Hemingway's Boat (30 page)
Authors: Paul Hendrickson
He starts out so calmly, in the middle of a paragraph with the words “That something.”
That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so
they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thingâthe stream.
On September 5, Hemingway went over to Key West to see the family and now the book caught fire. (In Havana, Carlos and Arnold had put
Pilar
in dry dock to scrape and paint her bottom.) In three days, he piled
up seventy-two manuscript pages. Carlos sent a wire that he should come back as quickly as possible, because it seemed as if the big ones would run at last. The new moon was up. On the fourteenth, the fisherman rode back on the car ferry with his satchel of burning prose only to encounter the same lousy fishing luck. The bad luck even extended to the crew: while he was away, Juan had to be taken to the hospital with a perforated ulcer, and
Pilar
's new cook, Bollo, was one step up from disaster. And yet writing, when it's going, will cure everything, anything. To the Murphys, Gerald and Sara, he writes, on September 30:
We (I) have caught 10 of these fishâ420â324â243â228âetc etcâdown to 104 pounds. The weather is still good and there are no hurricanes yetâHave gotten through fifteen days of the bad hurricane weather and if we get through next 20 are all right.⦠Hope to get a big fish at 900â1200 lbs. Boat has been lovelyâcomfortable and a marvelous sea boatâall we hoped for and more.⦠Have been working hard on this long thing and now have 50,000 words doneâ
Three days later, he wrote to Perkins:
Dear Max.
We have had a good summerâHave 50,000 words done on this long thingâHave caught 11 big marlin (none over 420 lb. though) and done a hell of a lot of work for and with the Philadelphia MuseumâCadwalader, their director and Fowler, the ichthyologist, were down for a month.⦠I went to Key West for two weeks early in Sept to write on this thing and with so much juice went very well.
If his word count was accurate, he'd more than doubled the size of “this long thing” in less than six weeks, from August 20, when he wrote to his mother-in-law and for the second time used the figure twenty-three thousand.
So much juice
. It's the writing mystery itself, of course: how for weeks and months nothing, or almost nothing, seems to be happening, and then you locate the storytelling groove, get the juice, and suddenly it's as if you're highballing on Interstate 80 in Iowa in the middle of the night in an eighteen-wheeler, not a state trooper in sight. Christ, you'll make Los Angeles by morning. It's anybody's guess what kicked the Hemingway rig
into fifth gear, but at least part of the juicing might have been his belief that the scientificos wished him to lead a gorilla expedition to Africa. (He mentions the prospect in his letter to Max.) But who cares what it was? The second wind had kicked in.
He fished on, wrote on, for three more weeks, sustaining in the process a small cut on his index finger that swelled into a bad infection. (From
With Hemingway:
“Then his whole fist swelled so that it was smooth across the knuckles with red streaks spreading up along the veins of his arm.”) Even without that mishap, it was clear the Cuban fishing year was done. He filed exit papers with the American vice consul, testifying that he was bringing no infectious diseases back to the States, that his boat had remained thirty yards from shore while he'd been a three-month guest in Cuba. (It's why they needed to use the dinghy named
Bumby
to get to and from
Pilar
every morning and evening.) Well before dawn on October 26, Hemingway and his apprentice puttered out of Havana Harbor and took
Pilar
across. As Hemingway wrote to the Murphys a couple weeks later:
We picked a good night to come across as soon as the hurricane warnings were down and before a norther should start and raised sandkey in nine hours forty minutes lead on the shipchannel buoy. Pretty good with a five knot current to figure and it rough as hell in the middle of the gulf with a beam sea.⦠I had an infected finger then hand for about a month so didn't write. Wrote on my book mornings then kept it in a sling and now is o.k.
Sometimes Hemingway will contradict himself in successive sentences: he didn't write at all, he wrote every morning. Postscripting to the Murphys: “It is lovely indian summer weather here nowâPlace looks beautifulâHave lots of pep for workingâ”
From
With Hemingway:
“We only went out in good weather half days and, after the marlin, catching sailfish and dolphin was more like play than a sport.”
One day when they're out, the apprentice asks, “Do you think I'll ever make a writer?” The teacher: “You're getting better. Much better. If you have talent, it will show up later.” The pupil presses a little more. “I was thinking about a few years from now if I find out for sure I don't have any talent.” Just keep working, the teacher says.
On November 16, Hemingway proclaimed his book done. (He'd continue
to obsess on it, naturally, up until its publication the following October.) He immediately wrote to various friends. To Gingrich: “Finished the long book this morning, 492 pages of my handwriting. Going to start a story tomorrow. Might as well take advantage of a belle époque while I'm in one.” To Perkins: “I finished the long bitch this morning, 492 msspages, average, I suppose, something over a hundred and twenty words to the page.” To the Murphys: “The weather here is perfect now, cool and fresh and swell for working. I finished my long thing, 492 pages, today.” Writing well is the surest revenge.
Four days later, he wrote again to his book editor, having made exact word counts of sixteen random pages. He decided that the work averaged out to 150 words per pageâsome, because of narrative, had a lot more words, while other pages, straight dialogue, added up to only eighty or ninety words per page. “There are 491 pages which would make it 73,650 wordsâ” he wrote. In the counting, you can get a sense of what the cost of 73,650 words had been.
