar, off Key West, in all her newness, and had caught eight dolphinfish, nine bonito, some barracuda. They’d had seven sailfish strikes. It just wasn’t enough.

  ON BEING SHOT AGAIN

  Ernest with his sons, Bimini, July 20, 1935

  But now am cured, I think, and want to wash myself out clean with the Gulf and the best soap I know—which is excitement or whatever you call it.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, in a letter,

  two days before setting out for Bimini

  … head her across the stream toward a new place where we’ve never been.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Esquire, May 1935

  IN ISLANDS IN THE STREAM—that botch of a sometimes beautiful book that Ernest Hemingway took up in the fall of 1945, about seven months after returning from World War II—he speaks of raising Bimini out of the sea. He means from the helm of his boat. First, you’d see the line of tall casuarina trees. (They’re still there.) Then the house that sat on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the open ocean and the protected harbor. “Then, as you came closer, you raised the whole length of the island with the coconut palms, the clapboarded houses, the white line of the beach, and the green of the South Island stretching beyond it.” That must have been exactly what it was like from Pilar’s wheel: raising Bimini, like a green Lazarus, from limitless sea.

  Even on maps of the Bahamas, never mind of the western Atlantic, it looks almost like an afterthought, like a mistaken daub of cartographer’s ink. Consider: about seven hundred islands and cays and about two thousand rock formations, reaching across one hundred thousand square miles of ocean, from Florida to Haiti, make up the independent archipelago of what’s formally known as the Commonwealth of the Bahamas; depending on how you count, little Bimini is about six of those. It seems to hang out there by itself, about fifty miles on the other side of the Gulf Stream, pretty much a straight shot due east of Miami. It amounts to less than ten square miles of landmass. When you first glimpse it from the air, it looks like a belt of trees sitting in a bottle-green lagoon. Some portions of the main strip of land—North Bimini—are so narrow that you can get across it, harbor side to the ocean side, in less than a minute. Its highest rocky point is about twenty feet above sea level—it seems almost as much part of the sea as of the land. But despite its microscopic size, or maybe partly because of it, the place has long had great allure for yachtsmen and sailors, and even more so for big-game fishermen. Only with mild exaggeration does Bimini like to promote itself as the game-fishing capital of the world. It possesses some of the clearest and most colorful and deep-dropping-off water in the world. You can wade right out into the warm water, on a seven-mile-long bathing beach, but before long, that water can go a half-mile deep, and then deeper. When Hemingway first saw it, he said it felt to him like something out of the South Seas, not that he’d ever been to the South Seas. Even today, Bimini will strike you like that, as if it has cheated time. And it’s so close to the American mainland, closer even than Cuba.*

  Hemingway knew it obsessively, exuberantly, seeming to inhale it whole, for parts of three consecutive fishing seasons, 1935–1937, each stay a little briefer than the previous, and then, for complex reasons, he never saw Bimini again. It was almost as if he used it up, spent it through, in the way he used up and spent through so many other things and places and human beings in his life. He loved everything up to a certain point, and then nothing was any good any more. In 1935, he spent his longest period there, from mid-April to mid-August, and about four weeks of it were in the company of his wife and children, who’d come over to join him after he’d established his Bimini beachhead. It’s curious that we think of Bimini as one of the iconic Hemingway places—and it is, no question—and yet it’s also a fact that he passed only about six and a half months there in total. Which of course only speaks to the way he could powerfully imprint himself. You go to the island now, and it’s his picture on the cover of the island history book, his legend that seems to be bobbing in every boat slip.

  First, though, a semi-famous story about what happened the first time Hemingway tried to take his boat to Bimini (which from Key West was about 230 curving nautical miles to the northeast). Gertrude Stein’s even in the story.

  Roughly twenty miles out into the Stream, on that spring Sunday morning, in a m
oderately choppy sea, he looked down at a mess of blood on both his lower legs and said something like Jesus Christ, I’ll be a dirty sonofabitch, I shot myself. But you couldn’t say this in the pages of Esquire in 1935. And so, in a curious piece titled “On Being Shot Again: A Gulf Stream Letter,” Hemingway wrote of a self-inflicted if not life-endangering pistol wound: “ ‘I’ll be of unsavoury parentage,’ remarked your correspondent. ‘I’m shot.’ ” He wrote the piece very fast, as he did all his Esquire contributions, this one within five days, when he was back home in Key West, in bed, recuperating, licking his wounds in more senses than one.

