Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  The first boat, of about half a dozen ultimately, to come into the family at Walloon as their own possession was Marcelline of Windemere. She was a lowly rowboat, around for decades, much loved, with her name handsomely lettered in black on both sides of her white bow. She arrived in the summer of 1900, taking her name from the family’s firstborn, with whom Hemingway was to get famously “twinned” by his mother in dress and haircut and other ways for the first several years of his life. There are many photographs from Hemingway’s first birthday at the lake, July 21, 1900, and Marcelline of Windemere is in them. The birthday boy clambers in and out of the new boat, which is pulled up on shore, its rope anchor tied to a rock. He sits in the bow, two tiny arms holding on to both sides. He’s got on bib overalls and a frilly blouse, and his older sister is dressed identically. He’s the captain of this ship, the name on the boat be damned. Thirty-four years later, there he is, in Key West, the real captain, waving from the cockpit of his own newly arrived motor cruiser, with her name lettered handsomely just below the window out of which he’s leaning.

  (Twinning. If one were trying to make something of something, there would be an entirely different way to think about the word “antecedent,” as it is being employed here. There are photos aplenty, in Oak Park, of Ernest the he-man toddler, kept by his mother in gingham gowns, black patent Mary Janes, girly hats with flowers on them. As for the laden idea of getting “twinned” with his sister, Grace held Marcelline back for a year from entering first grade, so she and her little brother could start together and go side by side up through their senior year of high school.)

  After Marcelline of Windemere came Ursula of Windemere, another rowboat, much loved and long-lasting, named for the second girl (and third-born) in the family. Then came Sunny, named for the fourth-born girl (whose christened name was Madelaine), and after that Carol, named for the last daughter in the family. These second-generation boats were motor launches. Because they were more costly craft, they got stored in the winter months at Ernie Culbertson’s boathouse in the west arm of the lake. (The Hemingways had a small boathouse of their own, although not in the early years.) Sunny arrived in the summer of 1910, when Hemingway turned eleven. She was an eighteen-footer in a dory style, meaning that she had a flat bottom and fairly high sides and a sharp bow. She was powered by a sputtery Gray Marine inboard motor that was perpetually hard to start and leaked rainbows of oil on the surface of the lake, which made the head of the family sputter mild oaths—like “Oh, rats.” Sunny had cushioned seats in her stern and a kind of small cockpit in her middle. She flew a pennant with her name at the bow. She’s Pilar in miniature. When the doctor was piloting her, he sometimes wore what looks in the photographs to be a canvas pith helmet.

  There were usually canoes around, borrowed or owned. When the shiny mail-order red canvas canoe arrived from Old Town, Maine—this was in the summer of 1917—the family nicknamed it Bonita Pescada, their version of the Spanish for “beautiful fish.” That winter the family stored the beautiful fish in Windemere’s living room, protecting it with a bed quilt.

  No sailboats—the Hemingways were rowboaters and canoeists and stinkpotters. Sailing was a different culture. This fits with the link between Hemingway and Pilar and Hemingway and fishing. You could formulate it like this: a sailboat will always be to a motor launch as fly-fishing is to night crawlers.

  It was probably Marcelline of Windemere or Ursula of Windemere that Hemingway was referring to in 1937 when he wrote a bilious letter to his older sister from Bimini. By then, Windemere belonged to him—Grace had deeded him the house and property, which included the family boats. Even though he hadn’t gone to Windemere in years, he wasn’t keen on Marce or her family using the place. Some of his other siblings, okay. Marcelline and her husband and children had their own cottage at Walloon Lake in 1937. We don’t have the precipitating letter from Marcelline that set Hemingway off, only his reply.