New Masses
, the Communist-leaning weekly, which had never been hesitant to attack his work, took off the gloves in a signed piece by Robert Forsythe. (It was a pseudonym.) It was titled “In This Corner, Mr. Hemingway” and was all about how he couldn't take it. “Quite the most delicate thing in the world is an author and quite the most delicate of all authors is Mr. Hemingway,” it began. “He is, for example, the most honest man alive in telling the truth about a friend. He will not shirk his duty, he will hide no grisly detail even if it ruin the friend, but art will be served and literature will be enriched.” The piece, so entertainingly written, so close to the mark, kept up its body blows:
The suspicion that Mr. Hemingway may have slipped slightly south of genius is calculated to throw the great man into furious exercises on the punching bag.⦠[H]e has since enjoyed himself on various occasions in slitting the throats of his hated ones, but he will tremble in rage if a reviewer on the Tuscaloosa (Ala.) Times so much as mentions him without reverence. As a prize fighter, he must have been a spectacle.⦠[I]t may be said that Mr. Hemingway so cherishes a lukewarm review that he will be in a mood to resent it physically ten years later. Like an elephant and a Bourbon, he forgets nothing. As for learning anything, Mr. Hemingway quite scorns the notion. I have been
told by Mr. Hemingway's friends, and his works bear out the rumor, that he will not read a book for fear of the effect on his art. What he does is go about masquerading as a photographic plate, acquiring impressions and giving them off like a tin-type man at a fair. As a general thing he uses the personal tragedies of his friends for his fictional masterpieces and his hatred for his enemies for his non-fiction works.
And there was plenty more.
But our devils are the gauge of our angels. If Hemingway went around the house in a fury following that, he was only kindness when first-time novelist Irving Stone and his wife appeared at his doorstep. Stone, four years younger, had read
The Sun Also Rises
in 1926 in close to one sitting and felt there was now a whole new written language for Americans. Eight years later,
Lust for Life
âhis biographical novel about Vincent van Gogh, based on van Gogh's letters to his brother Theoâhad just been published. He used the occasion to write to Hemingway to ask if he could stop by and present him a signed copy. Hemingway led them through the airy, high-ceilinged rooms of 907 Whitehead, past the Juan Gris canvases and big-game skins on the tile floor. He poured tumblers of whiskey. “Are you having any fun?” he asked several times. The visitors stayed two hours and in the middle of it Hemingway's children came into the room in their robes and pajamas to say good night. Their papa horsed around with each, shook hands formally with each. At the door, saying good-bye, the magnanimous host offered to take his fellow writer out on
Pilar
the next day.
But the weather was bad the following day, so the two sat on the upturned bottom of a small boat down at the submarine pens and talked about writing. Thirty-two years later, in 1966, in a letter to Carlos Baker, Stone could seem to remember every bit of it, in the same way that Ned Calmer, Hemingway's friend from Paris days, could remember for the rest of his life how fine and gentle and generous Hemingway had acted toward him and his ill wife just as Hemingway was crossing the Atlantic to acquire
Pilar
. In 1966, Stone lived in a big house in Beverly Hills, his commercial novels having been made into big-budget movies. But to read his letter to Baker is to get the idea that he would have given up nearly everything to write the kind of books Hemingway had written. “I remember when Ernest joined the backs of his hands to make a point, I saw that they were covered with cuts and scratches from fish hooks and lines and all the other
bruises one gets hunting big game fish. Ernest looked down at the cuts and scars and said proudly: âFisherman's hands.' â¦Â I think he expressed those two words with as much pride as anything he said about any of his books.”
Several years ago, on a sultrifying June evening, I went out for a boat ride in Key West with Toby Bruce's son. His name is Benjamin Bruce, but around Key West everyone knows him as Dink Bruce. Like his father, who knew Hemingway intimately for almost three decades, Dink's a small, compact figure with a taciturn air. Dink's dad, T. Otto Bruce, who died of lung cancer in 1984, and whom everyone called Toby, was originally from Pauline's hometown, Piggott, Arkansas, which is tucked up into the northeast corner of the state, close to the Missouri border.
Toby Bruce was twelve years younger than Hemingway and less than half his size. He was the ultimate fix-it man. He met Hemingway in the late twenties but didn't get to know him until a few years later, when Hemingway had come to Piggott with his family for Christmas. The friendship is said to have cemented itself when Toby proved himself a good thrower of skeet targets for Hemingway behind the Pfeiffer barn. Toby had remodeled the barn, had built it into a kind of studio to give Hemingway a place to write on visits to his in-laws. “I knew how to throw a trap for clay pigeons,” he once said. “I'd give him the business. A low one, then a high one, then a skimmer.” Eventually, Hemingway convinced Toby to come to Key West. For the last three decades of Hemingway's life, Toby was the ever-ready secretary, cross-country driving companion, drinking and hunting mate, surrogate parent to Patrick and Gigi, money holder, property manager, fixer-upper, listening post for the newest round of injustices and grievances. After the breakup with Pauline, Toby lived for a time in Cuba with Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. Then he said he was going back to Key West. Still, the skimmer was seldom more than a wire or phone call or letter away. Toby's the one who, in 1935, not long after first coming to Key West (he'd hitchhiked down from Piggott), built a chain-link fence for Hemingway around 907 Whitehead. Two years later, Pauline got Toby to tear down the unsightly chain-link and put up a more privacy-providing brick wall. She wangled bricks from the city at an absurdly cheap price (later to be the subject of a city council inquiry). Toby borrowed a pickup truck and began transporting nineteen thousand bricks from the navy yardâthree thousand at a time. He'd not tried to lay
a nearly six-foot-high brick wall in his handyman career. But Toby's wall, with its uneven bricks spaced at odd intervals, bulging out from their mortar here and there, stands today.