Hemingway's Boat (40 page)

It's amazing to see what close attention the man with the genius for detail could pay to the dreariest household matters. From a Hemingway archive: “Isabel gets 8.00 Borrowed $1.50. So gets $6.50. Wants to borrow $2.00. So next week will get $6.00.” That's from a little later in 1935. Isabel—the more accepted spelling of her name seems to have been Isabelle—was keeping the family fed, for eight dollars a week. There are letters in which Hemingway writes to Perkins, asking him to deposit funds into one of his New York accounts. He'll provide the precise address: City Bank Farmers Trust, 22 William Street, New York City—as if Max lived in Afghanistan.

Home two days, on June 2, having gone to Sunday Mass with the family at Saint Mary Star of the Sea, he's writing to MacLeish about his newfound sporting paradise:

He signs it “Pappy.”

Top of the week, Pappy was itching to get back. The wires were coming from Bimini about new runs of tuna. Instead of waiting for the Friday seaplane, maybe he could hitch a ride over on Captain George Kreidt's Tuesday
mail boat. On Tuesday, still home, he wrote to Gingrich, telling him all about the trimming of Dodi Knapp, hectoring him as well: “I wish to hell you would come. I will be fishing alone there from June 7 to June 25…. I wish to hell you would come down. It is really a fine place and that kind of fishing is a hell of a lot better with two guys than one.” He told Gingrich he was leaving for Miami on Wednesday the fifth. (He didn't.)

Meantime, he arranged by wire and letter for Carlos Gutiérrez to come to Bimini for the rest of the summer. Carlos would fly over from Havana. They'd meet in Miami, spend the night, go over together the next day, on Friday the seventh. Carlos was to be sure and bring with him for Pauline four or five bottles of Camomila Intea, which was the hair-lightening lotion she'd been lately using to turn herself into a bottle blond. (The lotion could be had absurdly cheap from the Havana
mercados
.) Pappy was also exuberating down at Josie Grunts' saloon on Greene Street.

Thursday night Hemingway took the train to meet Carlos. They bunked into the Miami Colonial Hotel, on Biscayne Boulevard. It was his regular Miami stopping-over place, seven blocks from the main rail terminal, with a good view of the turquoise bay itself and the speedboats plying it. The hotel, vaguely Moorish, was fronted by a row of royal palms and inside there was an adequate dark-paneled bar for a body to have a drink. Hardly the Hotel de Crillon, overlooking the place de la Concorde, where Jake Barnes waited at five o'clock for Lady Brett, but the joint would do.

Back now, he brawled on, sported on, fished on. He adopted as his protégé twenty-one-year-old rich boy Tommy Shevlin, telling people of how Tommy, a serious sportsman despite his family's preposterous wealth, had lost six marlins in a row until he'd personally begun coaching him, and then, what do you know, here's kid Tommy hauling in a world's record blue at 636 pounds. Shevlin did it on June 18 aboard a boat called
Florida Cracker II
. Same day, the instructor, working from his own boat, brought in a 785-pound mako shark, which was only twelve pounds shy of a world's record. He got it in within thirty-five minutes, using his might-against-might technique. The jumping had been spectacular. Come September,
Outdoor Life
would publish an item about it in one of their columns: “New American and Atlantic Record. Mako, 786 lb. by Ernest Hemingway, at Bimini, aboard his own boat the Pilar.”

Pauline and her sister and the boys came on June 24. The Mexican Mouse began browning like a real Mexican. The Irish Jew was getting over his fear of water and learning to swim. Bumby was gone from his bed by every dawn, fishing from the docks or out in the shallow flats from a leaky
outboard with his newfound black pals. All of this got told, no, exuberated over, in letters to friends. On the beach he and the kids built a cabana out of thatched palms. Fresh fish got cooked on open-pit fires on the sand, using driftwood bone-whitened from the sun and scoured by the wind. (This image would appear in the opening pages of
Islands in the Stream
.) Sometimes, after dinner, he'd lead expeditions through the town cemetery, studying the mix of English and African names, calculating the life span of the community. Sometimes he'd go over to the jewel box–size Wesley Methodist Church, with its miniature belfry and board-on-batten walls and sit alone in that perfect architectural space. Later, the limp bars, with their cold beer and sand flooring.

