By-Line Ernest Hemingway

by Ernest Hemingway

  What use is the sailfish’s sail to that fish? Why should this fish which seems to be an unsuccessful model, an earlier and more fantastic model for the marlin, thin where the marlin is rounded, weak where the marlin is strong, provided with insufficient pectoral fins and too small a tail for its size, have survived? There must be a good reason for the sail. What is it?

  Why do marlin always travel from east to west against the current and where do they go after they reach Cape San Antonio at the western end of Cuba? Is there a counter current hundreds of fathoms below the surface current and do they return working against that? Or do they make a circle through the Caribbean?

  Why in the years of great abundance of marlin off the California coast are the fish equally plentiful off Cuba? Is it possible that marlin, the same fish, follow the warm currents of all the oceans, or that they have certain circuits that they make? They are caught in New Zealand, Tahiti, Honolulu, the Indian ocean, off Japan, off the west coast of South America, off the west coast of Mexico and as far north on the west coast of the United States as California. This year there were many small marlin taken off Miami, and the big ones appear off Bimini just across the gulf stream several months before they run in Cuba. Last summer they caught striped marlin as far north as Montauk Point off Long Island.

  Are not the white marlin, the striped marlin and the black marlin all sexual and age variations of the same fish?

  For me, with what data I have been able to get so far, they are all one fish. This may be wrong and I would be glad to have any one disprove the theory as what we want is knowledge, not the pride of proving something to be true. So far I believe that the white marlin, the common marlin caught off Miami and Palm Beach, whose top limit in weight is from 125 to 150 lbs., are the young fish of both sexes. These fish when caught have either a very faint stripe which shows in the water but disappears when the fish is taken from the sea or no stripe at all. The smallest I have even seen weighed twenty-three pounds. At a certain weight, around seventy pounds and over, the male fish begin to have very pronounced and fairly wide stripes which show brightly in the water but fade when the fish dies and disappear an hour or so after death. These fish are invariably well rounded, obviously maturing marlin, are always males, and are splendid leapers and fighters in the style of the striped marlin. I believe they are the adolescent males of the marlin.

  The striped marlin is characterized by his small head, heavily rounded body, rapier-like spear, and by the broad lavender stripes that, starting immediately behind the gills, encircle his body at irregular intervals all the way back to his tail. These stripes do not fade much after the fish is dead and will come up brightly hours after the fish has been caught if water is thrown over him.

  All varieties of marlin breed off the Cuban coast and as the roe brings from forty cents to a dollar and a quarter a pound in the Havana market all fish are carefully opened for roe. Market fishermen say that all the striped marlin are males. On the other hand they claim all the black marlin are females.

  But what is the intermediate stage in the development of the female of the white marlin from the handsome, gleaming, well proportioned though rather large headed fish that it is as we know it at a hundred pounds, before it becomes the huge, ugly headed, thick billed, bulky, dark purple, coarse fleshed, comparatively ugly fish that has been called the black marlin?

  I believe that its mature life is passed as what we call the silver marlin. This is a handsome, silvery marlin, unstriped, reaching a thousand pounds or more in weight and a terrific leaper and fighter. The market fishermen claim these fish are always females.

  That leaves one type of marlin unaccounted for; the so-called blue marlin. I do not know whether these are a color variation stemming from the white, whether they are both male and female, or whether they are a separate species. This summer may show.

  We have caught and examined some ninety-one marlin in the last two years and will need to catch and examine several hundred more before any conclusions can be drawn with even a pretense of accuracy. And all the fish should be examined by a scientist who should note the details of each fish.

  The trouble is that to study them you have to catch them and catching them is a fairly full time job although it allows plenty of time for thinking.

  It really should be subsidized too, because, by the time you buy gas in Havana at thirty cents a gallon to run twelve hours a day for a hundred days a year, get up at daylight every morning, sleep on your belly half the time because of what the fish do to your back—pay a man to gaff—another to be at the wheel, buy bait, reels at two hundred and fifty dollars apiece, six hundred yards of thirty-six thread line at a time, good rods, hooks and leaders, and try to do this out of the money you fenangle out of publishers and editors, you are too exhausted physically and financially to sit up nights counting the number of rays in the fins and putting a calipers on the ventral spikes with four hundred water front Cubans wanting to know why the fish isn’t being cut up and distributed. Instead you are sitting in the stern of the boat, feeling pretty good and having a drink while the fish is being butchered out. You can’t do everything.

  All the people I know with enough wealth to subsidize anything are either busy studying how to get more wealth, or horses, or what is wrong with themselves with psychoanalysts, or horses, or how not to lose what wealth they have, or horses, or the moving picture business, or horses or all of these things together, and, possibly, horses. Also I freely admit that I would fish for marlin with great enjoyment even if it were of no scientific value at all and you cannot expect anyone to subsidize anything that anybody has a swell time out of. As a matter of fact I suppose we are lucky to be able to fish for them without being put in jail. This time next year they may have gotten out a law against it.

