Hemingway's Boat (80 page)

Re the question of EH's first-ever tuna catch: On page 272 of his bio, Baker describes a different and much larger tuna that he didn't hook but fought for hours. The suggestion is that
this
was EH's first battle with a bluefin, and that the fight occurred in May. But Dos Passos, who witnessed the fight, wasn't on Bimini anytime in May. He and his wife were there the month before, but then left and didn't come back to the island (and then only for a week), until the second week of June. Katy and Dos watched the battle from the top of
Pilar
's cabin, and Dos describes it in
The Best Times
. So I think that the tuna catch I've told of—and that EH wrote of in his August
Esquire
letter—was his first one, as well as Bimini's first-ever recorded bluefin that was brought in unmutilated. In the
Esquire
piece Hemingway says, “I was steering into the sea with a big southwest breeze blowing when we hooked
the first one
.” (Italics mine.) He then tells of this 381-pounder with the head that seemed made of chromium. EH doesn't give a date for the historic catch, and neither do his letters, but, as I say in the text, it had to have happened in the latter half of May. Incidentally, the
other
fish was hooked by a local named Charlie Cook, caretaker of Cat Cay. The fight lasted something like ten hours and ended in darkness with a circle of boats shining their searchlights on
Pilar
's stern. By the time they got the fish into the boat, only backbone, head, and tail remained: apple-cored.

Finally: The original document of Baker's Strater interview is in the Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Precede
. Re question of whether EH and Sara Murphy were ever lovers: my own hedge is yes. Nearly from the start, they seemed to have connected with each other powerfully, and you can get it from their letters, in coded and less-coded ways. Such as this one, of April 27, 1934, a fortnight before he claims
Pilar:
“Dearest Sara: I love you very much, Madam, not like in Scott's Christmas tree ornament novels but the way it is on boats where Scott would be sea-sick.”

Chapter
. Letters, logs, diaries, movies, photographs, oral histories. Also works by other Bimini anglers as well as of some general Hemingway hangers-on. In the former category, S. Kip Farrington's
Fishing with Hemingway and Glassell
was helpful, and in the latter Ben Finney's
Feet First
. (Both are self-aggrandizing.) Letter to Max re “lovely spot” is July 2, 1935. EH midnight wire to Max is February 18, 1935. Letter to Gingrich re birthday catch is July 31, 1935, and one re his “piles” to Max is the day before—July 30. Letter re “the Knapp thing” is to Gingrich,
July 31. “Who Murdered” piece is in
New Masses
, September 17, 1935. “Writers should work alone” quote is from page 21 of
Green Hills
, and Mark Twain quote is page 22. EH's letter to Janet Flanner is April 8, 1933.

Quote from
A Moveable Feast
appears on page 76.

Precede
. Grace's family albums are too fragile to be examined any longer in the original. But a transcript and reproduction of their contents will give new awe for her will, energies, abilities, suffocations, egotisms, loyalties. Her son's second album charts his life from age twenty-three months to five years, five months. On page 8, a picture of EH fishing on a log at Windemere, with this caption: “Gonna cats a big back bass.” (He's in overalls, boots, straw hat.) On page 11, he's naked on a boat, pointing to a tree, with this caption: “little mercury, quite unconscious.” On page 30, seated in a chair with his newly born sis, Ursula: “I wuv her to pieces.”

Chapter
. I have stood on the shoulders (metaphor I used earlier) of more than a dozen Oak Park and Michigan historians. For the canoe trip down the Des Plaines, the family of Ray Ohlsen was crucial. His three daughters and one son, all proud midwesterners in upper age, had vivid memories of their dad. So did several middle-aged midwestern grandsons and grandnephews. The Ohlsen family provided a copy of a 1974 tape recording that Ohlsen made with his grandson, Steve Rae, and also a transcript. The historians and archivists at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, housed in the Oak Park Public Library, had a copy of EH's January 15, 1961, letter from Mayo. The foundation also had photographs of the canoe trip; JFK as well. After I had studied these photographs for a while, a dumb question occurred to me: Who took the photographs of EH and Ohlsen along the stream bank and at their campsites? It must have been their fellow high school buddy, Toy Ullman, who joined them briefly on the trip. (Ohlsen speaks of Ullman in the tape recording, but makes no mention of how he caught up with them and if he had his own canoe.) I'm guessing he came overland, perhaps on the train, camped out with them for at least a night, and then went on his own back to civilization.