Early in July,
Pilar
needed an engine overhaul, a new strut bearing, and a copper painting on her bottom parts. It didn't dent his spirits. He fished off the docks. He wrote letters. He read proofs of his Africa book. To Perkins, he said: “This is a lovely spot—The kids are crazy about it. Swimming on a wonderful sand beach in the middle of the gulf stream—a fine cool house with ocean on both sides of it for 20.00 a month—servant 20.00 more.” He was betting on
Green Hills
selling more than twenty thousand copies—okay, fifteen. “[I]t's the best writing I've ever done and the more often I read it the more I think it gets that extra dimensional quality I was working for.” He meant the extra dimension in the landscape, that ineffable, Cézannesque quality. He had to turn the last page of the letter upside down to get his signature in: “Best luck to you—Ernest.” He drew a circle and wrote inside it: “My best to Scott.”

Four and a half months before, in February (the Maestro would have been just striking off for the cold north and the rest of his life), he hadn't been so magnanimous. He and his editor had had a set-to over money, specifically about the price Scribner's was offering for serialization of the new book. Fighting about money was always the worst. He'd wanted $10,000 for the first-serial magazine rights; Perkins had said the company could offer only $4,500. Hemingway had gone down to the Key West Western Union office close to midnight on the day he got the offer and fired off a night letter of 150-some-odd words, starting with this:
LETTER JUST RECEIVED SORRY UNABLE UNDERSTAND YOUR ATTITUDE PRICE UNLESS YOU MEAN YOU WANT ME TO REFUSE IT TO RELEASE YOU FROM PURCHASING STOP
. The master of cable-ese had made “New York”
NEWYORK
—probably saved him a penny. It's true that his mood hadn't been helped by those horse doses of emetine the doctor had him quaffing for the latest flare-up of his amoebic dysentery, which had never
completely gone away since Africa. (Some mornings there'd be a cupful of blood in his stool.) Then, too, the semi-devout Catholic had made the mistake of giving up serious drinking for Lent. He'd limited himself to one drink a day. Christ, how long was Lent anyway? But that was then, wintertime. All was summer light now. Or mostly.

Eight days later (it's July 10), he writes to Sara Murphy, and again the manic onrush of sentences:

Ten days later, he brings in his tenth and eleventh catches of the season and puts them up on the dock along with two other marlin and then poses for many photographs. The next day, the gods arrange for him to land, on his birthday, a huge blue, 540 pounds, in thirty minutes. At the end of the month, he inventories the recent bounty for his various correspondents, sometimes listing weights and times with little arrows between the respective numbers, lest there be any confusion. To Gingrich: “540 on my birthday—Big current now and another run due in next 10 days.
Sure
—540 was 12 feet 8 inches—jumped 18 times—ran out 450 yards of line twice.” To Perkins: “Only thing have piles from lifting them—it is work to take one that size up over the stern!” To both editors, he describes the newest island pastime. He says it's called “Trying Him.” He's offered 250 bucks in
U. S. currency to anybody who can stay with him for three rounds of boxing. “Since the Knapp thing when anybody is tight here or feels dangerous they ask me to fight.… Have fought 4 times in last 2 weeks—twice with bare fists, twice with gloves—all knock outs—Don't know whether it is working the fish has built up my shoulder muscles or what but can
really
hit now.”

