Hemingway's Boat (23 page)

Jake's creator has been to cockfights in this quarter. He knows where the second-floor bordellos are in this quarter. He has refereed boxing matches in one-bulb arenas on dirt flooring scuffed smooth as talc in this quarter. (The local fighters, a few of whom he's sparred with, have wonderful monikers: Shine Forbes, Iron Baby Roberts, Black Pie Colebrooks. Even the venue for a lot of the weekend fights has a wonderful name: the Blue Goose. They set up the ring beneath a huge Spanish
lime tree.) And now, having angled and shortcutted and cantilevered his way to the waterfront, Jake's creator is heaving into the yard, through the main gate, across the corduroy planking, and he sees her, the first goose-bumping glimpse, right ahead, bobbing in the sparkle of a deep body of water known by the locals as the submarine pens. He spies her registration number painted on a wooden plaque toward the tip of her angled nose: K 26761
.

For the last several books and years, Ernest Hemingway's world-famous prose style has been discernibly if subtly altering, but no more so than just now, on the eve of crossing over. What explains this evolving artistic change, which the critics have begun to take notice of but don't especially like and can't quite seem to reconcile with the writer whom they've fixed in their parsimonious imaginations? This is the modernist who wrote all of those not-quite-duplicable Dick-and-Jane-go-up-the-hill-seeming sentences, so evocatively free of the subordinate clause, yoking his strange declarative music with the simple conjunctive “and,” sans any commas. Sentences such as: “I saw the faces of the first two. They were ruddy and healthy-looking. Their helmets came low down over their foreheads and the side of their faces. Their carbines were clipped to the frame of the bicycles. Stick bombs hung handle down from their belts.” That's from
A Farewell to Arms,
in the extended and magnificent account of the retreat from Caporetto. But now, as a prose innovator seeks to marry the morning landscapes of Africa to the afternoon pleasures of the Gulf Stream, something new and exhilarating is occurring. Ernest Hemingway's prose line is filling up, is growing much more expansive, and there are many subordinate clauses. The pattern has been in evidence for the last several years, but never more freeingly than just now. The critics aren't privy
.

Could the artistic change have something to do with getting out of those tight, damp streets of Europe, away from those repressive, four-square enclosures of Oak Park so bulwarked against nature and the cold? Could his fuller prose line, his more complex sentence structure, have to do with a kind of literal and metaphorical thawing out, a throwing open of all the windows and doors? In the decades to come, there will be any number of scholarly explanations and interpretations and theories and analyses of this loosening. “Loosening”: that's a word the artist himself employed a couple of weeks earlier in a letter. “[H]ave gotten to like writing again,”
he'd said. “Was about through with it for a while but am getting the old 4th dimension back in the landscape again and loosening up in the rest of it and believe I'll make a writer yet.”

I believe
Pilar
was a key part of the change, allowing him to go farther out, where you don't see shoreline
.

A 420-pound blue marlin, photographed in an evening drizzle, Havana, August 6, 1934

ON JULY 19, 1934
, with a motley crew of two, with guns in sheepskin cases, with a big, boxy Graflex camera and much film, with thirty-two cases of canned vegetables and thirty-five gallons of motor oil, with heavy Hardy reels and marlin-ready rods and hundreds of yards of fishing line in various thread sizes, with boxes of catgut and swivels and gigantic Pflueger hooks and piano-wire leaders, with four shelves of books (both pleasure reading and reference tomes), Ernest Hemingway took his boat across that mythical ninety-mile wedge of fast-moving blue water between the United States and Cuba. In point of fact, the distance on navigational charts from Key West to Havana is closer to ninety-nine nautical miles, one nautical mile equaling 1.15 statute miles, so that ninety-nine nautical would translate to nearly 115 statute. But all this is technical quibbling, because in both common vernacular and popular myth, the distance is still and will always be ninety miles.

It took
Pilar
most of the day to get over, beating almost perpendicularly against a current whose surface velocity can reach five knots. If that doesn't
sound like much, then consider that the volume of flow in the passageway known as the Straits of Florida has been measured at more than a million cubic feet per second—or many hundreds of times the current of the Mississippi River.

They started out early. Arnold Samuelson was green and excited and prone to seasickness. The other crew member was a picked-up, twenty-eight-year-old mate named Charles J. Lunn, who, as a pilot on the Havana–Key West ferry run (the P&O Line), knew these waters well and would help man the wheel. Lunn wasn't going to figure in the coming summer's plans; he'd get paid off and catch a ferry back after they were safely across the Straits. The day before, Hemingway had signed clearance and oath-of-manifest papers, listing himself as “master,” Samuelson as “engineer,” Lunn as “seaman.” He had put down addresses and next-of-kin names. The engineer's address was given as 2940 Vincent Street in Minneapolis, and his mom, who must still have been grieving over her terrible loss, was listed as his nearest relative.

Within an hour, the boat had “dropped” the Key West government radio towers, and in another hour the Sand Key lighthouse was gone from the horizon, and then there were only the cerulean Straits. Their course was almost due south. On a plumb line, or any decent map, Havana would fall a few degrees to the left of Key West. Since the stream is coursing eastward at its variable rates, you cross to Cuba at what is essentially a right angle to the current. At an average speed of ten knots, Havana is roughly a day away, assuming nothing goes awry.

