Hemingway's Boat (24 page)

His Key West saloonkeeper pal, Joe Russell, known by Hemingway as Josie Grunts, did the marlin introducing. Russell, about a decade older than Hemingway, owned a thirty-four-foot cabin cruiser named the
Anita
, a little clunky-looking but very able, with plenty of speed. According to the myth (partly promulgated by Hemingway), Russell is said to have made something like 150 rum-running trips from Havana to the States since the start of Prohibition in 1920. In December 1933, when the ban ended (the ban had never quite been recognized in Key West), Russell set about acquiring a lease on a “blind-pig” bar in a rickety wood-frame building at 428 Greene Street that quickly got on the map of every sailor in port. He'd added a room for dancing and named it the Silver Slipper. Sometime in 1934 he renamed the bar Sloppy Joe's, supposedly at the suggestion of Hemingway, and in a bow to the saloon of the same name in Havana. The owner kept a sawed-off pool cue behind the bar for banging heads. After the fights were over, his barmen would swab the blood off the floor with a mop and bucket—so goes an
Esquire
account in the fall of 1934 by Hemingway, lamenting that Josie Grunts, who had to make it while he could off the drunk sailors, hadn't been able to join him that summer at the helm of his new boat. (In 1937, Russell would relocate Sloppy Joe's once more, to 201 Duval Street. The former Greene Street address—the bar Hemingway calls Freddy's in
To Have and Have Not
, and also the spot where he met the leggy blond much his junior whom he'd eventually marry—became Captain Tony's Saloon.

In April 1932, Russell had taken Hemingway and Charles Thompson (the easygoing hardware store owner) and Hemingway's Kansas City
cousin Bud White and one or two others across to Cuba. What was supposed to have been a two-week holiday with some big-game fishing thrown in turned into a two-month marlin marathon. Pauline came over twice, but Hemingway was there for the duration, wild in his new passion. He kept a log in a book of Western Union cable blanks. During this trip, Hemingway met Carlos Gutiérrez for the first time and gathered in everything he could about the ways of marlin. On May 30, to his pal Dos Passos, he wrote: “Well, you played it wrong not to make this trip. Damn I wish you could have made it.… You ought to see them strike, Dos. Jump more than tarpon and fast as light—one jumped 23 times.… Have had 17 strikes in a day—never less than 3.”

In
Esquire
's inaugural issue, Autumn 1933, in his first contribution to the magazine, Hemingway speaks of marlin “traveling along the edge of the dark, swirling current from a quarter of a mile to four miles off shore; all going in the same direction like cars along on a highway.” Finest life you could ever know.

During that Saturday morning in his workroom, on the eve of crossing over for the third campaign, Hemingway's oldest son, Bumby—his child by Hadley, who was down for his summer visit with his dad and half brothers—came in with the mail. There was the new issue of
Esquire
, the August edition, about to hit newsstands, with his latest piece, “Out in the Stream: A Cuban Letter,” featured at the front of the magazine. He'd written it in May in anticipation of the summer's fishing season. A couple of days before he sent it off, Hemingway had written to
Esquire
's editor: “It seems to be about fish and is I'm afraid a little bit scientific. Will try to ease off the science and let a good gust of shit blow over it in the re-writing.” He'd also said in that letter, dated May 25, “Am on the 59th page of a long story in which am very interested. Looks as if it would be considerably longer.” Here is the first sentence on manuscript page 59 of
Green Hills of Africa
, as it exists, after changes, on page 50 of the published book: “[In] the glasses it was a rhino, showing very clear and minute at the distance, red-colored in the sun, moving with a quick waterbug-like motion across the hill.” And here is more from that page: “So we went back to the camp, down the hill in the dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot, walking along that deep trail, that wound through the dark hills, until we saw the firelight in the trees.” Again, that's how the sentence appears in its published form. Hemingway had made about a half-dozen edits, simplifying, streamlining, crossing out, inserting, replacing seven words (“under the rubber of our shoe soles”) with just two
(“under foot”). In all, he seems to have taken his story forward by about one manuscript page in what I am guessing was four or five hours of effort. And the next day, judging from his correspondence, same thing: one more page, less than two hundred words. This was the day, May 26, Hemingway wrote to his angler friend Waldo Peirce, in Maine, and said he now had about sixty pages done on a long story, and that their mutual friend, Archie MacLeish, who had been down visiting, was one of the great poet–nose pickers of all time and wondering, by the way, Waldo, what the hell is it that American writers turn into?

If the magazine piece that ten-year-old John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway brought to his dad's workroom on July 14 was only perishable journalism, it was also a piece seeking to be serious in its own way, in and amid its boasting, in and amid its gratuitous cracks about movie actresses and homosexuals. Edmund Wilson, were he alive, would probably be jeering at this statement. He believed Hemingway helped ruin himself as an artist with his “rubbishy” articles “for a men's-wear magazine.”

Hemingway tells his readers it's his hedging belief that almost every known variety of marlin, the white, the silver, the striped, the black, maybe even the blue, are only color and sex and age variations of the same fish. The different colors represent different growth stages, not different marlin species. The white is the first stage and the black is the last stage. The black marlin is always a female even if in its earlier life it had been male. “The jewfish becomes a female in the last of its life no matter how it starts and I believe the marlin does the same thing,” he writes. “Now you prove me wrong” is the article's last sentence. Black marlin are very old fish, he explains, and you can always tell by the coarseness of their hide and bill, but above all by the way they tire, after the initial struggle, which you'd swear is going to crack your back when they sound. Except that the phrase “the way they tire” had come out as “the way they live.” The typo was infuriating.

