By-Line Ernest Hemingway

by Ernest Hemingway

  When you have finished far enough down with the current, you go into some beach to swim and have a drink while Gregorio, the mate, cooks lunch. In the late afternoon, you fish back toward home against the current until sunset. The small marlin are there in the spring and early summer and the big fish in the summer and the fall.

  This fishing is what brought you to Cuba in the old days. Then you took a break on a book, or between books, of a hundred days or more and fished every day from sunup to sundown. Now, living on the hill in the country, you fish the days you pick.

  It was different in Peru where we went to try to photograph big fish for the picture. There the wind blew day and night. Sand blew in your room from the desert that makes the coast and the doors banged shut with the wind.

  We fished 32 days from early morning until it was too rough to photograph and the seas ran like onrushing hills with snow blowing off the tops. If you looked from the crest of a sea toward shore you could see the haze of the sand blowing as the wind furrowed the hills and scoured and sculptured them each day.

  The sea birds huddled in the lee of the cliffs, coming out in clouds to dive wildly when a scouting bird would sight school-fish moving along the shore, and the condors ate dead pelicans on the beaches. The pelicans usually died from bursting their food pouches diving and a condor would walk backwards along the beach lifting a large dead pelican as though it weighed nothing.

  The marlin were large and did not fight as the fish off Cuba do. But their weight and bulk in the heavy seas made it hard work, and a fish that you would bring to gaff in eight or twelve minutes you would let run again, holding him always in close camera range, feeling his weight through the soles of your feet, your forearms and your back, and finally when he was dead tired, have Gregorio harpoon him to try for the camera shot you needed in the picture.

  It was steady punishing work each day and it was fun too because the people were nice and it was a strange new sea to learn. It was good too to be back in Cuba and on Pilar again.

  • • •

  Down in Peru, 420 miles south of the Equator, where she was working as interpreter on the main camera boat between the Spanish-speaking, Indian-blooded captain and crew and the United States-speaking cameramen, putting in a full day under arduous conditions, Miss Mary announced one evening that the first thing her husband needed in a wife was that she be durable.

  Miss Mary is durable. She is also brave, charming, witty, exciting to look at, a pleasure to be with and a good wife. She is also an excellent fisherwoman, a fair wing shot, a strong swimmer, a really good cook, a good judge of wine, an excellent gardener, an amateur astronomer, a student of art, political economy, Swahili, French and Italian and can run a boat or a household in Spanish. She can also sing well with an accurate and true voice, knows more generals, admirals, air marshals, politicians and important persons than I know dead company commanders, former battalion commanders, rummies, coyotes, prairie dogs, jack rabbits, leaders of café society, saloon keepers, airplane drivers, horse players, good and bad writers and goats.

  Miss Mary can also sing in Basque and is a brilliant and erratic rifle shot. She has been known to be irascible and can say in her own perfect Swahili, “Tupa ile chupa tupu,” which means take away that empty bottle.

  When she is away, the Finca is as empty as the emptiest bottle she ever ordered removed and I live in a vacuum that is as lonely as a radio tube when the batteries are dead and there is no current to plug into.

  She does not suffer fools gladly. She does not suffer them at all. She has great energy and she can stay the distance, but she also knows how to be as lazy as a cat.

  • • •

  There is the matter of being expatriots. It is very difficult to be an expatriot at 35 minutes by air from Key West and less than an hour, by faster plane, from Miami. I never hired out to be a patriot but regularly attend the wars in which my country participates and pay my Federal taxes. An expatriate (I looked up the spelling) is, consequently, a word I never cared for. Born in Cook County, Illinois, I early ceded the territory as a writer to Mr. Carl Sandburg, who had taken it over anyway, and to Mr. James Farrell and to Mr. Nelson Algren when they came of age. They have ruled it very well and I have no complaints.

  It was possible to stake out a few claims in other places, and I am glad that not all of these have been jumped. One of these claims is here.

  All you have to do to see your compatriots is to get into the car after work and go into the Floridita Bar in Havana. There are people from all of the states and from many places where you have lived. There are also Navy ships in, cruise ships, Customs and Immigration agents you have known for years, gamblers who are opening up or have just closed or are doing well or badly, embassy characters, aspirant writers, firmly or poorly established writers, senators on the town, the physicians and surgeons who come for conventions, Lions, Elks, Moose, Shriners, American Legion members, Knights of Columbus, beauty contest winners, characters who have gotten into a little trouble and pass a note in by the doorman, characters who get killed next week, characters who will be killed next year, the F.B.I., former F.B.I., occasionally your bank manager and two other guys, not to mention your Cuban friends. There are also the usual phonies who help you to keep your hand in on the language.

  One of the most enjoyable nights I remember recently at the Floridita was when several fleet units were in with an annual cruise of midshipmen. Miss Mary was away and I was lonesome as a goat and felt like going on the town. Some erudite midshipmen had been by in the early afternoon to ask my views on Ezra Pound. These views are succinct, although the subject is complicated. Ezra, I told them, should be released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and be allowed to practice poetry without let or hindrance.

