Hemingway's Boat (32 page)

We had lunch in the Angler's dark, cool bar, and he didn't object when I offered to pay. Maybe he had plenty of money, but I guessed otherwise. The proprietor of the hotel, a wiry, amiable Biminite named Ossie Brown, whose own father, Harcourt Brown, had been around in Hemingway's time, seemed to enjoy Les, but I thought I could detect a small contempt
.

There was no sign of lacerating rage at having been consigned a life—like practically every Hemingway after Ernest—under the shadow of the volcano. Indeed, as the weekend went on, it was Les's decency, in and amid all the apparent neediness, loneliness, that stood out. He'd made what he could of his life
.

On August 12, 1982
,
thirty-one days before his suicide, Les Hemingway mailed a mimeographed letter to his subscribers. It seems so characteristic of what he must have wished to project to the world. “Dear Friend and Subscriber. I've been hospitalized four times in the past five months. Three serious leg operations, two in the last 40 days. Now I can no longer drive a car, or go in a boat or airplane. So the Bimini News is having to suspend publication. Am sorry, but this is life. Cheers, Les.”

In the months after the funeral, Les's family helped put together a memorial edition of his best-selling 1962 book about his brother, which had made Les a semi-wealthy man, at least for a time. In the appendix of the 1982 commemorative edition, Jack Hemingway wrote:

One of Les's daughters, Anne E. J. Hemingway Feurer, wrote:

The cover and inside flap of the commemorative edition of
My Brother, Ernest Hemingway
narrate so much of Les's story. In the jacket photograph, Les, in his late twenties, is looking eagerly at his brother, who's now in his forties, and who isn't looking at Les, but at the camera. They're on a sailboat. It's as if all Les desires, still desires, is approval. On the inside flap is an author's picture of Les, now in late-middle age, in full Papa mock-up, hunched at a typewriter, hunting and pecking. It's a mimic of the celebrated photograph of Hemingway on the jacket of
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
That picture, which took up the entire back cover, was shot in a hotel room at Sun Valley in December 1939
.
There he is, the real thing, sleeves rolled, hair licked down, one-day growth of black whiskers, the thick hairy arms, the laser concentration, hunting and pecking on his portable
.

Hemingway refused to allow Les to publish
My Brother, Ernest Hemingway
while he was alive. Les had been working on the book in semi-secret for five or six years before the Boss shotgun went off in Ketchum. After a time, Les let his brother know he was writing it. There's a 1959 exchange of letters between them in which Hemingway says:

Six months after Hemingway was dead, there was Les, back in the limelight, entertaining the New York press about his just-published work
.

I remember something he said during that weekend on Bimini, a line so seemingly right about Ernest Hemingway: “He loved everything up to
a certain point, and then nothing was any good any more.” Les stole the line from himself. The sentence is on page 169 of his book. He was writing of a spring Sunday in 1934 when they'd been out on
Pilar,
off Key West, in all her newness, and had caught eight dolphinfish, nine bonito, some barracuda. They'd had seven sailfish strikes. It just wasn't enough
.

Ernest with his sons, Bimini, July 20, 1935

IN
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
—that botch of a sometimes beautiful book that Ernest Hemingway took up in the fall of 1945, about seven months after returning from World War II—he speaks of raising Bimini out of the sea. He means from the helm of his boat. First, you'd see the line of tall casuarina trees. (They're still there.) Then the house that sat on the
highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the open ocean and the protected harbor. “Then, as you came closer, you raised the whole length of the island with the coconut palms, the clapboarded houses, the white line of the beach, and the green of the South Island stretching beyond it.” That must have been exactly what it was like from
Pilar
's wheel: raising Bimini, like a green Lazarus, from limitless sea.

Even on maps of the Bahamas, never mind of the western Atlantic, it looks almost like an afterthought, like a mistaken daub of cartographer's ink. Consider: about seven hundred islands and cays and about two thousand rock formations, reaching across one hundred thousand square miles of ocean, from Florida to Haiti, make up the independent archipelago of what's formally known as the Commonwealth of the Bahamas; depending on how you count, little Bimini is about six of those. It seems to hang out there by itself, about fifty miles on the other side of the Gulf Stream, pretty much a straight shot due east of Miami. It amounts to less than ten square miles of landmass. When you first glimpse it from the air, it looks like a belt of trees sitting in a bottle-green lagoon. Some portions of the main strip of land—North Bimini—are so narrow that you can get across it, harbor side to the ocean side, in less than a minute. Its highest rocky point is about twenty feet above sea level—it seems almost as much part of the sea as of the land. But despite its microscopic size, or maybe partly because of it, the place has long had great allure for yachtsmen and sailors, and even more so for big-game fishermen. Only with mild exaggeration does Bimini like to promote itself as the game-fishing capital of the world. It possesses some of the clearest and most colorful and deep-dropping-off water in the world. You can wade right out into the warm water, on a seven-mile-long bathing beach, but before long, that water can go a half-mile deep, and then deeper. When Hemingway first saw it, he said it felt to him like something out of the South Seas, not that he'd ever been to the South Seas. Even today, Bimini will strike you like that, as if it has cheated time. And it's so close to the American mainland, closer even than Cuba.
^*