A thirty-six-year-old light-heavyweight in peak condition, Hemingway had issued an island-wide open challenge, with serious money attached. Some Hemingway chroniclers—not least his youngest son—have worked hard to debunk these old fight stories on Bimini. Was Willard Saunders—whom Hemingway claimed to have fought bare-fisted on the dock, finishing him off in something over a minute—really able to carry a piano on his head? Probably not, even though you can go into the waterside bars of Alice Town right now and hear that claim. Even the debunking son could acknowledge in his
Papa:
“And you know, it is something to issue a challenge to an island, and ultimately to the whole Bahamas, that you could knock out anybody before the end of three rounds. Sure, it was Hemingway, the twentieth-century Byron, overcompensating for being dressed as a girl for the first two years of his life.” In a letter to Gingrich on July 31, two weeks before he took
Pilar
home, Hemingway said, “Bimini is just about the size place that I could be heavyweight champion of!” But that sounds feigned, like an amateur fighter's too-obvious feint.

A week or so earlier, from Manhattan, on the engraved hotel stationery of the Waldorf-Astoria, Baroness Blixen had written. On the envelope: “Ernest Hemingway Esq. ‘M.S. Pilar' Bimini, Bahama Islands.” From the letter: “Darling fat Slob! I read a terrible story in the newspaper this morning about a marlin which had the cheek of weighing more than yours. Ernest you really can't have that!” Eva was leaving for Sweden—whether with Blix or without him wasn't clear from the letter—but she planned to return to Africa at summer's end. “Do come clown in the autumn,” she said. Nope. His book was coming out. The pub date was now set, October 25.

Somehow, it was as if once he stepped off the island, and back into America, everything in his life had to change, to foul. It began with
Pilar
herself.

He aimed his boat toward Key West just after midnight on August 14. He made it in twenty-six hours, arriving at about 2:00 a.m. on the fifteenth. That afternoon he could read about himself in the
Citizen:
“Ernest
Hemingway the author who, when not writing intensely interesting novels and articles, seeks to capture prize specimens of the larger denizens of the deep, arrived in port this morning on the Cruiser Pilar.” Oh, the hackdom.

The plan was to get the boat back, clean her up, rest her up, then hire a crewman or two to help him steer her over to Havana for the first two weeks of the September blue marlin runs. (Carlos Gutiérrez would rejoin the boat in Cuba.) The previous year they'd been “thickest” in the first three weeks of the month. But on the way down from Bimini,
Pilar
had begun to burn serious oil, and by the time he'd angled her through the little cut at the northwest corner of the submarine pens at the navy yard, the big Chrysler was smoking two quarts an hour. He ordered a new set of piston rings from Detroit, only to learn the best mechanic was not in town. Havana began to look seriously off.

Almost no sooner was he back than out-of-town guests descended, staying five days. He was trying to get a story started. On August 25, the day after the company was gone, he took
Pilar
out on the Stream around Key West and tried to kid himself into thinking he could make Havana anyway. The next day he told Gingrich: “If it would not have been any worse would have left tonight at midnight. But it is plenty worse.” He meant the fouled rings. Cuba was now out for sure.

A few days later, over the Labor Day weekend, a killer hurricane. It is said to be the first recorded Category 5 event in the country's history. Although it struck all the Keys, the storm directed its full fury—an eighteen-to-twenty-foot surge—at the CCC (Civil Conservation Corps) camps occupied by World War I veterans on Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys, near Islamorada, about forty-five miles from Key West. Hundreds died. Key West was only nicked. All the same, it was the closest Hemingway ever came to losing
Pilar
. He wrote about that and about the storm itself in a famous piece titled “Who Murdered the Vets?” which was published in
New Masses
. Even though Hemingway had no use for the magazine's Marxist agenda, he did the piece (after the magazine's editor had wired, fairly pleading) mainly because of his own fury at how the vets at Matecumbe had been left criminally in harm's way by the bureaucrats in FDR's Washington—or this is how he saw it. They could have been evacuated in time. If his report was scant on hard journalistic fact and documentation, it was long on his passion.