  At this point a group of Navy CPO’s, all with the several long hash marks of their re-enlistments, turned up to see old Ernie. They tolerated the midshipmen but were suspicious that by these queries about Pound and other subjects alien to them, they might be preventing old Ernie from writing; a thing they themselves would never do.

  “Give me the word,” one of the chiefs said, “and they’re out of here before they know it. Who the hell is going to bother you while I’m alive?”

  “Ernie,” the chief said to me, “you got to have somebody steer people away from you. You got to be allowed to think. I will be your A.D.C. I will be your personal aide. I will be the man that wears the chicken guts on his shoulders for you and I will handle all your public relations.”

  “Chief,” I said, “you are my pal and now you are my personal aide. Handle my public relations.”

  “Sir,” he said, “let there be no familiarity between us even though I may sometimes speak as man to man under stress. Sir, this is the chance I have prepared myself for during long years.”

  “The Floridita,” I said.

  “You hear that, you bums?” the chief said. “Hit the bag. It’s the Floridita.”

  On the way in, although we opened up the new Chrysler New Yorker convertible a little once, to the extent the highway permitted, the chief said, “Ernie, sir, she is a mighty nice little car except maybe that fireman red they have her painted. But from now on maybe you will wish to have a bigger car.”

  “A bigger car it is. Steady as you go,” I warned Juan, the driver.

  “Yes, sir,” the chief said. “Make a note of it, Healey.”

  The Floridita was quite crowded, but my public relations officer evicted a number of characters from the stools in the corner in which we usually sat.

  We sat and ordered and various people approached, some seeking autographs, others wishing to shake hands.

  “Do you know Ernie?” asked my public relations officer.

  “No? You don’t come from his home town or anything? Scram. He’s thinking.”

  We were all engaged in serious literary discussion and had gone very deeply into things. Another chief joined us and he said, “The two books I like the best were . . . . No three . . . . Were When the
Rains Came, The Mooney Sixpense, and The Towers of Babel.”

  “Mac,” I said, “I didn’t write a one of them.”

  “He probably means the Torrents of Spring,” one of our chiefs said. “I liked where that no-armed Indian shot that wonderful stick of pool.”

  “The Mooney Sixpense was a good book,” the new chief said defensively.

  “Ernie wrote them all,” my aide said. “Only he’s too modest. He wrote them under a synonym. But every one of them has got the old touch. You were smart to have spotted them, chief.”

  Soon we were singing, very softly and surprisingly in tune, that lovely old ballad, “Meet me by the slop chutes on the old Whangpoo.”

  Around then, I got the eye from the naval attaché who was sitting at a table with the admiral and a couple of other people, all in civilian clothes.

  I refused the eye once, but I got it again and I said, “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I have to go over and speak to a man I know pretty well who would feel I was rude if I did not come over.”

  “Be careful, sir,” said my aide. “Do you need me, Ernie? They may be false friends.”

  “No,” I said. “You handle this end and I’ll be right back.”

  So I went over and sat down with my good friend and found the visiting admiral to be cordial, extremely intelligent, pleasant and good company.

  We had talked for some little time when I heard a voice at shoulder height, “Ernie, what are you doing here, wasting your time with a bunch of civilians?” It was my aide and public relations officer.

  The admiral stood up and said, “I’m sorry, son, but I am your admiral.”

  “Admiral, sir, excuse me, sir. I have never seen you before, sir, so I did not recognize you in civilian clothes.”

  “I understand that perfectly,” the admiral said.

  “Admiral, sir, may I respectfully request, sir, that Ernie be allowed to return to our group?”

  “It’s not necessary to make the request,” the admiral said. “Mr. Hemingway had said he was overdue to return.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  It was a very good evening. At the end the chief said, “Ernie, I hate to relinquish this job I have worked for so hard and so well over so many years.”

  “I feel bad too, chief,” I said. “I’ll never have another personal aide and public relations officer if it isn’t you.”

  “Stand back there, you guys,” the chief said. “Let Ernie get in the car. He’s got to get home so he can sleep good and think right and work good tomorrow.”

  About the Author

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, and began his writing career for The Kansas City Star in 1917. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front but was invalided home, having been seriously wounded while serving with the Red Cross. In 1921 Hemingway settled in Paris, where he became part of the literary expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris in 1923 and was followed by the short story selection In Our Time, which marked his American debut in 1925. With the appearance of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway became not only the voice of the “lost generation” but the preeminent writer of his time. This was followed by Men Without Women in 1927, when Hemingway returned to the United States, and his novel of the Italian front, A Farewell to Arms (1929). In the 1930s, Hemingway settled in Key West, and later in Cuba, but he traveled widely—to Spain, Italy, and Africa—and wrote about his experiences in Death in the Afternoon (1932), his classic treatise on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting in Africa. Later he reported on the Spanish Civil War, which became the background for his brilliant war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), hunted U-boats in the Caribbean, and covered the European front during the Second World War. Hemingway’s most popular work, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration.” One of the most important influences on the development of the short story and novel in American fiction, Hemingway has seized the imagination of the American public like no other twentieth-century author. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. His other works include The Torrents of Spring (1926), Winner Take Nothing (1933), To Have and Have Not (1937), The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938), Across the River and into the Trees (1950), and posthumously, A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), and The Garden of Eden (1986).

