Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  (The other white hunter whom Hemingway lionized—empurpled might be the better word—in that same Esquire nonfiction piece was Philip Percival, an Englishman and partner of Blixen’s, said to have been an even greater hunter than Blixen, although far less of a Technicolor human being. Blixen’s branch of the business was Tanganyika Guides, Ltd., while Percival, based in Kenya, looked after African Guides, Ltd. Percival, not Blixen, is the guide whom Hemingway chose to employ on his 1933–34 safari. In Green Hills of Africa, Percival appears as Pop. In his youth, Pop had been part of Teddy Roosevelt’s epic 1909 safari to Africa, which had been avidly followed in Chicago newspapers by a TR-worshiping Oak Park ten-year-old. As for the prototype of Robert Wilson in “Francis Macomber,” it’s probably closer to the truth to say that both white hunters, Blix and Pop, as well as other males, were in Hemingway’s mind by the time he’d finished the story in the spring of 1936.)

  If the name has registered, it’s likely not because of Bror, but rather because of the literary genius to whom he’d once been married: Karen Blixen, who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen, and who authored the haunting memoir Out of Africa, published in 1937. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills” is one of the great beginnings in modern literature. Karen was Bror’s Danish cousin. They’d gotten married in 1914, on the eve of war, and gone to Kenya to begin their doomed marriage and hilltop coffee plantation outside Nairobi. Not long into both, the adulterous husband, ever hopeless with money, unable to keep himself from sleeping with Masai women or the spouses of friends, had infected his wife with syphilis. They’d separated in 1921 and a few years later had divorced. In Hollywood’s seven-Oscar 1985 version of the story, Meryl Streep, as Karen, incants Out of Africa’s opening sentence three times in her pitch-perfect Scandinavian voice-over. In old age, the real Karen Blixen is claimed to have said, “If I should wish anything back of my life, it would be to go on safari once again with Bror Blixen.” In author Judith Thurman’s magisterial 1982 biography of Dinesen, Bror is described as a man almost “maddeningly without moods … one of the most durable, congenial, promiscuous, and prodigal creatures who ever lived.”

  No one gets to be durable and promiscuous and prodigal and maddeningly without moods forever. When Bror visited Hemingway’s boat in the company of the third Baroness Blixen (CAN EVA AND SELF VISIT YOU THURSDAY, he had cabled Hemingway on May 6 from Miami), he wasn’t far from fifty, and old-manness was setting in. You can see it in the pictures. By contrast, the newest baroness on his arm was almost twenty years younger. She was the former Eva Dixon (in some accounts, it’s spelled “Dickson”), who had come out to Africa from Sweden a few years before mostly for the purpose of snaring Bror. She is said by her biographers to have been a woman ever out for the main chance, someone who loved causing a sensation, faintly ridiculous in her vanities and coquetries. There is apparently some question as to whether they were ever formally married. Friends of Bror’s are said to have resented the way she seemed to relish dominating him. As things turned out, they would be together for only a handful of years. Three years after she sunned on Hemingway’s boat for most of May 1935, she died in a car crash in India. She was barely thirty-three. By then Eva’s union with Bror seems to have been all but finished.

  In the JFK Presidential Library, there are numerous photographs of her. In her fetching two-piece suit, she primps, flirts, sticks out her tongue, tosses her humidity-frizzed hair. She cuddles up to just-landed fish. Pauline is in some of these photographs. (Her look is quite different: to please her husband, whose hair fetishes are not exactly a secret, she’s become an ash blond, and the once boy-cropped hair is now thick and grown out.) In some of the pictures, Hemingway and Eva are standing shoulder to shoulder, pressed lightly against each other, while Bror stands several feet away, wearing a floppy sun hat and holding a box camera. In some of the pictures, the hirsute Hemingway wears only a pair of smeared shorts (leather belt outside the loops), while Strater, vying for Eva’s attentions, looks positively jacked in his sleeveless white muscle T-shirt. So look again at the picture at the front of this chapter.

