By-Line Ernest Hemingway

by Ernest Hemingway

  There are many people in Italy who remember the last war as it was; not as they have been taught to believe it was. Many of these people have been beaten because they opened their mouths, some were killed, others are in prison on the Lipariislands, and some have left the country. It is a dangerous thing in a dictatorship to have a long memory. You should learn to live for the great deeds of the day. As long as any dictator controls his press there will always be great daily deeds to live for. In America as we get premonitions of dictatorship you can see in the newspapers how marvelous everything is every day in the achievements of government and looking back note how lousy is the result of any given year or period of years of governmental activity. No dictatorship can last, really, except by force and that is why no dictator or potential dictator can afford to go through any period of unpopularity which will at once force him to the use of force to stay in power. A successful dictator uses clubs and has constant newspaper triumphs. An unsuccessful dictator gets scared, shoots too many of his own people, and goes out as soon as his army or police switch on him. If he shoots too many he gets shot himself, usually, even while his regime stands. But this is not about dictators but about certain ornithological aspects of African war.

  Certainly no knowledge of the past war will help boys from the little steep-hilled towns of the Abruzzi where the snow comes early on the tops of the mountains, nor those who worked in garages, or machine shops, in Milano or Bologna or Firenze, or rode their bicycles in road races on the white dust-powdered roads of Lombardy, nor those who played football for their factory teams in Spezia or Torino, nor mowed the high mountain meadows of the Dolomites and guided ski-ers in the winter, or would have been burning charcoal in the woods above Piombino, or maybe sweeping out a trattoria in Vicenza, or would have gone to North or South America in the old days. They will feel the deadly heat and know the shadeless land; they will have the diseases that never cure, that make the bones ache and a young man old and turn the bowels to water, and when there is a battle, finally, they will hear the whish of wings when the birds come down and I hope when they are hit someone will have told them to roll over on their faces so they can say, “Mamma mia!” with their mouths against the earth they came from.

  Mussolini’s sons are in the air where there are no enemy planes to shoot them down. But poor men’s sons all over Italy are foot soldiers, as poor men’s sons all over the world are always foot soldiers. And me, I wish the foot soldiers luck; but I wish they could learn who is their enemy—and why.

  On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter

  Esquire • APRIL, 1936

  CERTAINLY there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue. Wine, when your tongue has been burned clean with lye and water, feels like puddle water in your mouth, while mustard feels like axle-grease, and you can smell crisp, fried bacon, but when you taste it, there is only a feeling of crinkly lard.

  You can learn about this matter of the tongue by coming into the kitchen of a villa on the Riviera late at night and taking a drink from what should be a bottle of Evian water and which turns out to be Eau de Javel, a concentrated lye product used for cleaning sinks. The taste buds on your tongue, if burned off by Eau de Javel, will begin to function again after about a week. At what rate other things regenerate one does not know, since you lose track of friends and the things one could learn in a week were mostly learned a long time ago.

  The other night I was talking with a good friend to whom all hunting is dull except elephant hunting. To him there is no sport in anything unless there is great danger and, if the danger is not enough, he will increase it for his own satisfaction. A hunting companion of his had told me how this friend was not satisfied with the risks of ordinary elephant hunting but would, if possible, have the elephants driven, or turned, so he could take them head-on, so it was a choice of killing them with the difficult frontal shot as they came, trumpeting, with their ears spread, or having them run over him. This is to elephant hunting what the German cult of suicide climbing is to ordinary mountaineering, and I suppose it is, in a way, an attempt to approximate the old hunting of the armed man who is hunting you.

  This friend was speaking of elephant hunting and urging me to hunt elephant, as he said that once you took it up no other hunting would mean anything to you. I was arguing that I enjoyed all hunting and shooting, any sort I could get, and had no desire to wipe this capacity for enjoyment out with the Eeu de Javel of the old elephant coming straight at you with his trunk up and his ears spread.

  “Of course you like that big fishing too,” he said rather sadly. “Frankly, I can’t see where the excitement is in that.”

  “You’d think it was marvelous if the fish shot at you with Tommy guns or jumped back and forth through the cockpit with swords on the ends of their noses.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “But frankly I don’t see where the thrill is.”

  “Look at so and so,” I said. “He’s an elephant hunter and this last year he’s gone fishing for big fish and he’s goofy about it. He must get a kick out of it or he wouldn’t do it.”

  “Yes,” my friend said. “There must be something about it but I can’t see it. Tell me where you get a thrill out of it.”

  “I’ll try to write it in a piece sometime,” I told him.

  “I wish you would,” he said. “Because you people are sensible on other subjects. Moderately sensible I mean.”

  “I’ll write it.”