I said in the text I had a second postscript: Ray Ohlsen himself. What was the rest of his life like? At Class Day in graduation week, Hemingway had delivered the class prophecy and said that Cohen—he called him by his real name—would end up president of Harvard. What I ended up learning about the history of the
real man moved me. If his story—and I can only suggest the bare outline of it—sounds ordinary, un-Hemingway-like, sane, decent, midwestern, banal even, well, that's pretty much my point.

His grandkids—sixteen at his death, twelve great-grandchildren—used to call him Dad-o. In retirement Dad-o drove this rancid old 1964 Rambler station wagon, and he loved loading up the kids on an airless Peoria summer night and carting them off to Velvet Freeze, “Home of the Wonder Dog.”

He was married to the same good woman for sixty-two years, not without heartache and temporary separations due at least in part to his difficulties in holding steady work. Instead of getting hitched in Illinois, he and Angeline had run off in 1925 to a justice of the peace at the Lake County Courthouse in Crown Point, Indiana, because that's where Rudolph Valentino got married.

In his retirement from Caterpillar, Dad-o became something of a rose fanatic. He gave up cigarettes just to have the money for new bushes. Weekends, he'd go around to juried shows with one of his favorite grandsons, Andy Rae. They'd get up early on a Saturday morning and go to the backyard and snip a just-blooming “Peace” rose or a bright red “Mr. Lincoln.” They'd put the prizes in a Styrofoam cooler and then light out for Illinois burgs like Pekin and Decatur and Mattoon, hoping to snare a best-of-show medallion. Late in the day, grandfather and grandson would pull into the driveway at 1013 North Frink—“Stinky-Frinky,” the grandkids called it—beat and happy.

At age seventy-five, the idea came up to make a tape recording about his memories of his boyhood friend. In his flat midwestern drawl, he read into the machine Hemingway's letter from Mayo. His voice lilted just a little on the word “kid.” The kid was on his way to eighty-nine when the massive stroke took him off in the early fall of 1987. His family had him cremated. The roses in the backyard and along the side of the house had come in beautifully that summer.

EH letter to Philip Young is March 6, 1952. Young's statement re “All theses” distorting the work is in his 1966
Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration
. EH's undated letter to Marcelline re use of Windemere is circa July 1937, and his apology is December 22, 1938. The quote from
Feast
re the fishermen of Paris is on page 43. EH letter from the Pine Barrens is to Howell Jenkins, July 26, 1919. Marcelline's passage about her father's “disciplines” is on page 31 of her memoir, and Morris Buske's “Hemingway Faces God” is in the Fall 2002
Hemingway Review
.

Re travel on the
Manitou
and other Great Lake steamers to the northland: William Lafferty of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, had the old timetables—and much else. (His website, Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia, was very helpful.) George Hilton's
Lake Michigan Passenger Steamers
was useful, as was a July–September 1946 article, “Chicago to Mackinac: Story of the Northern Michigan Transportation Company,” by Thomas Dancey, in
Michigan History Magazine
.

The
Manitou
, which I think of as the primal Hemingway boat, changed ownership several times during her career—but her cut-above service didn't alter. Her
longest operator was the Northern Michigan Transportation Company, referred to by almost everyone as the Northern Michigan Line. Just the name is said to have enlivened the pulses of Illinoisans dreaming through hard winters. In the
Chicago Tribune
and other dailies of the city, you'd see the NMTC's display ads for their flagship boat, the one “equipped for people who travel right.”

