Hemingway's Boat (33 page)

“Fuck the bastard,” he apparently said, which came out a little too cutely in Arnold Gingrich's middlebrow men's magazine as “Fornicate the illegitimate.” He'd said that the first time the
galano
had popped his line, which was wound around a new reel he'd ordered by mail over the winter from Abercrombie & Fitch at Forty-Fifth and Madison in New York. It was a “Commander Ross” 14/0 Vom Hofe model, and it could hold up to one thousand yards of thirty-nine-thread line, and it weighed nine and a half pounds before the line was on, and its seven-inch side plate was surfaced
with a hard vulcanized rubber so that the reel wouldn't heat up when a big fish began sizzling out the line, and it had cost him $250, not counting the parcel post.

Big-game reels are measured by the diameter of their side plates. A seven-incher was
big
.

Hemingway was counting on it for his coming battles with tuna. All winter he'd daydreamed of giant bluefins off Bimini weighing up to a ton—not that any angler had ever been able to come close to landing such a fish on a rod and reel. But the one-tonners were claimed to exist, were claimed to come highballing along “Tuna Alley” off Bimini each year around the middle of May. How would you land a two-thousand-pound fish? Even if you could get the thing aboard before the sharks got to it, wouldn't it make a hole the size of a torpedo through the floorboards, or stand your boat on end? But Hemingway had a plan, altogether loony sounding. It had to do with that little sea skiff he was taking along.

In addition to the Vom Hofe, he'd also bought a seven-inch Zane Grey reel, crafted by the House of Hardy in Great Britain. Its interior parts were made of Monel, “the strongest non-ferrous metal known … guaranteed to be absolutely immune to the action of sea water and air in any part of the world”—that's from 1935 Hardy Brothers catalog copy. For the last three years, Hemingway had been fishing with Zane Grey reels, and up until now a five-and-a-half-inch Zane Grey and a six-inch Zane Grey were all that he'd really needed. His six-inch marlin reel (it's the one previously mentioned, pictured on the first page of the prologue of this book) was a beautiful piece of tackle. Its spool spindle was encased in seize-free ball bearings. It weighed seven and three-quarters pounds—without any line.

Hemingway slacked out another bait on the same line, and goddamn if the illegitimate didn't pop that one, too. Now the fish had a “length of double line streaming out of his mouth like one whisker on a catfish,” Hemingway wrote in
Esquire
. It was on the third slack, with yet a third bait on a different line and different equipment, that they'd managed to get the fish close—and he'd managed to get the gaff in, even as he was struggling to keep the line taut against the fish. He was out of his fighting chair, standing nearly atop the shark, holding the hickory-tipped rod as far out from him as he could. And right at what must have been the instant of greatest strain between animal and man and fishing line, with the gaff hanging from its side, with two lengths of popped double line in its whiskered mouth, the fish went into what seemed a convulsing fit of epilepsy. There was this huge cracking sound. The shaft on the gaff splintered, and
a piece of it came flying at Hemingway's right hand. That's the hand that held the .22.

All this was happening in several square feet of spraying space at the boat's stern. It was happening while another fisherman, fishing amidships (Mike Strater, his close friend but also his athletic rival), was battling his own
galano
. There were sharks in the water in the first place because they'd come after the school of dolphinfish into which
Pilar
had trolled just a little while earlier. Once the sharks had shown, the dolphins began to flash silver above the waves, terrified at what was freight-training up from below to tear huge chunks from their sides at a single bite. Dolphins are small, toothed whales. There's something almost innocent, playful, about them. You don't associate them with the word “savage.” But like almost any blindly attacked thing, they can seem savage in their terror.

And even before the dolphins had come, there had been the giant green turtle. It had come close to the boat, scudding—to use Hemingway's word—under the surface. The turtle would make good eating for the trip; they could fillet the meat and salt it down in layers in a keg. They had rigged the harpoon to get the turtle when the dolphins appeared. And after the dolphins, the
galanos
.