  In the first place, the Gulf Stream and the other great ocean currents are the last wild country there is left. Once you are out of sight of land and of the other boats you are more alone than you can ever be hunting and the sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats. In a season fishing you will see it oily flat as the becalmed galleons saw it while they drifted to the westward; white-capped with a fresh breeze as they saw it running with the trades; and in high, rolling blue hills, the tops blowing off them like snow as they were punished by it, so that sometimes you will see three great hills of water with your fish jumping from the top of the farthest one and if you tried to make a turn to go with him without picking your chance, one of those breaking crests would roar down in on you with a thousand tons of water and you would hunt no more elephants, Richard, my lad.

  There is no danger from the fish, but anyone who goes on the sea the year around in a small power boat does not seek danger. You may be absolutely sure that in a year you will have it without seeking, so you try always to avoid it all you can.

  Because the Gulf Stream is an unexploited country, only the very fringe of it ever being fished, and then only at a dozen places in thousands of miles of current, no one knows what fish live in it, or how great size they reach or what age, or even what kinds of fish and animals live in it at different depths. When you are drifting, out of sight of land, fishing four lines, sixty, eighty, one hundred and one hundred fifty fathoms down, in water that is seven hundred fathoms deep you never know what may take the small tuna that you use for bait, and every time the line starts to run off the reel, slowly first, then with a scream of the click as the rod bends and you feel it double and the huge weight of the friction of the line rushing through that depth of water while you pump and reel, pump and reel, pump and reel, trying to get the belly out of the line before the fish jumps, there is always a thrill that needs no danger to make it real. It may be a marlin that will jump high and clear off to your right and then go off in a series of leaps, throwing a splash like a speedboat in a sea as you shout for the boat to turn with him watching the line melting off the reel before the boat can get around. Or it may be a broadbill that will show wagging his great broadsword. Or it may be some fish that you will never see at all th
at will head straight out to the northwest like a submerged submarine and never show and at the end of five hours the angler has a straightened-out hook. There is always a feeling of excitement when a fish takes hold when you are drifting deep.

  In hunting you know what you are after and the top you can get is an elephant. But who can say what you will hook sometime when drifting in a hundred and fifty fathoms in the Gulf Stream? There are probably marlin and swordfish to which the fish we have seen caught are pygmies; and every time a fish takes the bait drifting you have a feeling perhaps you are hooked to one of these.

  Carlos, our Cuban mate, who is fifty-three years old and has been fishing for marlin since he went in the bow of a skiff with his father when he was seven, was fishing drifting deep one time when he hooked a white marlin. The fish jumped twice and then sounded and when he sounded suddenly Carlos felt a great weight and he could not hold the line which went out and down and down irresistibly until the fish had taken out over a hundred and fifty fathoms. Carlos says it felt as heavy and solid as though he were hooked to the bottom of the sea. Then suddenly the strain was loosened but he could feel the weight of his original fish and pulled it up stone dead. Some toothless fish like a swordfish or marlin had closed his jaws across the middle of the eighty pound white marlin and squeezed it and held it so that every bit of the insides of the fish had been crushed out while the huge fish moved off with the eighty-pound fish in its mouth. Finally it let go. What size of a fish would that be? I thought it might be a giant squid but Carlos said there were no sucker marks on the fish and that it showed plainly the shape of the marlin’s mouth where he had crushed it.

  Another time an old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabanas hooked a great marlin that, on the heavy sashcord handline, pulled the skiff far out to sea. Two days later the old man was picked up by fishermen sixty miles to the eastward, the head and forward part of the marlin lashed alongside. What was left of the fish, less than half, weighed eight hundred pounds. The old man had stayed with him a day, a night, a day and another night while the fish swam deep and pulled the boat. When he had come up the old man had pulled the boat up on him and harpooned him. Lashed alongside the sharks had hit him and the old man had fought them out alone in the Gulf Stream in a skiff, clubbing them, stabbing at them, lunging at them with an oar until he was exhausted and the sharks had eaten all that they could hold. He was crying in the boat when the fishermen picked him up, half crazy from his loss, and the sharks were still circling the boat.

  But what is the excitement in catching them from a launch? It comes from the fact that they are strange and wild things of unbelievable speed and power and a beauty, in the water and leaping, that is indescribable, which you would never see if you did not fish for them, and to which you are suddenly harnessed so that you feel their speed, their force and their savage power as intimately as if you were riding a bucking horse. For half an hour, an hour, or five hours, you are fastened to the fish as much as he is fastened to you and you tame him and break him the way a wild horse is broken and finally lead him to the boat. For pride and because the fish is worth plenty of money in the Havana market, you gaff him at the boat and bring him on board, but the having him in the boat isn’t the excitement; it is while you are fighting him that is the fun.

  If the fish is hooked in the bony part of the mouth I am sure the hook hurts him no more than the harness hurts the angler. A large fish when he is hooked often does not feel the hook at all and will swim toward the boat, unconcerned, to take another bait. At other times he will swim away deep, completely unconscious of the hook, and it is when he feels himself held and pressure exerted to turn him, that he knows something is wrong and starts to make his fight. Unless he is hooked where it hurts he makes his fight not against the pain of the hook, but against being captured and if, when he is out of sight, you figure what he is doing, in what direction he is pulling when deep down, and why, you can convince him and bring him to the boat by the same system you break a wild horse. It is not necessary to kill him, or even completely exhaust him to bring him to the boat.