  Strater claimed to Carlos Baker (fellow Princetonian) that Hemingway had slept that summer with Eva. Baker interviewed Strater in July 1964, on the third anniversary of Hemingway’s death. He wrote up his notes from the interview—at least some of it—in narrative form, with no direct attribution to Strater, but there’s no question that he was indirectly quoting Strater. Several copies of Baker’s typescript ended up with his Hemingway papers at Princeton. The document contains the following paragraph:

  A few days after arrival at Bimini, a Swedish count and his blond aviatrix wife [she was actually a former rally car driver] reached Bimini (Baron VonBlixen?) and were bunked aboard Pilar. Bred Saunders and Mike Strater slept on deck. The countess was put in forward cubby, and the count on deck above her. Ernest slept in the cabin. It was generally supposed by the deck-sleepers that Ernest and the countess were sleeping together below decks. The blond was a tough adventuress type. Count approached Strater and indicated jealousy of Hemingway.

  In Baker’s published account (page 273 of Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story), the claims are handled differently. The biographer wrote that Hemingway, who had been “carefully excluding” Strater from his conversations with Blixen about Africa, “also seemed resentful when the Baroness showed signs of preferring Strater to himself.”

  Mike Strater lived to be ninety-one. He died in 1987. He’d had several wives and eight children. He had kept on painting, a minor American artist who’d nonetheless been there, at the Café du Dôme and the Select and the Rotonde and Les Deux Magots and La Closerie des Lilas, not just with Hemingway, but with Joyce, Pound, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Picasso, all the rest. Near the end of his life, with only bitterness seeming to be left in his voice for Hemingway, he told an oral biographer named Denis Brian, in an odd, compelling 1988 book titled The True Gen, that “Hem” was the kind of charming bully and artful sadist who sought to get you drunk in a bar and then take you out into the dark and sucker punch you. “We were friends, but he was a goddamned thankless friend,” Strater said. The thankless friend and charming bully had left Strater out of A Moveable Feast, and stuck the fact in his face by mentioning it in his preface.

  As for the baron (who had another eleven years left to him after his stay on Hemingway’s boat): if he was resentful (enraged?) about what Hemingway may have been doing with Eva just a few feet out of his sight, that didn’t keep him from admiring (empurpling?) Hemingway’s fishing prowess in his 1938 autobiography, African Hunter. You could say, in fact, that he did Hemingway one better than Hemingway did him in “Notes on Dangerous Game” in the July 1934 Esquire. Blixen told how on their last day of Bimini fishing, toward the end of May 1935, Hemingway hooked into a monster. Wrote the baron: “With the big, strong Hardy rod quivering under the colossal forces at work on both sides, he slowly began to haul in.… Hemingway toiled at reel and line like a galley-slave at his oar. The sweat stood in drops on his bare back as he strained every muscle to tire out his quarry.” What could it be? It was a hammerhead shark. “There was great disappointment and annoyance on board; when one goes out lion-hunting one is not pleased to get a hyena.”

  Eva struck poses with the shark as it lay dead and white on Pilar’s transom with the gaff still in its jaw. She pretended to be beating it with a club.

  But it wasn’t any possible cuckoldry that effectively finished the Hemingway-Strater friendship. Rather, it was because of something that happened just between the two of them: the “apple-coring” of a huge fish, and Hemingway’s role in that coring, and the lie of omission he afterward told in Esquire. “Apple-cored” is a term fishermen use for a fish that gets eaten nearly whole by the sharks.

  They were out on Pilar one day in middle May when Strater hooked into a trophy black marlin. In forty minutes, he managed to get the fish close to the boat. All hands were trying to get it on board when the first shark or two appeared. T
hat’s when Hemingway took out a tommy gun that he’d recently acquired from another Bimini fisherman and started spraying the water—which only had the effect of bringing packs of sharks to Pilar’s stern. They came for the blood, which at first was the blood of one of their own. Wasn’t Hemingway trying to protect his friend’s fish against those cannibals?