The self-taught naturalist, son of a physician-naturalist, writes of having a lot of time to think out on the water, while the sun slants in like molten lead, as the teasers dip and dive in the wake. If he's caught ninety-one marlin in the last two years, he'll have to land and open up several hundred more before any serious conclusions can be drawn. In the meantime, he has his questions, about many kinds of fish, although especially marlin: Why is it that they always travel from east to west against the current? Where do marlin go after they reach Cape San Antonio at the western tip of Cuba? What makes them decide to migrate down from the Bahamas in the first
place? Could there be a countercurrent hundreds of fathoms below the surface current—and do they return working against that? Do they make a circle through the entire Caribbean? Why, in the years of abundance of marlin off the California coast, have the fish been equally plentiful off Cuba? Is it possible that all marlin are following all the warm currents of all the oceans on the earth? Why does the south wind keep marlin from biting off the coast of Cuba when the same wind makes far lesser fish bite off the Florida Keys? And as for a striped marlin, with its “small head, heavily rounded body, rapier-like spear,” with its broad lavender stripes that encircle its body from gills to tail like bands on a barrel, well, the market fishermen of Havana would swear to you the striped are all males. And yet: “This time last year we caught a striped marlin with a roe in it. It wasn't much of a roe it is true. It was the sort of roe you would expect to find in certain moving picture actresses if they had roe, or in many actors.”

Hemingway's marlin theories, advanced with seriousness and some low humor, have been proven wrong by time and natural scientists. But he had the theories, he had the bent of scientific mind—that seems the point to appreciate.

The next afternoon, Sunday, July 15, home from Mass with Pauline and his sons, again up in his workroom, the congenitally restless man wrote another letter to
Esquire
's editor.

“Out there” in the last sentence refers to Africa. The “F.E.R.A. Jew administered phony of a town” is the place he's about to be shed of for the next several months. On July 2, 1934, Key West's city council and the board of commissioners of Monroe County had declared a state of local emergency. They petitioned the governor to take over the city. What had once been close to the richest little town in the United States in the late 1800s was now at the edge of financial collapse. The Mallory Steamship line, the cigar industry (which in its prime had twenty-nine local factories going), the sponging business, the sea-freight business, the pineapple business, the commercial fishing business: all kaput, or mostly so. Governor David Sholtz had called Commissioner Julius F. Stone, FDR's federal fund agent for the state of Florida. The New Deal's Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) would now be in control of Key West's immediate future, minus one of its most prominent citizens.

“Chicken shit sailfish”? Back in May, you'll remember, twelve days after he'd brought
Pilar
down from Miami, a record-busting sail of 119 (and one-half) pounds was a lot of cheese to the man who'd caught it—well, co-caught it, along with that hooky-playing Jesuit. But that was May. Around Key West, you could expect to take kingfish, tarpon, bonito, sharks, amberjacks, dolphinfish, permits, snook, wahoos, groupers, yellowtail, bonefish, barracuda, sails—but what were they next to marlin?

The priest and the writer and several others had departed the navy yard at 2:30 that afternoon. There'd been an earlier sailfish on Father McGrath's line, not nearly as big, but a shark got hold of that one after forty-five minutes and fifteen jumps. About 4:30 p.m., they were fishing on a flood tide in ten fathoms of heavy, dark water. They'd put on a new strip of mullet bait, and the 119-pounder came smashing at it. After a few minutes,
the arm-aching cleric shouted for Hemingway to take the rod; Hemingway resisted. When he did take over, he was certain that the fish was foul-hooked, because no sailfish could pull that hard on twenty-one-thread line. But it was a sail. A 50-pound sail, Hemingway afterward enthused, was a good fish. A 75-pound sail was a hell of a fish. But a 119-pound sail? Six times they got the creature close to the boat, and each time the fish eluded the gaff. At twilight, they tooted in with her to the submarine pens (they didn't know she was a female until they'd cut her open), loaded her onto the rear bumper of Charles Thompson's roadster, drove her across town to the Thompson icehouse, made many pictures at the dock, uncorked the whiskey and the champagne. Father McGrath stayed out of the pictures, although not out of the champagne. Later that night came the official weighing before a horde of inebriated witnesses.

Two days later, on the front page of the
Citizen:
“Ernest Hemingway, the author, is anxious to know the record catch for sailfish in the Atlantic Ocean, as he has just made a catch which he thinks is near, if not the record. While out trolling Tuesday afternoon [sic] in his Cabin Cruiser ‘Pilar,' he caught one of the finest specimens he has ever seen. The fish was perfect in every way.” The celebrity of Whitehead Street must have spoon-fed the words to the reporter. And yet, almost immediately, the egoist began refusing credit for the catch, perhaps the flawed conscience of an honorable sportsman doing the pricking. On the day the
Citizen
ministory appeared, Hemingway wrote to Gingrich and described the fish and misspelled the priest's name and also momentarily forgot the fish's sex. “He was so beautifully proportioned he didn't show his weight. I won't claim him because I didn't hook him so am trying to get Father MacGrath to claim him. Anyway will enter him for the Atlantic record as a fish.” The priest went back to Miami and wrote up an anonymous account, which he hoped to place in
The Miami Herald
, under the byline “Eye Witness.” Hemingway sent him a cable: “Story and picture ok with me provided story states Hemingway has steadily refused to make any claim to the record for himself since another person handled the fish but claims Atlantic record for the fish since it was weighed on tested scales before eight witnesses. Stop. Thanks pictures. Send bill. Regards.”