Hemingway's Boat (29 page)

In Key West, in the first weeks of the boat, it seemed as if the whole
world was coming aboard—opera singers, prizefighters, fellow writers, in-laws, kid brothers, navy brass, local wharf rats. Still, he'd managed to advance the work in the second-floor room. Now, in Havana, he's entertaining avant-garde artists, Venezuelan sportsmen, Cuban sportsmen, Havana social figures, correspondents for stateside papers, a bullfighter, consular folk, employees at the Ambos Mundos—not to say a pair of prim Philadelphians, whom he's grown quite fond of and is seeking to loosen up a little. Hemingway's dandified fellow egotist Sidney Franklin was down from Brooklyn for something like three weeks, arriving the week after the scientificos, partly to promote bullfighting and partly to visit with Hemingway. Uncounted numbers were on the dock after
Pilar
was in, when the bottles were being unstoppered, when a dead-on-his-feet fisherman must have felt caught between wishing to be hospitable and wanting only to go to bed, whether bed on that particular night would have been down below or two blocks away in room 511 at the Ambos Mundos, where his neglected manuscript sat on a desk in the middle of the room. But Hemingway, a man in a solitary profession, could barely stand to be alone, no matter how he'd curse at the world for not leaving him alone.

August 6, 1934: a fishing day to remember.

It starts out with no portents. The sea is “lumpy”—to use Samuelson's word in the piece he'll soon write for
Outdoor Life
. There's ten gallons of fresh gas in a lower tank; the barometer reading is good. The owner slept on board last night. Yesterday he went to Sunday Mass. Six people are going out with Hemingway, including the head scientifico. (Fowler has stayed in to organize his notes.) They get away from the dock by 9:50 and plan to troll in the blue water about three miles off Cojimar. In town today, three Americans, including a soldier of fortune known for fomenting revolutions, will be arrested on suspicion of smuggling in a shipment of arms. Tomorrow Pauline's due here on the ferry, bringing along her young Arkansas cousin Ward Pfeiffer Merner, one more landlubber to whom he'll need to try to explain the basics of deep-sea fishing. On the society page of the
Post
this morning is an item reminding local matrons that the Book and Thimble Society meets at 3:00 p.m. at the home of Mrs. Guillermo Arguedas.

Shortly before noon, Arnold has a strike, but doesn't sufficiently slack. In the next instant, though, everything has changed, because that same fish has crossed over to attack one of the other lines. From the logs: “Something
hit E.H. bait and he slacked, missed, slacked again and hooked a big marlin, blue and silver color.” Samuelson, in his
Motor Boating
piece: “E.H. stood up, let out fifty yards of line, struck three times hard, missed and slacked again. The next time he struck the fish was solidly hooked.” From his piece in
Outdoor Life:
“Hemingway stood up between his chair and the fish box, feet wide apart.… Pressing his finger tips lightly against the spinning spool to prevent a backlash, he let out fifty yards of line.” From the logs: “[The fish] jumped four or five more times and waggled his spear, showing parts of his wow out.… Carlos turned tiller over to Juan and took gaff. Cojo held chair and exerted calming influence on Carlos and Juan. Lopez Mendez got water and held chair. Arnold took pictures.”

When the fish jumped, he “shot upward, stiff as a ramrod, blue on top and silver below, the two colors divided sharply by a line down his body,” Samuelson wrote. The fish came down on its tail and shot up again. It seemed to hang there, a blue vision against a blue horizon with the blue water below.

“Harness,” Hemingway has commanded. He's now got the butt of the rod in the chair socket. Earlier, he'd been steadying the rod in a leather crotch cup affixed to his belt—but you don't want to fight a fish of this size with a crotch cup. The fish is liable to break your back, or haul you over.

In about thirty minutes, he brings it close enough to gaff. But the fish breaks free and carries away the gaff. The gaff floats to the surface and is retrieved by two market fishermen, who are watching the fight from a small skiff. The fish, still hooked, is pulling desperately for the bottom. Six times Hemingway gets it close, but for all his strength, he can't raise it. Then suddenly the animal is at the surface, an apparition. It's terrifying. From Samuelson's piece in
Motor Boating:
“Carlos buried the gaff into the marlin's head and we all took hold of the gaff handle and pulled him over the stern roller. When the marlin was well up it came forward so fast that its spear narrowly missed going through my middle before he flopped down on the deck.”

