Hemingway's Boat (79 page)

Chapter
. Reading EH's back-to-back Saturday and Sunday letters to Gingrich of July 14–15, 1934, gave the idea of how to construct the chapter. For instance, the reason I know Bumby came in with the mail while he was writing the Saturday letter is because EH said so in the letter.

For the start, that is, the ride over, Samuelson's memoir was crucial, along with his February 1935
Motor Boating
piece, “Marlin Fishing with Rod and Reel.” The clearance and manifest papers are in the
Pilar
papers at JFK. EH letter to MacLeish with “Why don't you come down here sometime” is April 4, 1943. “My right arm broken off short” passage is on page 148 of
Green Hills
. MacLeish's letter to Baker re the terns is January 31, 1965, and his earlier one re “most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creatures” is August 9, 1963. “Completely happy” passage is on page 55 of
Green Hills
. “Cool in the shade” passage is on page 107 –page 108.

Timelines (again): Although the clearance and manifest papers are dated July 18, suggesting that as the date of departure, I am convinced he didn't go until the following day. Why? Because of an old wire I came upon in the Hemingway archives at JFK. On Tuesday evening, the seventeenth, at 8:36 p.m., EH cabled his Havana boatman, Carlos, at his home at 21 Vives in Havana: LLEGAREMOS JUEVES TARDE. We will arrive late on Thursday. Which is to say, the nineteenth. (Gutiérrez had lately moved from 31 Zapata, and for some reason Hemingway seemed to be very fond of that address—he even put it in the
Esquire
piece of the year before, when Carlos's name came up.) What I think happened is that EH went down to the customhouse on Wednesday and filled out the departure papers, in order to be ready for the next day's early going. This tracks with events
on the Havana side. It also tracks with the A-1 story in the
Havana Post
on July 21 that EH and
Pilar
“entered Havana Bay Thursday night.” It also tracks with a front-page story in the
Citizen
on the eighteenth that Hemingway “will leave tomorrow on his cabin cruiser Pilar for Havana waters.”

Re the tension to get down the words: As noted, on May 26 EH advanced his safari story by less than two hundred words. Three were “strawy dung piles.” At some point between ms. and galley and published book, the phrase became “strawy piles of dung.” Above and below “piles” on the ms. sheet, he wrote the numbers 118 and 472. What they referred to, other than a toting up of some kind, is anybody's guess.

Finally, re the new issue of
Esquire
that Bumby brought to his dad's workroom on that Saturday morning: Three small pen-and-ink drawings illustrated the piece. One has Hemingway tilted back with his rod in his fighting chair, draining a bottle of booze, with a dozen other liquor or beer bottles beside him. On the jump page, two baby fish stare at a very large marlin. This is the caption: “Confidentially, he's a she.” In light of all we posthumously know, or think we know, or are all too eager to speculate, about Hemingway's psychosexual conflicts, his hair fetishes, his fascination behind the bedroom door with sexual role reversals, as these themes and fetishes and half-concealed desires seem to speak to us so loudly now from his grave, it's a little disconcerting—even startling—to go to a library and pull down from a dusty shelf a bound copy of the August 1934 issue of
Esquire
and come on that cartoonish illustration.

Precede
. “One Trip Across” first appeared in the April 1934
Cosmopolitan
. The passage from
Islands
is on page 110.

Chapter
. I cross-referenced a dozen sources: among others, Samuelson's memoir and his two journalism pieces of February and June 1935, EH letters, the
Pilar
logs, EH's fishing letter in the October 1934
Esquire
, and Havana newspaper accounts. What such cross-referencing mainly gets you is headaches. The Maestro is only too happy to contradict himself all over the place. For instance, re the catching of Pauline's pint-size marlin on Hemingway's birthday, he reports in
With Hemingway
the fish weighed sixty-four pounds and was gaffed in seven minutes. But in his
Motor Boating
piece (written closer to the actual event, and under the editing eye of his mentor), he says the fish weighed forty-four pounds and was gaffed in fourteen minutes. The
Pilar
log entry, which was surely written within hours of the catch, must be nearest the truth: a forty-four-pounder, landed in twelve minutes, length “six feet eight.” Bit of pedantry, I know.