  To kill a fish that fights deep you pull against the direction he wants to go until he is worn out and dies. It takes hours and when the fish dies the sharks are liable to get him before the angler can raise him to the top. To catch such a fish quickly you figure, by trying to hold him absolutely, which direction he is working (a sounding fish is going in the direction the line slants in the water when you have put enough pressure on the drag so the line would break if you held it any tighter); then get ahead of him on that direction and he can be brought to the boat without killing him. You do not tow him or pull him with the motor boat; you use the engine to shift your position just as you would walk up or down stream with a salmon. A fish is caught most surely from a small boat such as a dory since the angler can shut down on his drag and simply let the fish pull the boat. Towing the boat will kill him in time. But the most satisfaction is to dominate and convince the fish and bring him intact in everything but spirit to the boat as rapidly as possible.

  “Very instructive,” says the friend. “But where does the thrill come in?”

  The thrill comes when you are standing at the wheel drinking a cold bottle of beer and watching the outriggers jump the baits so they look like small live tuna leaping along and then behind one you see a long dark shadow wing up and then a big spear thrust out followed by an eye and head and dorsal fin and the tuna jumps with the wave and he’s missed it.

  “Marlin,” Carlos yells from the top of the house and stamps his feet up and down, the signal that a fish is raised. He swarms down to the wheel and you go back to where the rod rests in its socket and there comes the shadow again, fast as the shadow of a plane moving over the water, and the spear, head, fin and shoulders smash out of water and you hear the click the closepin makes as the line pulls out and the long bight of line whishes through the water as the fish turns and as you hold the rod, you feel it double and the butt kicks you in the belly as you come back hard and feel his weight, as you strike him again and again, and again.

  Then the heavy rod arcing out toward the fish, and the reel in a hand-saw zinging scream, the marlin leaps clear and long, silver in the sun long, round as a hogshead and banded with lavender stripes and, when he goes into the water, it throws a column of spray like a shell lighting.

  Then he comes out again, and the spray roars, and again, then the line feels slack and out he bursts headed across and in, then jumps wildly twice more seeming to hang high and stiff in the air before falling to throw the column of water and you can see the hook in the corner of his jaw.

  Then in a series of jumps like a greyhound he heads to the northwest and standing up, you follow him in the boat, the line taut as a banjo string and little drops coming from it until you finally get the belly of it clear of that friction against the water and have a straight pull out toward the fish.

  And all the time Carlos is shouting, “Oh, God the bread of my children! Oh look at the bread of my children! Joseph and Mary look at the bread of my children jump! There it goes the bread of my children! He’ll never stop the bread the bread the bread of my children!”

  This striped marlin jumped, in a straight line to the northwest, fifty-three times, and every time he went out it was a sight to make your heart stand still. Then he sounded and I said to Carlos, “Get me the harness. Now I’ve got to pull him up the bread of your children.”

  “I couldn’t stand to see it,” he says. “Like a filled pocketbook jumping. He can’t go down deep now. He’s caught too much air jumping.”

  “Like a race horse over obstacles,” Julio says. “Is the harness all right? Do you want water?”

  “No.” Then kidding Carlos, “What’s this about the bread of your children?”

  “He always says that,” says Julio. “You should hear him curse me when we would lose one in the skiff.”

  “What will the bread of your children weigh?” I ask with mouth dry, the harness taut across sh
oulders, the rod a flexible prolongation of the sinew pulling ache of arms, the sweat salty in my eyes.

  “Four hundred and fifty,” says Carlos.

  “Never,” says Julio.

  “Thou and thy never,” says Carlos. “The fish of another always weighs nothing to thee.”

  “Three seventy-five,” Julio raises his estimate. “Not a pound more.”

  Carlos says something unprintable and Julio comes up to four hundred.

  The fish is nearly whipped now and the dead ache is out of raising him, and then, while lifting, I feel something slip. It holds for an instant and then the line is slack.

  “He’s gone,” I say and unbuckle the harness.

  “The bread of your children,” Julio says to Carlos.

  “Yes,” Carlos says. “Yes. Joke and no joke yes. El pan de mis hijos. Three hundred and fifty pounds at ten cents a pound. How many days does a man work for that in the winter? How cold is it at three o’clock in the morning on all those days? And the fog and the rain in a norther. Every time he jumps the hook cutting the hole a little bigger in his jaw. Ay how he could jump. How he could jump!”

  “The bread of your children,” says Julio.

  “Don’t talk about that any more,” said Carlos.

  No it is not elephant hunting. But we get a kick out of it. When you have a family and children, your family, or my family, or the family of Carlos, you do not have to look for danger. There is always plenty of danger when you have a family.