  Dear Marce—

  Thanks for your charming letter. Reading it made me slightly sick.…

  The keys to Windemere are in my workroom in Key West. The workroom is locked and I am here at Cat Cay B.W.I. where your letter took ten days to reach me.… If Sunny is not there you may use the row boat but I do not want you to use the house or anything else.… I expressly forbid you to enter or use it in any way except in the matter of using the row boat which you offer to repair and return in good condition in return for this use. If you go into the house for any other purpose, except if you go there as a guest of any of the people that I have given the right to use it, I will regard it as trespass and proceed accordingly. Your always, Ernest.

  Something bitter got said between brother and sister at Ed Hemingway’s funeral in December 1928, but what it was isn’t clear. (It may have centered on the breakup of Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley.) This is: after 1928, Hemingway and Marcelline never saw each other again, although they did communicate, and sometimes warmly, or at least with a surface warmth.

  A year and a half later, in December 1938, Hemingway wrote to his sister and said, “Much love and Merry Christmas. Am awfully sorry I wrote you such a rude and boorish letter about Windemere that time.” The usual pattern of remorse and self-recrimination, which must have set in long before that.

  In 1962, a year after Hemingway’s suicide, Marcelline, just as her kid brother Les, published a book about her family. Like Les, Marcelline had been working on her manuscript in not-quite secret for several years. At the Hemingways: A Family Portrait is a mostly sanitized view of the family epic. On the other hand, it’s more reliable in its chronologies and facts and timelines than My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, even though Les’s book is the far better read. According to Gregory Hemingway, in Papa, his aunt Marcelline, whom he barely knew, was intensely taking notes on the small plane that ferried family members and friends into Sun Valley for Hemingway’s funeral. Gigi, sitting on the plane next to his aunt, had been hoping for some conversation. “She had a serious look on her face, almost evangelical, as if she finally believed that [Ernest] might amount to something,” Gigi wrote. Within two years of her book, Marcelline Hemingway Sanford herself was dead. The doctors said natural causes, but several in the family suspected otherwise. She wasn’t quite sixty-six. Three years later, in the fall of 1966, the third-born Hemingway child, Ursula, whom Hemingway called Ura, and who was probably his favorite sibling, and who was suffering from cancer and depression, took an overdose of drugs at her Hawaii home and stopped her life at age sixty-four. So, formulate it like this. In a Christian midwestern nuclear unit of eight—mother, father, six children—four (and possibly five) of the members would end up dying by their own hand: Clarence, Ernest, Ura, Les, maybe Marce. What flows from the father …

  Antecedents. In time, a child’s watery field of vision widened out from Walloon, and nowhere did it widen for the better, in terms of fishing and fiction, than at the crossroads of Horton Bay. Horton Bay, and more specifically Horton’s Creek, which lies just outside the town, and which is a tiny thing, quite beautiful, quite cold, quite alive with trout, is where Hemingway first learned the thrill of horsing a rainbow trout out of the water and flying it over his head and into the cool green ferns somewhere behind him, with the lovely thing quivering and throbbing and gasping for its breath. Listen:

  When we first fished, as boys, we did not believe in flies. Horton’s Creek, where we fished, was a beautiful, clear, cold stream but so covered with logs and brush that casting was impossible. We used angle worms, looped several of them on the hook with the ends free and dropped this bait under the logs or in any open places in the brush. We used a long cane pole, long enough so you could keep out of sight on the bank and swing the bait on the end of the line out and let it slink into the water. The difficult part was to keep out of sight so not even your shadow fell on the water and swing the bait with the long pole like a pendulum to drop it exactly in the small opening in the dead cedar branches. If it hit the water and the bait rolled with the current under the
log and the trout struck, if they struck instantly, then you swung the long pole back, it bent and you felt the line fighting heavily pulling trout in the water and it seemed you could not move him. Then the unyielding fighting tension broke and the water broke too and as you swung the trout came out and into the air and you felt the flop, flopping of him still fighting in the air as he swung back and onto the bank.