For the northland itself: Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant has an extensive Hemingway collection (and an angling one, too). In 2003, the Clarke mounted an exhibit called “Hemingway in Michigan, Michigan in Hemingway,” and the catalog was valuable. In 2007, the library helped put on an exhibit at the Crooked Tree Art Center in Petoskey
(Up North with the Hemingways and Nick Adams)
, and again the companion booklet-catalog was helpful. (The two quotations in the text from Professor Frederic Svoboda are in that publication.) The Petoskey District Library's History Department has much northland material. Constance Cappel Montgomery's 1966 study,
Hemingway in Michigan
, was helpful—and still up-to-date in its own way. Walloon Lake has its own library—the Crooked Tree District Library—with works on the history of Walloon, particularly a lavishly illustrated local history–oral history titled
Walloon Yesterdays
. Speaking of lavish: JFK has hundreds of pictures of the Hemingways in Michigan, and boats are in half of them, or so it seems to me. And, of course, Grace's exhausting albums, word and photo. Also: Jim Sanford, Marcelline's son (and EH's nephew), in Petoskey, was generous with his memories about water, about boats, about family disputes, and so was his brother, John Sanford, in California, who said in an e-mail: “I wish there were sailboats as I am a sailor myself.” Both brothers remembered the canoes. When EH was in high school (long before the Sanfords were alive), he gave his kid sister Sunny, five years his junior and the tomboy of the four girls, a picture of himself paddling a canoe. He wrote on the back: “Me trusty Bitch Bark viacle. Length 9 feet wt 20 lbs. Just as sturdy as a church, like hell. You have to part your hair in the middle to balance it.” Years later, Madelaine Hemingway Miller (Sunny) reproduced the picture in her adoring memoir,
Ernie
. The paddle her bro's using is made of ashwood, given to him by an Indian who lived in the woods behind Windemere. Finally: in the text I spoke of Hemingway forsaking northern Michigan. But we do know he went back as a rolling spy at least once—September 1947, in his new royal blue Buick Roadmaster, with Toby Bruce doing most of the driving, the two of them en route from Miami to Ketchum via Walloon Lake. The last look.

Isak Dinesen's oft-quoted line, misquoted through the years, seems to have first been said in a telephone interview, and published in
The New York Times
Book Review
, November 3, 1957. Jack Gilbert's poem is collected in his
Refusing Heaven
.

Precede
. Re the level of his anxiety and of how concentrated his mind had to have been: In the first letter of October 2 to Scribner, written by hand, three pages long, Hemingway starts in on the same line as the greeting, as if he can't take the time to skip down a line. At the end, in a PS without the “PS”: “Times are bad general but we've seen worse.” The last four words are going up the side of the page. I first saw this letter, a photocopy, in the Baker files at Princeton. There's a red line drawn through the sentences “But this boy Gigi was not brave as Patrick always was. He was only terribly skillful and corrupted. His mother, and her sister being corrupt did not help him much.” In the left margin, in what looks like Baker's handwriting, are four words I've wondered about: “delete without indicating deletion.”

Harbor scum: In
Islands
, in the middle “Cuba” section, there's a passage about the diseased upper end of Havana Harbor. Thomas Hudson, having lost all three sons, is getting ready to go into town to make a report to a military attaché at the American Embassy re his submarine patrols. He's trying not to think about it, and the “it” seems to be almost anything and everything in his recent and not-so-recent life. “It wasn't the sea you wanted to forget,” he thinks to himself. Dressed now, he comes out of the long, bright living room that still seems so enormous to him. He comes down the stone steps. Some dead branches have fallen from the great ceiba. He climbs into his car with a drink of gin and bitters in his hand and his driver takes him down the long drive and unchains the gate and turns onto a side street of the dirty village below. They maneuver onto the old stone highway of Cuba, the Central Highway, cracked and cobbled, running downhill for three miles. A man drinking and self-pitying for things he can't fully articulate, gone children, gone wives, destroyed friendships, squandered opportunities at his art, gazes from the window. He hates this part of the ride the most. “I drink against poverty, dirt, four-hundred-year-old dust, the nose-snot of children, cracked palm fronds, roofs made from hammered tins, the shuffle of untreated syphilis, sewage in the old beds of brooks, lice on the bare necks of infested poultry, scale on the backs of old men's necks, the smell of old women, and the full-blast radio.” Now the approaching smokestacks of Havana Electric. Now the upper limit of the harbor, where the stagnant water is “as black and greasy as the pumpings from the bottoms of the tanks of an oil tanker.” The gates of a railroad crossing come up and the car is moving again and there on the right are the old wooden-hulled ships of the merchant marine. They “lay against the creosoted pilings of the wooden docks and the scum of the harbor lay along their sides blacker than the creosote of the pilings and foul as an uncleaned sewer.” This old colonial harbor, with its scum, has been like this for three or four hundred years.