  Curiosity, I suppose, is what makes you fish as much as anything and here is a very curious thing. This time last year we caught a striped marlin with a roe in it. It wasn’t much of a roe it is true. It was the sort of a roe you would expect to find in certain moving picture actresses if they had roe, or in many actors. Examining it carefully it looked about like the sort of roe an interior decorator would have if he decided to declare himself and roe out. But it was a roe and the first one any of the commercial fishermen had ever seen in a striped marlin.

  Until we saw this roe, and I wish I could describe it to you without getting too medical, all striped marlin were supposed to be males. All right then. Was this striped marlin how shall we put it or, as I had believed for a long time, do all marlin, white, striped, silver, etc. end their lives as black marlin, becoming females in the process? The jewfish becomes a female in the last of its life no matter how it starts and I believe the marlin does the same thing. The real black marlin are all old fish. You can see it in the quality of the flesh, the coarseness of the bill, and, above all in fighting them, in the way they live. Certainly they grow to nearly a ton in weight. But to me they are all old fish, all represent the last stages of the marlin, and they are all females.

  Now you prove me wrong.

  Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba

  Esquire • DECEMBER, 1934

  YOUR correspondent is an old newspaper man. That makes us all just one big family. But the bad luck for the customers is that your correspondent was a working newspaper man and as such used to envy the way columnists were allowed to write about themselves. When the papers would come over your correspondent would read a long blob-blobs by his then favorite columnist on the columnist himself, his child, what he thought and how he thought it, while on this same day your correspondent’s output would be something on this order: KEMAL INSWARDS UNBURNED SMYRNA GUILTY GREEKS, sending it at three dollars a word Eastern Cable urgent to appear as, copyrighted by Monumental News Service, “Mustapha Kemal in an exclusive interview today with the correspondent of the Monumental News Service denied vehemently that the Turkish forces had any part in the burning of Smyrna. The city, Kemal stated, was fired by incendiaries in the troops of the G
reek rear guard before the first Turkish patrols entered the city.”

  I don’t know what was on the mind of the good grey baggypants of the columns when he used to write those I, me, my pieces but I am sure he had his troubles even before he took over the world’s troubles and, anyway, it has been interesting to watch his progress from an herbivorous (out-doors, the spring, baseball, an occasional half-read book) columnist to a carnivorous (riots, violence, disaster, and revolution) columnist. But personal columnists, and this is getting to read a little like a column, are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat—no matter who killed the meat for him. Winchell kills his own meat and so do a few others. But they have news in their columns and are the most working of working newspaper men. So let us return to the ex-favorite who projects his personality rather than goes for the facts.

  Things were in just as bad shape, and worse, as far as vileness, injustice and rottenness are concerned, in 1921, ’22 and ’23 as they are now but our then favorite columnist did not get around as much in those days or else he didn’t read the papers. Or else we had to go broke at home before anybody would take the rest of the world seriously.

  The trouble with our former favorite is that he started his education too late. There is no time for him, now, to learn what a man should know before he will die. It is not enough to have a big heart, a pretty good head, a charm of personality, baggy pants, and a facility with a typewriter to know how the world is run and who is making the assists, the put-outs and the errors and who are merely the players and who are the owners. Our favorite will never know because he started too late and because he cannot think coldly with his head.

  For instance the world was much closer to revolution in the years after the war than it is now. In those days we who believed in it looked for it at any time, expected it, hoped for it—for it was the logical thing. But everywhere it came it was aborted. For a long time I could not understand it but finally I figured it out. If you study history you will see that there can never be a Communist revolution without, first, a complete military debacle. You have to see what happens in a military debacle to understand this. It is something so utterly complete in its disillusion about the system that has put them into this, in its destruction and purging away of all the existing standards, faiths and loyalties, when the war is being fought by a conscript army, that it is the necessary catharsis before revolution. No country was ever riper for revolution than Italy after the war but the revolution was doomed to fail because her defeat was not complete; because after Caporetto she fought and won in June and July of 1918 on the Piave. From the Piave, by way of the Banca Commerciale, the Credito Italiano, the merchants of Milan who wanted the prosperous socialist co-operative societies and the socialist municipal government of that city smashed, came fascism.

  It is too long a story to go into here but our present literary revolutionary mouthpieces ought to study a little contemporary history. But no history is written honestly. You have to keep in touch with it at the time and you can depend on just as much as you have actually seen and followed. And these boys started too late. Because it isn’t all in Marx nor in Engels, a lot of things have happened since then.