The passage re water color is on page 107 of
Islands
. The quote re David lifting and reeling is on page 110. Linda Patterson Miller's essay about the
Pilar
logs is titled “The Matrix of Hemingway's
Pilar
Log, 1934–1935,” and is in
North Dakota Quarterly
, 64, no. 3 (1997). Bruccoli's comment about EH as restaurant critic is in his
Classes on Ernest Hemingway
. Doctorow's quote about EH and food is in his “Braver Than We Thought.” The passage from
Green Hills
re “cold sliced tenderloin” is on page 111 and the “chop box” passage is on page 110. EH letter to his mother-in-law is August 14, 1934. EH letter to Gingrich re trying to write a novel part-time is August 18, 1934. Second letter to Mary Pfeiffer is August 20, 1934.
The Sentence
is on page 148–page 150 of
Green Hills
. EH letter to Murphys re coming back across is November 7, 1934.
New Masses
smackdown of EH is November 27, 1934.

Portrait of the scientificos: largely from my own reporting. Re the big catch of August 6: writing of that day in his “Genio after Josie” letter in the October 1934
Esquire
, EH gave the technical data, as if only the facts, the names of things, had dignity: “This fish was hooked on a trolled cero mackerel bait, on a 12/0 Pflueger swordfish hook, No. 13 piano wire leader, Hardy 20-oz. tip and Hardy 6-inch reel with 500 yards of 39-thread line and was taken on board in one hour and twelve minutes from the time he was hooked.” From the logs of that day: “No. 2 of 1934. 12 feet 2 inches. 420 pounds. Girth 4 feet 8 inches. Head 3¼ inches.”

Re the
Pilar
logs: As noted, in the late 1980s, the JFK library acquired a carbon copy from the Samuelson estate—some ninety-five pages of gapped text, with a first full entry of July 28. (There was a partial entry ahead of this, thought to be from July 27.) It was assumed that this was all there was. But in the last few years, another eleven pages have come forth, found in the family archives of Toby and Betty Bruce in Key West. So the extant if still incomplete logs are now an even more valuable 106-page document, commencing on July 21, 1934.

Precede. Time
review of Les Hemingway's novel is November 2, 1953, and EH letter about it six years later is September 14, 1959. EH's yelling at his little brother aboard
Pilar
is described in Vernon (Jake) Klimo and Will Oursler's
Hemingway and Jake
. As said in the text, the passage from
Islands
forms that novel's perfect first paragraph. EH's letter to his brother re forbidding publication of any kind of book about him while he was alive is September 14, 1959.

I am staring at a curling photograph of Les and me taken by my wife with Les's camera, a Polaroid; it's more than thirty years old. Les and I are saying good-bye at the Chalk's seaplane ramp. A bright red hibiscus petal is stuck in the buttonhole of my denim shirt—Les has reached over and put it there. He has on his black horn-rims, a plaid woolen shirt. He could be my best older friend, or the favorite uncle always looking out for me. I can't really see his brown eyes—they're
obscured by his thick lenses. The man who did what he could. The apparition, free of the disease.

Chapter
. I drew on EH letters, accounts of others (John Dos Passos, e.g.), EH pieces in
Esquire
, logs, film footage. (A cache of footage is housed at the museum-library of the International Game Fish Association in greater Fort Lauderdale.) First epigraph is from letter to the very ill Patrick Murphy, April 5, 1935. Second epigraph is from EH's “a.d. Southern Style” in May 1935
Esquire
. Letter to Gingrich re “Here is the piece” is April 12, 1935. Stein in America: details were culled from news accounts and several biographies, including Janet Hobhouse's
Everybody Who Was Anybody
. Re EH and eight-millimeter home movies: In one of the sequences of
Pilar
getting away from the dock en route (on the first try) to Bimini, you see the boat turning around. The figures on shore are waving; the figures on the boat are waving back. But now
Pilar
's making a long, slow curve in the navy yard harbor. EH needs to retrieve the movie camera. What's this about? He wishes to document his leaving, and somebody on land has obliged him, but he's now coming back to collect the camera for all the anticipated catches on Bimini.