  It took another hour to get the fish in. What got in weighed five hundred pounds. There are a lot of pictures of the fish, and most of its lower half isn’t there. Whole, it might have weighed twice as much. In the July 1935 Esquire, in a piece titled “The President Vanquishes,” Hemingway wrote: “There were two buckets of loose meat that were knocked off when we took him over the roller on the stern that were not weighed. You take a look at him and figure what he would have weighed whole, remember that all the meat gone is solid meat, that a pint of blood weighs little under a pound, and that the part weighing five hundred pounds was hollow.”

  The fish was nearly thirteen feet long (Strater later claimed over fourteen feet), with a sixty-two-inch girth and a forty-eight-inch tail spread. According to Hemingway’s piece, “We hung him up and weighed him and took the pictures and eighteen jigs followed the President around singing a song.” It went like this: “Mr. Strater caught a marlin / Tonight’s the night we got fun / Mr. Strater caught a marlin / One thousand pounds.”

  There’s some memorable writing in “The President Vanquishes,” which purports to be a tribute to Strater’s fishing courage. (In the middle of the fight, Mike’s knee went out.) The opening:

  You write this at three o’clock in the morning lying at anchor outside of Bimini harbor. There is a nearly full moon and you dropped out of the harbor to avoid the sandflies. Everyone is asleep below and almost everyone is snoring and you are writing on top of the house by the light of the riding light. It is almost light enough to write by moonlight. Yes, you can do it; but the penciling shows so gray on the paper that you go back to the riding light. A breeze is coming up from the southwest, and you know that if we get a southwest blow now it will bring the big tuna.

  Midway in the article: “And as he went off jumping high, clean, throwing himself long, slamming, and clear he seemed smaller all the time. But it was because he jumped out nearly four hundred yards of thirty-nine thread and we were looking at him from a long way away.” Hemingway later told Arnold Gingrich that he had just slapped out the piece—fifteen hundred words, apparently most of it from the top of the house in that wan 3:00 a.m. light—and thus had felt a little guilty for collecting his $250 fee. What he didn’t tell Gingrich—or the readers of Esquire—was anything about grabbing the tommy gun at the critical juncture to begin reddening the waters. It was jealous rage that made him do it, or so Strater would always believe. For the rest of his life, he’d nurse this grudge.

  Later that summer, Katy Dos Passos described for Gerald Murphy what it was like with Hemingway and sharks and machine guns on Pilar. (This was in a letter not connected to the Strater incident.) “They come like express trains and hit the fish like a planing mill—shearing off twenty-five pounds at a bite. Ernest shoots them with a machine gun, rrr—but it won’t stop them—It’s terrific to see the bullets ripping into them—the sharks thrashing in blood and foam—the white bellies and fearful jaws—the pale cold eyes—I was really aghast but it’s very exciting.”

  From “The President Vanquishes”: “What we landed of him weighed 500 lbs. and the pictures show what the sharks took.” The pictures also reveal what Hemingway tried to take. You’d swear it must be his fish. He stands in closer than the man who’s caught it. He holds on to the fish while Strater peers over his shoulder. In the photograph accompanying the Esquire piece, Strater and Hemingway are standing on either side of the marlin. Hemingway is reaching up and holding on to a partially eaten fin. He looks at the camera, while Strater, holding his rod, stares across at him with something like an incredulous expression. In Denis Brian’s The True Gen, Strater said that Hemingway “stood in front of me every time the fish was photographed.” Not quite true.

  Strater was in New York when he read the Esquire piece. That September he wrote to Hemingway, who was back in Key West from the summer on Bimini. Strater said that his wife, Maggie, had been operated on for an infected sinus. His weight was down to 194. The kids were good. “You sure did me proud,” he said. So why didn’t he say what he truly felt, which must have been rage? I can only think that the force field of Hemingway’s personality was too great for him to speak up, at least then. But to Carlos Baker, Strater said it unambiguously: Hemingway had helped ruin the largest fish Strater had ever hooked into, and in so doing had ruined something greater, their friendship, if not immediately, soon enough.