The engineer was bidden by the master to church-key the tops off three bottles of beer, and when the bottles were empty, the master threw them over the side for target practice with a .22 Colt Woodsman automatic. The beer and the heat and the bucking swells began to have a queasy effect on the engineer, and so he lay wanly on the cushioned settee opposite the master, who, feeling dandy, took turns at the wheel with the seaman. When he wasn't at the wheel, Hemingway trolled a feather rig, but there was too much rolling and the boat was moving too fast. In early afternoon, the trio spotted purple anthills on the horizon: the sugarloaf mountains of La Cabaña. After a while, Hemingway, through his field glasses, could see the low, green shoreline. Havana, dead ahead. Their course had been true. They'd make port by six o'clock, the captain thought, in time to be cleared by customs, and maybe go out on the town, the thought of which brought awake the horny engineer—he'd heard about how those hot Cuban
señoritas
would give you a “three-way.”

It all seemed so propitious, and then it wasn't. “Something's burning,” the captain said. They were about three miles off the coast. Hemingway pulled open the gull-wing doors in the floorboard above the engine pit. The big motor was so hot that paint was blistering off its cylinder head. The water pump that cooled the Chrysler had busted. They had to go the rest of the way in on the little guy, the Lycoming, and what should have taken twenty minutes ended up taking two hours. The four-cylinder motor was barely able to hold the boat against the current.

They entered the harbor between the old fortress of Morro Castle and the Havana waterfront. A gunboat full of khaki-clothed and carbine-bearing
federales
ran up alongside them. (The guards in the Morro's tower, watching the boat come slowly, must have suspected
Pilar
was smuggling cargoes of munitions for the local revolutionaries, waiting to make land under cover of darkness.) The owner kept shouting to the soldiers in his pretty fluent Spanish that they were a fishing craft from the States with an engine problem. The troops were about to come aboard when a small launch appeared out of the dusk and a voice called, “El Hemingway!” It was Carlos Gutiérrez, a Havana commercial fishing-smack captain, in his fifties, whom Hemingway had engaged to be his boat's first mate for the remainder of the summer. Gutiérrez had first gone to sea in the bows of skiffs with his father at about age six and had been keeping detailed records of his large catches since at least 1912. He'd been described by Hemingway in the pages of
Esquire
the year before as “the best marlin and swordfisherman around Cuba.” For weeks, he had been sending reports to Key West by wire regarding the mysterious lateness of the season's striped marlin run.

Carlos saved the moment. The
federales
moved off.
Pilar
limped in the rest of the way, past the fishing smacks and the splashing stone seawall where Havana lovers have always sat and spooned. The trio, unable to be cleared till morning (unless they were willing to pay an extra twenty-five dollars), slept on board. But that burning smell beneath the floorboards and the broken water pump and the contretemps with the gunboat and the twilight crawling-in seemed only harbingers of the kind of luck that was going to plague Hemingway's Cuban marlin dreams for the next three months. Not that he'd go fishless.

On the weekend before Hemingway made his troubled crossing, he wrote back-to-back letters to the editor of
Esquire
. He wrote them up in his
workroom. Typing the date of the first letter in the upper-right corner of the sheet, he must suddenly have realized what day it was: “Sat. July 14 (my God le quatorze Juillet and me sober.)” The old debauching Bastille Days in Paris, were just that, the old days.

He said, “Am getting stale writing and no bloody exercise. On my tail out here in the workhouse five hours a day now since early April. Haven't made a trip except up to Miami to get the boat.” It was a somewhat true statement, and within it you could detect defensiveness about getting set to leave home for another lengthy period (when he was only three months back from Africa), and also rationalization about interrupting the flow of work on his book—which would keep getting worked on in Cuba, best it could, fits and starts, if nothing close to the disciplined morning writing schedule of Key West.

One of the rituals, before ascending to the workhouse, was to turn on the garden hose and aim it in a desultory way at one of the parched spots in the yard. At length he'd go on up the stairs. He'd sharpen pencils. He'd walk around. He'd unfold his wire glasses and begin to read over what he'd written the day before. He'd go as far back as he could before resigning himself to trying to take the story forward.

The man who wrote his telegram-like sentences in his letter to Gingrich on Bastille Day probably knew as much or more about marlin fishing—and the habits of marlin—as any angler alive, as any ichthyologist or natural scientist, including a highly esteemed one from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia who'd shortly join him on his boat. Perhaps that claim doesn't sound like much. But Hemingway had been a marlin fisherman for barely two years, and in that time he'd managed to catch and examine, by his record keeping, ninety-one marlin, many of them trophy size. A big-game fisherman might have counted himself blessed to have landed two or three good-size marlin in a season's fishing. In one month alone, May 1932, right after he'd begun, Hemingway had landed nineteen marlin on a rod and reel. The following year, fishing again on the north coast of Cuba, from mid-April to mid-July, Hemingway brought in fifty-two marlin. The largest of these, a black marlin, went 468 pounds and nearly thirteen feet, a Cuban record.

The acknowledged pioneer of Cuban fishing grounds was a proper little man named H. L. Woodward, who worked for Havana Electric. He'd begun his saltwater fishing career in 1915 and had averaged maybe six or seven good fish a year through the twenties. Once, he'd landed a 459-pound blue. By the early thirties, when Hemingway fished with this
older dapper gentleman (gleaning whatever he could), Woodward had boated somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred marlin. It took three years for the upstart to overlap the pioneer.

As I noted, a handy demarcation point for Hemingway's life as an ocean fisherman is the year 1928—when he first spied Key West with his spouse. But it took him another four years, until 1932, to discover the sport, the spectacle, the art form, the ritual of testing and manhood that somehow seemed to have been designed by the Creator just for him. Once he'd found marlin, all bets were off; it was as if nearly every other creature in the sea was just guppy sport. Yes, giant bluefin tuna and broadbill swordfish and, to some extent, mako shark off Bimini in the mid-thirties would have their obsessions. But for the rest of his life, marlin reigned supreme, most especially the blue marlin:
Makaira nigricans
, a trophy that could go to fifteen feet, could go from fifty pounds to twelve hundred.