Re size of EH's reels: A few years ago, in Jupiter, Florida, I spent a happy afternoon with one of America's foremost antique tackle experts and collectors. Ed Pritchard not only had the tackle, he had the vintage catalogs from Abercrombie and Hardy. He owned both a 14/0 Vom Hofe and several of the larger Zane Greys. He took one of the latter from a cabinet—I think it was a seven-incher—and set it in my hands. It felt like a bowling ball—I was worried I'd drop the thing. I played with the spindle and listened to the oiled whir and click of its wheels and bearings. “How much do you want?” I joked. “Oh, give me fifteen or twenty thousand,” he said.

Precede
. July 20, 1935: The JFK library has many photographs, which aren't dated but are unquestionably from that day. Extremely helpful was the eight-millimeter footage donated to the International Game Fish Association museum by legendary Bimini angler Mike Lerner. Lerner's footage has these old-timey title cards: “That Memorable Day July 20. Four big blue Marlin on Bimini's Dock.”

“And meanest” quote is on page 10 of
Islands
. “Something about him” quote is on page 144. “Smallest boy” passage is on page 53. Re the never-completed trilogy of war novels, and re scholars still trying to sort out time frames of composition: I am not alone in thinking that the best work done on this entire period is by Rose Marie Burwell in her
Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels
. I am not only indebted to her 1996 book, but to the time she gave to me in an interview at her Oak Park home several years ago, with elegant refreshments.

Re EH's use of title page of
The Magic Mountain
for a fishing log: Literature professor and bibliographer James D. Brasch, retired now from Ontario's McMaster University, sent a close-up slide of that title page, and he was also generous on the phone and in correspondence with what he knew. In 1977, shortly after New Year's, Brasch and a fellow McMaster professor, Joseph Sigman, went to Cuba to work in Hemingway's library as part of an ongoing effort by bibliophiles to try to gauge how many books Hemingway had owned through the moveable feast of his life, from Oak Park to northern Michigan to Paris to Key West to Havana to Idaho, and all the Hemingway places in between. (Essentially, Brasch and Sigman were concerned with the personal libraries of Key West and Cuba.) The truth is we'll never know the total number of books EH owned in his lifetime. Like people, he left too many behind. According to the Boston-based Finca Vigía Foundation, which works privately with Cuban conservators to preserve Hemingway's home (including
Pilar
—see the end of these notes), there are about nine thousand items—books, magazines, pamphlets—in his personal library, and it's estimated that about 20 percent have something written by Hemingway in their margins.

Chapter
. I charted the timelines by again cross-referencing letters, movie footage, logs, EH pieces in
Esquire, Islands in the Stream
, books about Bimini in the thirties and the years beyond. As for broader history, about Bimini and also big-game fishing, I've mentioned in the text George Reiger's
Profiles in Saltwater Angling
, but mention should also be made of Ashley Saunders's two-volume
History of Bimini
. Saunders is the nephew of the composer of “Big Fat Slob,” and I have pedaled a bike with him up-island from Alice Town to another little clot of Bimini life called Bailey Town, to dine on a late dinner of fry bread and plantains and deep-fried grouper at a wobbly table covered with oilcloth—and listened to Nattie's nephew, on the way home, through the starry midnight blackness, singing verses of his uncle's song.

Re EH letter to Mike Strater of July 1933 re hoping to go eventually to Bimini for tuna, and of the boat he hoped to buy on his return from Africa: it's a pity we don't have an exact date for this letter, for it's important in the history of
Pilar
. I think it's primarily from this letter—ten months before
Pilar
was in EH's possession—that a lot of misinformation about her has barnacled itself to biographies.

Passage from
For Whom the Bell Tolls
re coded reference to Mike Strater is on page 380–page 381. Shipboard letter to Lerner re competition should “be all inside yourself” is March 4, 1937. EH
Toronto Star Weekly
piece is February 18, 1922. Letter to Perkins re how he's “changed the whole system” is June 19, 1935. Letter to Gingrich re “plenty rich boys” is June 4, 1935. The “slob” passages in
Islands
are page 35–page 39. Letter to Gingrich about “clipping” Dodi Knapp is June 4, 1935. Quotes re “I humiliated him” etc., appear on page 46, page 47, page 48 of
Islands
. A Knapp researcher named Ken Spooner has done invaluable work on the real-life Dodi, as opposed
to the EH fictional creation, and I am grateful to him for making some of it available to me.