  Nearly a quarter century after the Baker interview (in the 1980s) Strater told Brian that, on the night of the big marlin, they’d gone off to Bobby Cash’s bar at the foot of Alice Town, and everyone in the place had insisted on buying him drinks, and he’d gotten loaded, and finally the place emptied out, which is when Hemingway slugged him in the stomach. Strater said, “You’re getting weak, old boy. Can’t you hit any harder than that?” (If you’re dead drunk, how could you remember what you said?) Hemingway had been “tonguing the bottle,” meaning that he’d been only pretending to drink, biding his time until Strater was too far gone to fight back.

  In For Whom the Bell Tolls, published five years afterward, Hemingway, in the voice of Robert Jordan, makes a coded reference to Strater. Jordan is thinking of his friend, Anselmo, whom he has known only in these last four days of his life. “I know him better than I know Charles, than I know Chub, than I know Guy, than I know Mike, and I know them well.” He did know them well. And in Mike’s case, no less than with Archie MacLeish, he also must have known what he had wrecked.

  The Egyptians are said to have provided the earliest written accounts of angling as we know it, that is, something done with a length of thread affixed to a bent piece of metal. That was four thousand years ago. It wasn’t until 1898, at the Tuna Club of Avalon, on Catalina Island off Los Angeles, that the idea of big-game sportfishing, with codes of conduct urging conservation ethics and sporting behavior, arose in America. On June 1 of that year, the Associated Press rifled the news that a naturalist and author and professor named Charles Frederick Holder had landed, by rod and reel, a 183-pound leaping tuna, an event eclipsing “all previous achievements in the line of angling for the big Thoroughbreds of the deep.” Holder (his father had been the first curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York) had done it with a stiff stick that weighed sixteen ounces, with twenty-one-thread line made of linen and a seven-foot leader made of piano wire. The Los Angeles Times said the epitome of angling had just been reached. Dispatches from the Spanish-American War almost took a back seat that day.

  Tuna dreams. The Gulf Stream, tearing with terrific force through the narrow gorge that separates the outer edge of the Bahamas from the east coast of Florida, is said to move more quickly than any other current in all the world’s oceans. It’s apparently the speed, in conjunction with the heat and stunning clarity of the water, that has historically brought the “granders” close to Bimini, not only the tuna, but the big billfish and marlin as well. Tuna, those so-called oceanic bison, passed yearly in the 1920s and 1930s between Florida and Cuba, but off the northern shore of Cuba they tended to stay deep and were impossible to see. By the time they got up near Bimini, they often swam in close to shore. You could target them. They were like dark torpedo shapes, sometimes in less than a hundred feet of water. For about five weeks every year, starting in middle or late May, the bluefin came in pods past Bimini, on their migration toward the colder waters of New Jersey and Nova Scotia. But no one had been able to boat a tuna—of any size—in those warm southern waters without first witnessing its mutilation by the sharks. No one had been able to boat one, that is, until Hemingway. The standard angling histories are agreed: he’s the first known angler to have ever gotten one in whole, clean, at Bimini.

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nbsp; Tuna dreams. Since at least the early twenties, Bimini had been on big-game maps. Recognized names in the sport, like Van Campen Heilner or George Albert Lyon (an inventor out of Detroit—he had something to do with perfecting the automobile bumper), had discovered the island. Zane Grey had fished there. But it wasn’t until the thirties that numbers of fishermen and their boats and their guides began converging on Bimini. For a few years, in the middle of the decade, when much of the country was just trying to keep bread on its table, this slice of colonial earth, which you could fairly hurl a rock across, became the epicenter of big-game angling of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Again, it’s no wonder that Hemingway, with his sixth sense for locating himself, channeled his boat to the right symbolic place.

  In February 1933, a Bimini angler with an international reputation, S. Kip Farrington, had taken a small blue marlin of 155 pounds. But the news went around: if the small marlins were there, the big ones must be as well. Two weeks later, a female angler, Betty Moore, had hooked and fought a 502-pound blue for four hours at Bimini. (When her arms gave out, another fisherman took over and got it on board, so it was a co-catching and not a pure record.) Bimini was officially the newest it place in a very small club. Historians say that there were possibly no more than seventy-five or one hundred truly superior fishermen and guides and charter captains on both coasts of America.