Up on the overhead of the cockpit, John Dos Passos, who was much more of a Sunday kind of fisherman than a competitive one, was trying to make eight-millimeter black-and-white home movies. He'd been the first one to hook into a twenty-pound dolphin, but once the sharks were at the boat, he handed off his rod and went for the movie camera. The camera jerked wildly.

The footage is thrilling, blurring stuff, although only ten seconds of the actual fight have been preserved. You see the fisherman climbing into his leather harness as the battle begins. You see the fish thrashing in the water. You see various hands trying to bring it aboard. You see the fit of epilepsy. Then, suddenly, in the next sequence, Hemingway is back on shore, limping around with his second son, grinning, mugging for the camera, pulling up his striped pajama pant leg to show off his bandaged wounds, clowning with Dos Passos. It's a couple days later, and he's in the yard of the big fine house at Key West with all those strutting peacocks and airy verandas. He surely looks like someone overcompensating for a recent humiliation.

There's a surprising amount of Hemingway film footage around, from the thirties through the fifties. It brings him back to human scale. It reduces him, so to speak, rescues him from his insupportable myths. Even when he's doing things that the rest of us wouldn't try, Hemingway
in home movies seems far less of a Hollywood invention, somehow. He seems almost ordinary, somebody who could almost be your show-offy neighbor. Here he is, at the dock that morning as they're getting set to go. He's picking up Pauline as if he's a bridegroom carrying his beloved across a threshold. He's clowning with a captain's hat, as if he's the admiral of the ocean sea. He's shaking hands with his fishing partners. Hardware-store proprietor Charles Thompson has come down with his wife, Lorine, to say good-bye. Hemingway's so hungry for the hungry eye of the camera. How very tall he seems in the old thirties footage—somehow you get it on film far more than in the photographs. He looks rangy as a tight end, and there is about his physical movements a likable schoolboy gawkiness, even allowing for the cinematic jumpiness, even allowing for the voracious ego and competitive infighter that lived inside the schoolboy. The old movies will also reveal how radically his looks changed, once they began to change. The internal must have been devouring the external. Somehow, he had turned into an elderly man before he'd even hit sixty, and the transformation from what he looks like on this fine Sunday in 1935 to what he'll look like by the middle and late fifties seems to have had, once again, very little in-between stage. But such thoughts are too gloomy to linger on when someone, not yet thirty-six years old, is making the world new on a piece of paper.

He looked down. A mess of blood. A discrete hole about three inches below his kneecap. A second discrete hole, more ragged than the first, “bigger than your thumb,” as he put it in
Esquire
. Plus, any number of birdshot-like small lacerations on the calves of both legs. “Could I have pulled the trigger twice or three times without knowing it the way former mistresses did in the testimony regarding Love Nest Killings. Hell, no, thought your correspondent.” Again, that's from “On Being Shot Again.”

Apparently, he fired just once. The bulk of that bullet was in his left calf and the fragments of it in both legs. This would become clear once he was back on land and Dr. William Warren at the Key West U.S. Marine Hospital was extracting many of the fragments, although not the largest piece. That one was too far in. To take out the big chunk would have meant removing too much muscle. Doctor Warren gave the patient a shot against tetanus and told Hemingway to go to bed. None of it was particularly serious, he said, as long as no infections set in. And to keep that from happening, he needed rest. The wounds would heal over quickly.

There wasn't any pain, or not initially, or so Hemingway would tell his readers. Soon after
Pilar
had been turned around and headed back to Key West, soon after someone had boiled water and scrubbed the wounds with antiseptic soap and had poured a lot of iodine into the two holes, he would retch his lunch into a bucket. This, too, he would report.