  SCRIBNER

  Cover design by Paul Smith

  Cover photographs © Image Bank (man fishing and typewriter), © Archive Photos (army jeeps, troops, and plane)

  Register online at www.simonandschuster.com for more information on this and other great books.

  Books by Ernest Hemingway

  NOVELS

  The Torrents of Spring

  The Sun Also Rises

  A Farewell to Arms

  To Have and Have Not

  For Whom the Bell Tolls

  Across the River and Into the Trees

  The Old Man and the Sea

  Islands in the Stream

  The Garden of Eden

  True at First Light

  A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition

  STORIES

  In Our Time

  Men Without Women

  Winner Take Nothing

  The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War

  The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

  The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

  The Nick Adams Stories

  The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

  NONFICTION

  Death in the Afternoon

  Green Hills of Africa

  Selected Letters 1917-1961

  A Moveable Feast

  The Dangerous Summer

  Dateline: Toronto

  By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

  A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

  ANTHOLOGIES

  On Writing

  Hemingway on Fishing

  Hemingway on Hunting

  Hemingway on War

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook.

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  Index

  Abyssinia, see Ethiopian war

  Adowa, first battle of, 207-208, 233

  Adrianople, Turkey, 51-52, 56-60

  African Queen, The, 437

  Aguilera, Pichon, 403

  Aigle, Switzerland, 34-35

  Airplane crashes, 432-434, 444-447, 453-54

  Akeley, Carl, 430

  Albert I, King of the Belgians, 81

  Alexander I, King of Yugo-Slavia, 79-80

  Algabeno, 105, 108

  Algren, Nelson, 474

  Alicante, Spain, 258

  Alphonso XIII, King of Spain, 80-81

  American Friends of Spanish Democracy, 263

  American Museum of Natural History, 253, 412

  Amoebic dysentery, 159-161

  Anarchists, 272

  Anderson, Dr., 159, 161

  Anderson, Lt. (jg) Robert, 341-355

  Anna Karenina (Tolstoi), 186, 218

  Appointment in Samarra (O’Hara), 184

  Arkansas, U.S.S., 342, 343

  Armor, Lt. Cdr. Lester, 368

  Arrens (Russian official), 62

  Arrow of Gold, The (Conrad), 133

  Austria, 183

  Autobiographies (Yeats), 187, 218

  Baker, Harry, 310, 312

  Ballesteros, Florentino, 151

  Balzac, Honoré de, 185

  Bank
er, Ed, 345, 347, 349, 352-353

  Barber colleges, 5-7

  Barcelona, Spain, 257, 281-283

  Bat-eared foxes, 465

  Battalino, Bat, 157

  Baudelaire, Charles, 25

  Bellaria, Switzerland, 21

  Belmonte, Juan, 148

  Billingsley, Sherman, 451

  Bimini, 175, 199

  Bird, Mr. and Mrs. Bill, 36-40

  Bird wine, 307

  Birds

  carrion, 230-231

  shooting of, 186-191

  See also specific birds

  Bismarck, Otto von, 49

  Black Dog, 466-467

  Blazzard, Capt. Howard, 393-399

  Blixen, Baron von, 167-168

  Blizzard, driving in a, 155

  Blue Hotel, The (Crane), 218

  Bogart, Humphrey, 437

  Bolitho, William (Ryall), 221-228

  Bolo, 247-251

  Bonefish, 410

  Books, the best, 186-187, 218

  Boris III, King of Bulgaria, 79

  Bourne, Whitney, 391

  Bowers, Claude, 152

  Boxing, 156-157

  Brothers, Karamazov, The Dostoevski), 186, 218

  Brown, George, 451

  Buddenbrooks (Mann), 186, 218, 219

  Buffalo, 170-171, 431

  Bulgaria, 52

  Boris of, 79

  Bullfighting, 90-108, 147-151

  Bull-Neck Moose-Face, 153

  Burma, 312-313

  Burma Road, 310-312, 333

  Cachin, Marcel, 31

  Caldwell, Keith, 428

  Canada

  best rainbow trout fishing in, 9-12

  See also Toronto

  Canadian Soo River, 9

  Caporetto, battle of, 180, 207, 233

  Carol, Prince (later King of Rumania), 78

  Carpentier, Georges, 156

  Carrion birds in Africa, 230-231

  Cartwright, Reginald, 444-445, 453