In a drizzle, the boat and occupants ran back to Havana. They weighed the fish at Casa Blanca, the village underneath La Cabaña fortress across the harbor from the city: 420 pounds. “Took pictures in rain. Hope we got something,” writes the log keeper.

The big Graflex gets positioned on a barrel. Dick Armstrong—an American correspondent for the Hearst chain, who lives at the Ambos Mundos and has been out on the boat often—is taking the pictures. (They've sent for him because he's a pro with a camera.) He keeps shooing away the
local urchins, but they keep peeking back into the frame. There must be twenty-odd Cubans, young and old, in and amid the recognizable faces, trying to line up for a posterity snap. Cadwalader, shirt collar open, pipe in place, is crowding in close, as if he's the one who's caught it. Arnold, the lank of bone and hank of hair, has his hands in his pockets. Carlos is squatting in front of the catch, with a rain parka over top of his sailor suit that's got “Pilar” on the front. Bullfighter Sid Franklin is duded up in a suit and tie and dark beret. And not least, here's the fisherman, in one frame looking predatory, in another relaxed, in another punch-drunk with fatigue. His white trousers are rolled at the cuff. Hanging down between his legs, resting against his fly, is his leather fishing belt and crotch cup. He's got his rod and reel in one hand, and in his other is his long-billed cap, and with this same hand he's reaching up and holding out the pelvic fin of the fish, in the center of everything, hung upside down by block and tackle, the great mouth open, the tip of his sword two inches from the slick pavement, that eye looking big as a soup bowl. Pictures and more pictures. And here's a funny thing: the man with the rage for data will write the wrong date on many of them, consternating his future chroniclers.

Later, Henry Fowler draws sketches and helps Hemingway with the steel-tape measurements. Later, too, Arnold is sent for an extra quart of whiskey. From
With Hemingway:

The cutting up of the fish into chunks will keep the fisherman from coming back to the dock later in the evening, when everyone has cleared away, to punch the dead thing into further oblivion. But in Bimini, year after next, Hemingway will famously do just that: show up at the dock close to midnight in a jubilant drunk to find his 514-pound giant bluefin tuna that he'd fought for seven hours (sweating off something like a pound an hour), and pound his fists over and over into the strung-up raw meat in moonlight the way prizefighters in the gym slam at the heavy bag.

Three days later, Cadwalader hooks into an even bigger fish, a monster black marlin. Carlos, standing on the roof of the cockpit when it strikes, swears the fish would have gone six or seven hundred pounds, maybe more. From
With Hemingway:
“E.H. would have traded the whole fishing season for such a strike.”

On August 13, a week after his blue marlin, Hemingway stayed in to write. He wanted to work on his book, but there was an odious magazine deadline to honor. That day he also answered a letter from MacLeish. They were both trying to patch up their most recent feud. “Was awfully glad to hear from you,” he wrote to Archie. “Had your letter on top of the desk to answer every day but fishing with all these scientificos no could do. Up every morning at—and too pooped at night. Scientificos, very good guys.… [W]e landed (E.H.) a $fuck that dollar sign 420 lb marlin in one hour and twelve minutes.” Half a dozen stream-of-consciousness paragraphs later:

Another distraction: Les Hemingway, with his seeming need to get attention, particularly his big brother's, has gone missing at sea—again—with a new sailing companion. The pair had shoved off from Key West on Saturday at midnight, trying for Havana. Now it's Tuesday (the day after Hemingway's letter to Archie), and they still haven't shown. So far, everybody's keeping a calm face. Jack O'Brine is covering the story for the
Post
. Two more days elapse, and then Hemingway himself is out searching for the “youthful mariners.” Late on Thursday, he finds them, twelve miles off the coast. He escorts them in, and for the last mile or so, as they're trying to make the harbor, he has to throw out a line and tow them in behind his own boat. In O'Brine's page-one account the next day, Les is popping quotes to the Havana press corps as his boat settles at the dock. Nah, he wasn't scared. Anybody got a smoke? “By the way, what day is it?” He's flashing the old Hemingway grin. Whatever tongue-lashing his brother
gave him that night hasn't been recorded, but in plenty of letters between the two in later years Hemingway speaks to his sibling in the way you might speak to an irksome dog. (There are also letters through the years in which Hemingway sounds generous, solicitous, and big brotherly, even though the thinly veiled contempt never seems far away.)