Hemingway knew it obsessively, exuberantly, seeming to inhale it whole, for parts of three consecutive fishing seasons, 1935–1937, each stay a little briefer than the previous, and then, for complex reasons, he never saw
Bimini again. It was almost as if he used it up, spent it through, in the way he used up and spent through so many other things and places and human beings in his life.
He loved everything up to a certain point, and then nothing was any good any more
. In 1935, he spent his longest period there, from mid-April to mid-August, and about four weeks of it were in the company of his wife and children, who'd come over to join him after he'd established his Bimini beachhead. It's curious that we think of Bimini as one of the iconic Hemingway places—and it is, no question—and yet it's also a fact that he passed only about six and a half months there in total. Which of course only speaks to the way he could powerfully imprint himself. You go to the island now, and it's his picture on the cover of the island history book, his legend that seems to be bobbing in every boat slip.

First, though, a semi-famous story about what happened the first time Hemingway tried to take his boat to Bimini (which from Key West was about 230 curving nautical miles to the northeast). Gertrude Stein's even in the story.

Roughly twenty miles out into the Stream, on that spring Sunday morning, in a moderately choppy sea, he looked down at a mess of blood on both his lower legs and said something like
Jesus Christ, I'll be a dirty sonofabitch, I shot myself
. But you couldn't say this in the pages of
Esquire
in 1935. And so, in a curious piece titled “On Being Shot Again: A Gulf Stream Letter,” Hemingway wrote of a self-inflicted if not life-endangering pistol wound: “ ‘I'll be of unsavoury parentage,' remarked your correspondent. ‘I'm shot.' ” He wrote the piece very fast, as he did all his
Esquire
contributions, this one within five days, when he was back home in Key West, in bed, recuperating, licking his wounds in more senses than one.

It happened on April 7, 1935, about two hours after
Pilar
had pulled away from the navy yard dock with either five or six adults and two months of canned goods and other survival rations on board. (Also, with some expensive new fishing gear that Hemingway intended to try out, as well as with a newly purchased and nifty-looking thirteen-foot sea skiff he was bringing to Bimini.) It happened near a place called American Shoal, when they were trolling along a heavy and dark current of Stream. It happened right at the tail end of a nasty fight with a shark, as they were trying to get the thrashing beast, with its brown back and milky white belly and fearsome teeth, into the boat. It happened when the greased, hollow-point, soft-nosed, lead bullet from Hemingway's .22 caliber Colt Woodsman automatic ricocheted off the brass strip that ran along the top of the coaming at
Pilar
's stern. The shot, which had gone off involuntarily and whose
report no one on board had apparently heard, made a “starry splash” in the metal. From there it caromed into Hemingway's legs.

Hemingway had a long and queer history with queer mishaps. They started early in his life and never really let up. It was as if something was always waiting to poke him in the eye or fall from a bathroom skylight in the middle of the night to gash him in the forehead and send him to the hospital for stitches. That freakish accident was in Paris in March 1928; he'd just gotten over a bout with influenza. In London, in World War II, at three in the morning, he'd smash his forehead into the windshield of a car that had rammed into a steel water tank: fifty-seven stitches at St. George's Hospital. In Jeffrey Meyers's
Hemingway: A Biography
, there's a three-page appendix of Hemingway's accidents and illnesses, starting with a stick in the throat in childhood.

At least once, in the chaotic several seconds before the unheard shot and unseen ricochet, Hemingway had fired into the brainpan of the fish, hoping to kill it. But the shark—which had some new and costly leaders and hooks in its mouth that Hemingway by damn intended to get back—didn't want to be killed. They'd been trying to bring the animal close enough to the boat so they could gaff it, and so that Hemingway could shoot it again and then club it into senselessness and finally haul it aboard.

The shark was a
galano
, or this was Hemingway's name for it. It was a word he'd picked up in Cuba. Hemingway hated almost all sharks, because they were thieves and cannibalizers of the sporting trophies he was trying to get into his boat. (Soon, on Bimini, he'd be tommy-gunning sharks with a Thompson submachine gun, spattering the waves, turning the foam red, like a mad gangster, trying to keep count of how many he'd killed.) But he seems to have had special venom for
galanos
, which are known for their shovel-shaped head, large triangular fin, bad odor, and, not least, by the way they'll go after anything—even the side of your boat, or your rudder—when they're hungry. Seven times in his
Esquire
piece Hemingway uses the word, setting it off with italics.