  What the boys need, to play the races successfully, is past performances. They also need to have known horses for a long time, and to be able to tell them in the early morning around sun-up with no numbers, no colors, with blankets on them, and to be able to clock them, then, as they go by in the half-light and, thus, know what times they are capable of making.

  If the men who write editorials for the New Republic and The Monthly Review, say, had to take an examination on what they actually know about the mechanics, theory, past performance and practice of actual revolution, as it is made, not as it is hoped for, I doubt if any one of them would have one hundredth part of the knowledge of his subject that the average sensible follower of the horses has of the animals.

  France was whipped and ready for revolution in 1917 after the failure of the Chemin des Dames offensive. Regiments revolted and marched on Paris. Clemenceau came into power when practically every politician and all the sane people of the country were secretly negotiating or hoping for a peace and by shooting or frightening out of the country all his old political enemies, refusing to negotiate a peace, executing God knows how many soldiers who died without publicity tied to stakes before the firing squads at Vincennes, and holding on without fighting until the American effort arrived, had his troops fighting again by July of 1918. Because they ended up as winners, revolution was doomed in France and anybody who saw, on Clemenceau’s orders, the Garde Republicaine, with their shining breastplates, their horse-hair plumes, and those high-chested, big-hoofed, well-shod horses, charge and ride down the parade of mutilated war veterans who were confident the Old Man would never do anything to them, his poilus that he loved, and saw the slashing sabers, the start of the gallop then, the smashed wheel chairs, men scattered on the streets unable to run, the broken crutches, the blood and brains on the cobble-stones, the iron-shod hooves striking sparks from the stones but making a different sound when they rode over legless, armless men, while the crowd ran; nobody who saw that could be expected to think something new was happening when Hoover had the troops disperse the bonus army.

  Germany was never defeated in a military debacle. There was never any Sedan such as prepared the way for the Commune. There was no final complete bankruptcy of faith in what the war was fought for. U.S. troops took Sedan but the Army was retreating orderly. Germany had simply failed to win in the spring and summer but the army was still intact and there was a peace made before there was a defeat of the kind that makes revolution. True, there was a revolution but it was conditioned and held in check by the way in which the war had ended and those who had never accepted a military defeat hated those who had and started to do away with the ablest of them by the vilest program of assassination the world has ever known. They started, immediately after the war, by killing Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and they killed on, steadily eliminating revolutionary and liberal alike by an unvarying process of intelligent assassination. Walther Rathenau was a different and better man than Roehm, the pervert, but the same men and the same system murdered both.

  Spain got a revolution that corresponded exactly to the extent of her military debacle at Annual and those who were responsible for that terrible butchery lost their jobs and their thrones. But when they tried to extend that revolution three weeks ago the mass of the people were not ready for it and they did not want it.

  Neither Austria nor Hungary were ever really defeated in the war in the sense that France was defeated in 1870. The war wore out before anyone won it with them and what has happened in both countries has reflected that. Too many people still believe in the State and war is the health of the state. You will see that finally it will become necessary for the health of the so-called communist state in Russia. But the penalty for losing a war badly enough, completely and finally enough, is the destruction of the state. Make a note of this, Baggy-pants.

  Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about. Because the literary revolution boys are all ambitious. I have been living for some time where revolutions have gotten past the parlor or publishers’ tea and light picketing stage and I know. A lot of my friends have gotten excellent jobs and some others are in jail. But none of this will help the writer as a writer unless he finds something new to add to human knowledge while he is writing. Otherwise he will stink like any other writer when they bury him; except, since he has had political affiliations
, they will send more flowers at the time and later he will stink a little more.

  The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. It is too easy. All the outs are too easy and the thing itself is too hard to do. But you have to do it and every time you do it well, those human beings and that subject are done and your field is that much more limited. Of course the boys are all wishing you luck and that helps a lot. (Watch how they wish you luck after the first one.) But don’t let them suck you in to start writing about the proletariat, if you don’t come from the proletariat, just to please the recently politically enlightened critics. In a little while these critics will be something else. I’ve seen them be a lot of things and none of them was pretty. Write about what you know and write truly and tell them all where they can place it. They are all really very newly converted and very frightened, really, and when Moscow tells them what I am telling you, then they will believe it. Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about. If you write them truly they will have all the economic implications a book can hold.

  In the meantime, since it is Christmas, if you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara.

  Then when you have more time read another book called War and Peace by Tolstoi and see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are. Do not let them deceive you about what a book should be because of what is in the fashion now. All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer. Because that is the hardest thing of all to do. If, after that, you want to abandon your trade and get into politics, go ahead, but it is a sign that you are afraid to go on and do the other, because it is getting too hard and you have to do it alone and so you want to do something where you can have friends and well wishers, and be part of a company engaged in doing something worth doing instead of working all your life at something that will only be worth doing if you do it better than it has ever been done.