  Sometimes he was back in the swamp and you heard him thumping and crashed toward him to find and hold him still thumping, all his life still moving in your hands before you held him by the tail and whacked him so his head struck against a log or a birch tree trunk. Then he quivered and it was over.…

  That’s from a fragment, unpublished in his lifetime, that Hemingway probably wrote in Paris in the mid-twenties. In this same journalistic piece, he says:

  This way of fishing I learned to look down on and it was not until long afterward that I knew that it is not the duration of a sensation but its intensity that counts. If it is of enough intensity it lasts forever no matter what the actual time was and then I knew why it was that I had loved that fishing so. Because in no other fishing was there ever anything finer than that first sudden strike that you did not see and then the moment when you swung with all your force and nothing gave.

  Yes, he’d grow into a much more sophisticated angler, would put his line in some far streams and oceans, would come to own expensive reels, custom-made rods, hand-tied flies, and deep-sea lures the size of a tennis shoe. But a core part of Ernest Hemingway would always be the five-year-old night-crawler fisherman with the overlong cane pole flying them over his head at Horton’s Creek. The hell with fly-fishing—it was too dainty, too effete. (Which isn’t to say he didn’t get awfully good at it.) The might-against-might tuna theories on Bimini have their font in the cane-pole horsing at Horton’s. Indeed, Horton’s explains so much of the fishing part of him—his addiction to it, the primitive joy he got from it. If the sensation has enough intensity, it’ll last forever.

  But Ed Hemingway gave that, too, it needs be added. In “Fathers and Sons,” the author has Nick Adams meditating on how “someone has to give you your first gun or the opportunity to get it and use it, and you have to live where there is game or fish if you are to learn about them.” Nick “loved to fish and to shoot exactly as much as when he first had gone with his father,” says the narrator. “It was a passion that had never slackened and he was very grateful to his father for bringing him to know about it.”

  Regarding the flying of them into the air over your head: in a long unpublished fragment of a novel—which Hemingway worked on through the fifties but could never finish, and which was posthumously published in The Nick Adams Stories as a lengthy short story titled “The Last Good Country”—Nick Adams says to himself, having just caught a fat trout on worms: “Damn, didn’t he feel like something when I horsed him out though? They can talk all they want about playing them but people that have never horsed them out don’t know what they can make you feel. What if it only lasts that long? It’s the time when there’s no give at all and they start to come and what they do to you on the way up and into the air.”

  There’s a wonderful passage in A Moveable Feast when Hemingway describes going down to the Seine to watch the old Parisians working their long cane poles.

  At the head of the Ile de la Cité below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the water’s edge with fine chestnut trees, huge and spreading, and in the currents and back waters that the Seine made flowing past, there were excellent places to fish.… [T]he fishermen used long, jointed, cane poles but fished with very fine leaders and light gear and quill floats and expertly baited the piece of water that they fished. They always caught some fish, and often they made excellent catches of the dace-like fish that were called goujon. They were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful.

  Toward the end of the passage, the author says, as if trying to get down a truth of his life in eight words, “I could never be lonely along the river.”

  The fine chestnuts are still there, below the Pont Neuf, and the head of the Île de la Cité still comes to a point as sharp as the bow of a ship, and you still go down a stone stairway to get to the little park, and the old fishermen, who might be the great-grandchildren of the ones Hemingway watched and felt himself bonding with, are still there, working their long cane poles, trying, as Hemingway wrote, to take “a few fritures home to their families.”

  Take another look at the photograph at the start of this chapter: The helmet-haired five-year-old at Horton’s with the straw sombrero and comically large wicker creel, clad in his favorite fringed cowboy get-up, is eyeing the lens at an off angle while he waits to swing with all his force. That left hand isn’t holding lightly the stick in front of him. He’s ready. And he’s got that flat-lipped expression, as if to say: Go away, you’re much in my way. This cedar-fallen and hemlock-strewn little stream belongs to me.