  It happened on April 7, 1935, about two hours after Pilar had pulled away from the navy yard dock with either five or six adults and two months of canned goods and other survival rations on board. (Also, with some expensive new fishing gear that Hemingway intended to try out, as well as with a newly purchased and nifty-looking thirteen-foot sea skiff he was bringing to Bimini.) It happened near a place called American Shoal, when they were trolling along a heavy and dark current of Stream. It happened right at the tail end of a nasty fight with a shark, as they were trying to get the thrashing beast, with its brown back and milky white belly and fearsome teeth, into the boat. It happened when the greased, hollow-point, soft-nosed, lead bullet from Hemingway’s .22 caliber Colt Woodsman automatic ricocheted off the brass strip that ran along the top of the coaming at Pilar’s stern. The shot, which had gone off involuntarily and whose report no one on board had apparently heard, made a “starry splash” in the metal. From there it caromed into Hemingway’s legs.

  Hemingway had a long and queer history with queer mishaps. They started early in his life and never really let up. It was as if something was always waiting to poke him in the eye or fall from a bathroom skylight in the middle of the night to gash him in the forehead and send him to the hospital for stitches. That freakish accident was in Paris in March 1928; he’d just gotten over a bout with influenza. In London, in World War II, at three in the morning, he’d smash his forehead into the windshield of a car that had rammed into a steel water tank: fifty-seven stitches at St. George’s Hospital. In Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway: A Biography, there’s a three-page appendix of Hemingway’s accidents and illnesses, starting with a stick in the throat in childhood.

  At least once, in the chaotic several seconds before the unheard shot and unseen ricochet, Hemingway had fired into the brainpan of the fish, hoping to kill it. But the shark—which had some new and costly leaders and hooks in its mouth that Hemingway by damn intended to get back—didn’t want to be killed. They’d been trying to bring the animal close enough to the boat so they could gaff it, and so that Hemingway could shoot it again and then club it into senselessness and finally haul it aboard.

  The shark was a galano, or this was Hemingway’s name for it. It was a word he’d picked up in Cuba. Hemingway hated almost all sharks, because they were thieves and cannibalizers of the sporting trophies he was trying to get into his boat. (Soon, on Bimini, he’d be tommy-gunning sharks with a Thompson submachine gun, spattering the waves, turning the foam red, like a mad gangster, trying to keep count of how many he’d killed.) But he seems to have had special venom for galanos, which are known for their shovel-shaped head, large triangular fin, bad odor, and, not least, by the way they’ll go after anything—even the side of your boat, or your rudder—when they’re hungry. Seven times in his Esquire piece Hemingway uses the word, setting it off with italics.

  “Fuck the bastard,” he apparently said, which came out a little too cutely in Arnold Gingrich’s middlebrow men’s magazine as “Fornicate the illegitimate.” He’d said that the first time the galano had popped his line, which was wound around a new reel he’d ordered by mail over the winter from Abercrombie & Fitch at Forty-Fifth and Madison in New York. It was a “Commander Ross” 14/0 Vom Hofe model, and it could hold up to one thousand yards of thirty-nine-thread line, and it weighed nine and a half pounds before the line was on, and its seven-inch side plate was surfaced with a hard vulcanized rubber so that the reel wouldn’t heat up when a big fish began sizzling out the line, and it had cost him $250, not counting the parcel post.

  Big-game reels are measured by the diameter of their side plates. A seven-incher was big.

  Hemingway was counting on it for his coming battles with tuna. All winter he’d daydreamed of giant bluefins off Bimini weighing up to a ton—not that any angler had ever been able to come close to landing such a fish on a rod and reel. But the one-tonners were claimed to exist, were claimed to come highballing along “Tuna Alley” off Bimini each year around the middle of May. How would you land a two-thousand-pound fish? Even if you could get the thing aboard before the sharks got to it, wouldn’t it make a hole the size of a torpedo through the floorboards, or stand your boat on end? But Hemingway had a plan, altogether loony sounding. It had to do with that little sea skiff he was taking along.

  In addition to the Vom Hofe, he’d also bought a seven-inch Zane Grey reel, crafted by the House of Hardy in Great Britain. Its interior parts were made of Monel, “the strongest non-ferrous metal known … guaranteed to be absolutely immune to the action of sea water and air in any part of the world”—that’s from 1935 Hardy Brothers catalog copy. For the last three years, Hemingway had been fishing with Zane Grey reels, and up until now a five-and-a-half-inch Zane Grey and a six-inch Zane Grey were all that he’d really needed. His six-inch marlin reel (it’s the one previously mentioned, pictured on the first page of the prologue of this book) was a beautiful piece of tackle. Its spool spindle was encased in seize-free ball bearings. It weighed seven and three-quarters pounds—without any line.