Back home (or even on the way home), as John Dos Passos wrote in his 1966 memoir,
The Best Times
, Katy was “so mad she would hardly speak to him.” This line has been much evoked by Hemingway chroniclers to support the view that Hemingway had recklessly endangered the lives of others. (Dos Passos's account has several errors of both fact and chronology. For instance, he claimed Hemingway had shot himself with a rifle.) Maybe Katy, who'd known and loved Hemingway ambivalently since his northern Michigan years, was rageful in the way of parents or older siblings once an endangering event is over: you are so relieved that no serious harm has come to your loved one that you end up showing it by turning unspeakably angry at him. Katy, nearly eight years older than Hemingway, often reproached him like a kid brother. What happened aboard
Pilar
isn't so much emblematic of Hemingway's carelessness—he was never known to be careless with weapons—as of his ego: he needed once again to be the whole show. Perhaps if the fisherman hadn't been trying to land the fish and gaff it and shoot it in the head all at once, the accident would never have occurred. So you could say he'd hoisted himself, not for the last time, on his own petard.
^†

On Monday, April 8, at home, he wrote to Gingrich. “Am staying in bed today and tomorrow. Will get up Wednesday and leave Thursday if all o.k.—if had to get shot couldn't have been shot in better place.” He didn't
get away on Thursday, nor did he leave for Bimini on Saturday—the second try would be pushed back three times, until the following Monday. A writer's mind is working. Suddenly, Hemingway has a story to tell. He knows he owes Gingrich a piece on his $3,000 boat loan, and he's late with it. “I can write you a piece,” he says, proceeding to set up typographically on the page the suggested title. He centers the words and skips down several spaces on his stationery.

By that Friday, the story is in hand. “Here is the piece,” he says in a covering letter. As to that fuck-the-bastard business, which he's made into fornicate-the-illegitimate, he asks Gingrich: “If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consumate I suppose.” Going on: “Wound perfectly clean so far and should be healed tight in another couple of days. Very little pain.”

“On Being Shot Again” appeared in the June 1935
Esquire
. This is how it disconcertingly—you'd almost want to say gleefully—opens:

The beginning of the second paragraph: “If you ever have to shoot a shark shoot him anywhere along a straight line down the center of his head, flat, running from the tip of his nose to a foot behind his eyes.” The piece goes on like this for about another thirty lines, providing instructions on the right bones to sever in the neck or the spinal column when you wish to take down large creatures cleanly.

And how does Gertrude Stein fit into all this? With her own taking down. Not razor-clean, but a wounding for sure.

In the fall of 1934, and through the winter and spring of 1935, Hemingway's onetime Paris mentor and godparent to his oldest child, now a sworn enemy, along with her sour, diminutive secretary-lover, Alice B. Toklas, had crisscrossed and barnstormed America. It was Stein's first time back
in thirty-one years. They had left Le Havre on the SS
Champlain
in October in their crocheted hats and heavy coats, and they didn't return to the badly heated comforts of 27, rue de Fleurus—where those avant-garde canvasses shimmered in the hallways and above the mantels—until May 11, 1935. Stein had said that she wished to experience the land of her birth from coast to coast, which is just what she did. As she later wrote, “People always had been nice to me because I am pleasing but now this was going to be a different thing. We were on the Champlain and we were coming.” That seemed a limpid enough thought, unlike this one: “I will be well welcome when I come. Because I am coming. Certain I come having come.”

In America, the seer with the obscure flashes of something or other had belted into an airplane for the first time. She had lectured at something like thirty colleges and universities, among them Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Bryn Mawr. Pathé News produced a newsreel—they nearly had to get in line. On NBC radio and at the Museum of Modern Art, she had made many literary pronouncements, not all of which were immediately clear (headline in
The New York Times:
“Miss Stein Speaks to Bewildered 500”). In New Orleans, she had dined with Sherwood Anderson. In Chicago, she had stayed at Thornton Wilder's apartment on Drexel Avenue. In California, she had driven a rental car through Yosemite. In Monterey, she had sat like a stone contemplating the Pacific. At Berkeley, a University of California student had asked her why her prose was so much more difficult to comprehend than her spoken words. She'd replied: “If they invited Keats for lunch, and they asked him an ordinary question would they expect him to answer with the ‘Ode to the Nightingale'?”