  Horton Bay sits on Lake Charlevoix, which is west of Walloon and is a much larger body of water than Walloon. (It’s the third-largest lake in the state and was known in Hemingway’s time as Pine Lake.) Lake Charlevoix drains into Lake Michigan, just as Horton’s Creek flows into Lake Charlevoix. Lake Charlevoix’s color, as opposed to Walloon’s, is deep blue, stunning in its own right. Horton Bay, which is on the lake’s north shore and is the only real “town” between Boyne City and Charlevoix, used to be listed on Michigan maps as “Horton’s Bay.” In his writing Hemingway calls the place “Hortons Bay.” Sometimes he refers to the creek as “Horton’s Creek” and at other times he’ll leave out the apostrophe. No matter how they’re written, town and creek, and no matter how the current locals themselves tend to confuse the issue, both village and stream thread through some of Hemingway’s finest Michigan stories. They are just in his imagination in a way Walloon isn’t. In the Nick Adams story “The End of Something,” Hemingway begins: “In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber.” By the third sentence he has you hooked like a fish. He’s already reached the swing point of the story.

  As a teenager, Hemingway usually got to Horton Bay and its creek by oaring one of the family rowboats across Walloon. He’d tie up on the opposite shore, directly across from Windemere, hide the oars in the weeds, then walk the three miles into town through open fields and along the sandy Sumner Road. By then his family knew a lot about the opposite shore, because, in 1905, a forty-acre farm was being sold at auction for back taxes across the lake, and Grace Hemingway had bought the place with her inheritance. They named it Longfield Farm. A tenant was put on the land to manage things, with Ed paying the bills and earning the right to a third of the crops. But all the Hemingways pitched in to farm the place. To say it mildly, Ed and Grace’s second-born preferred to be fishing in Horton Creek or idling with friends in the village rather than to be digging potatoes or harvesting peaches or cutting alfalfa in twelve-hour workdays out at Longfield. In “Fathers and Sons,” the narrator says: “His father had frost in his beard in cold weather and in hot weather he sweated very much. He liked to work in the sun on the farm because he did not have to and he loved manual work, which Nick did not.” Hemingway spent a lot of his adult life avoiding manual work.

  Horton Bay is where Hemingway met and grew to be fast friends with Bill Smith and his sister Katy (who became the wife of John Dos Passos). Horton Bay is where he married Hadley Richardson at the Methodist church on Saturday afternoon, September 3, 1921. Horton Bay is where a writer in Paris, still an apprentice, placed his bawdily titled 1923 story “Up in Michigan,” which Gertrude Stein famously called inaccrochable, unpublishable, like a painting not to be hung. The story is about a drunken seduction/rape on the rough planking of the dock that reaches out into Lake Charlevoix. That “vulgar, sordid tale” is the way hi
s moralizing sister Marce spoke of it, so many years later, in her family memoir, which was only an echo of her moralizing parents.

  The little hop-across trout stream at Horton Bay, the one flowing fast and sure down into Charlevoix, can be thought of as the primal Hemingway trout stream. The following passage is from the Nick Adams story “Now I Lay Me,” written in 1927, nine years after Hemingway was wounded in the war. Nick is lying in his Milan hospital bed. He can’t sleep. Just the thought of closing his eyes in the dark fills him with terror. In his waking nightmare, the blown-up man tries to comfort himself with the memory of boyhood trout streams. Hemingway doesn’t name Horton’s but he’s at Horton’s Creek, all right. We know this because he talks about the mouth of the creek; where it comes into the lake is where Hemingway always found some of his best fishing.

  I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a boy and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching trout and sometimes losing them.… I would fish the stream over again, starting where it emptied into the lake and fishing back up stream, trying for all the trout I had missed coming down. Some nights too I made up streams, and some of them were very exciting, and it was like being awake and dreaming.… But some nights I could not fish, and on those nights I was cold-awake and said my prayers over and over and tried to pray for all the people I had ever known.… If you prayed for all of them, saying a Hail Mary and an Our Father for each one, it took a long time and finally it would be light, and then you could go to sleep, if you were in a place where you could sleep in the daylight.