  Hemingway slacked out another bait on the same line, and goddamn if the illegitimate didn’t pop that one, too. Now the fish had a “length of double line streaming out of his mouth like one whisker on a catfish,” Hemingway wrote in Esquire. It was on the third slack, with yet a third bait on a different line and different equipment, that they’d managed to get the fish close—and he’d managed to get the gaff in, even as he was struggling to keep the line taut against the fish. He was out of his fighting chair, standing nearly atop the shark, holding the hickory-tipped rod as far out from him as he could. And right at what must have been the instant of greatest strain between animal and man and fishing line, with the gaff hanging from its side, with two lengths of popped double line in its whiskered mouth, the fish went into what seemed a convulsing fit of epilepsy. There was this huge cracking sound. The shaft on the gaff splintered, and a piece of it came flying at Hemingway’s right hand. That’s the hand that held the .22.

  All this was happening in several square feet of spraying space at the boat’s stern. It was happening while another fisherman, fishing amidships (Mike Strater, his close friend but also his athletic rival), was battling his own galano. There were sharks in the water in the first place because they’d come after the school of dolphinfish into which Pilar had trolled just a little while earlier. Once the sharks had shown, the dolphins began to flash silver above the waves, terrified at what was freight-training up from below to tear huge chunks from their sides at a single bite. Dolphins are small, toothed whales. There’s something almost innocent, playful, about them. You don’t associate them with the word “savage.” But like almost any blindly attacked thing, they can seem savage in their terror.

  And even before the dolphins had come, there had been the giant green turtle. It had come close to the boat, scudding—to use Hemingway’s word—under the surface. The turtle would make good eating for the trip; they could fillet the meat and salt it down in layers in a keg. They had rigged the harpoon to get the turtle when the dolphins appeared. And after the dolphins, the galanos.

  Up on the overhead of the cockpit, John Dos Passos, who was much more of a Sunday kind of fisherman than a competitive one, was trying to make eight-millimeter black-and-white home movies. He’d been the first one to hook into a twenty-pound dolphin, but once the sharks were at the boat, he handed off
his rod and went for the movie camera. The camera jerked wildly.

  The footage is thrilling, blurring stuff, although only ten seconds of the actual fight have been preserved. You see the fisherman climbing into his leather harness as the battle begins. You see the fish thrashing in the water. You see various hands trying to bring it aboard. You see the fit of epilepsy. Then, suddenly, in the next sequence, Hemingway is back on shore, limping around with his second son, grinning, mugging for the camera, pulling up his striped pajama pant leg to show off his bandaged wounds, clowning with Dos Passos. It’s a couple days later, and he’s in the yard of the big fine house at Key West with all those strutting peacocks and airy verandas. He surely looks like someone overcompensating for a recent humiliation.

  There’s a surprising amount of Hemingway film footage around, from the thirties through the fifties. It brings him back to human scale. It reduces him, so to speak, rescues him from his insupportable myths. Even when he’s doing things that the rest of us wouldn’t try, Hemingway in home movies seems far less of a Hollywood invention, somehow. He seems almost ordinary, somebody who could almost be your show-offy neighbor. Here he is, at the dock that morning as they’re getting set to go. He’s picking up Pauline as if he’s a bridegroom carrying his beloved across a threshold. He’s clowning with a captain’s hat, as if he’s the admiral of the ocean sea. He’s shaking hands with his fishing partners. Hardware-store proprietor Charles Thompson has come down with his wife, Lorine, to say good-bye. Hemingway’s so hungry for the hungry eye of the camera. How very tall he seems in the old thirties footage—somehow you get it on film far more than in the photographs. He looks rangy as a tight end, and there is about his physical movements a likable schoolboy gawkiness, even allowing for the cinematic jumpiness, even allowing for the voracious ego and competitive infighter that lived inside the schoolboy. The old movies will also reveal how radically his looks changed, once they began to change. The internal must have been devouring the external. Somehow, he had turned into an elderly man before he’d even hit sixty, and the transformation from what he looks like on this fine Sunday in 1935 to what he’ll look like by the middle and late fifties seems to have had, once again, very little in-between stage. But such thoughts are too gloomy to linger on when someone, not yet thirty-six years old, is making the world new on a piece of paper.