In the middle of the Lester-the-Pester fiasco, Hemingway wrote a letter to his mother-in-law in rural Arkansas. “Dear Mother: Thank you and Pauline's father very much for the birthday present. It was the largest looking fifty dollars I ever saw,” he began. He and Mary Pfeiffer were so totally different—she was a strict Catholic, conservative, provincial, a well-bred upper-class mid-South woman whose main obligation was to keep her home going smoothly—but he'd won her over and, as with the scientificos, enjoyed loosening her up. He railed at the way FDR's New Deal was ruining the country. He said that he now had about twenty-three thousand words done “on this thing I am writing on.” He couldn't stop himself from getting a little dig in at the relatives. “It was something of a blow to learn that an unknown cousin had been invited to spend two or three weeks with me at a time when I was hoping to finish a book but have found Ward no strain at all and very good company on the boat.”

A few days later he wrote to Gingrich, who was trying to edit a magazine by day and to write a novel by night. Can't be done, Hemingway told him. If you're serious about your craft, you need four to five hours at it every day. “What makes it is when you go over the whole piece each day from the start to where you go on from rewriting it really and then going on. Even then the actual writing is probably only about an hour and a half. Of course lots of times you can't write but nearly always you do. Each day you throw away what turned out to be shit in the stuff you did the day before.” Eight or ten paragraphs later: “Have to get out on the wasser now.… [T]his looks like a bad year. We may hang a huge one but so far they aren't running and it is hard work finding them.”

He wrote again to his mother-in-law, the second time in six days, and it's clear what's eating him. He said he had torn up two earlier letters to her because they were full of political invective. He thanked her again for the cash gift. He reported that Pauline had just been over and had gone back to Key West but was coming back on the ferry tomorrow. And then he said: “When I am writing a novel I am making nothing and am probably regarded by the family intelligence service as a loafer. On the other hand when I am all through with a novel I make plenty of money and then, while I am loafing, am regarded with respect as a Money Maker. Have
23,000 words done on this.” It was the second time in less than a week he'd mentioned that number.

Hemingway had said on Bastille Day, five days before crossing, that he had 201 manuscript pages. Not quite a month before that, on June 20, he had told Max Perkins he had “20,000 words of triply re-written shit-removed mss. so far.” So if he had twenty-three thousand keeper words by August 20—one month after crossing—he had written damn little in Cuba, even allowing for some overly generous estimates back in June.

But the sentence—
The Sentence
—had to have been part of the damn little. If it's an amazing sentence, it's also an entirely absurd and ill-fitting sentence to the book itself. It's not known whether it was written on
Pilar
or at a Havana café or up in the white-curtained fifth-floor room of the hotel whose name means “both worlds.” What can be said is that the sentence begins five lines down on manuscript page 223 in the acid-free archival box in Charlottesville and isn't over until the third line of sheet 228. Immediately before, the author is talking about trying to make yourself responsible only to yourself, and the feeling that comes of that when you're a writer. He starts out arrogantly and defensively but along the way seems to catch up to himself to say what he really wants to say. Was he even fully aware of what he was doing, or, as with the best of all writing, had his subconscious done its work in his sleep, so that in the actual writing a kind of autodidacticism, a sort of trancelike state, had taken over? Ostensibly, the sentence (
The Sentence
), which has very few cross-outs and revisions, is about the Gulf Stream, that mythic warm current named by Ben Franklin two centuries ago, deep as the bottom itself in places, sixty to eighty nautical miles wide in places, which forms in the western Caribbean Sea, flows into the Gulf of Mexico, courses through the Straits of Florida, hooks left, and moves up the southern coast of America to Cape Hatteras, before switching directions again, to the northeast, and breaking up into several other currents and crosscurrents of the Atlantic system.