Hemingway's Boat (36 page)

In this same letter, misspelling and mistyping and stream-of-consciousness-ing as he went, Hemingway had told Strater of the boat he hoped to buy when he returned from Africa: “thirty eight foot, diesel powered.” He'd “put in twinscrews, double rudders, proppeller and rudder guards so you can't fould line and yet can spin her on her ass with the twin screws. We can live on her, carry a cook and fish anywhere.” Somewhere between the writing of this five-page letter and the cab ride to Cropsey, in April of the following year, he'd decide not on a diesel-powered boat, but on a gas-powered vessel, with a powerful main engine and a smaller trolling one. And the actual
Pilar
, the realized one, wouldn't run on twin screws, as he had envisioned and as numerous Hemingway chroniclers have claimed. She'd have
double
screws, owing to the size difference of the big Chrysler and the small Lycoming: technical—and important—distinctions.

On the morning Strater made it to Bimini—May 3, 1935—Hemingway was waiting for him in the harbor aboard
Pilar
, and Gertrude Stein was marching up Madison Avenue, taking his name in vain.

Pauline had just departed. So had Charles Thompson and Katy and John Dos Passos. (The Dos Passoses would be back for another brief stay in June.) Pauline, who'd been over for a long weekend, had come on the Pan Am seaplane flight that left twice weekly out of Dinner Key Airport in Coconut Grove, en route to Nassau, with a Bimini pit stop. (The actual stop was at nearby Cat Cay. Cat Cay was where the wealthy of South Florida were erecting their Depression-era hideaways, and so that's where the flying boats splashed down.) Pauline would be back and forth during May (usually sleeping ashore, not keen on
Pilar
's nighttime seesawing), and then in late June would return with the family to rent a cottage for a month, bringing along her sister, Jinny Pfeiffer, a lesbian, whose bobbed hair, diminutive frame, and cheeky way of speech had always attracted Hemingway, perhaps even sexually (students of Hemingway have long speculated on the idea); that is, until their mutual hard hatred set in. This would have to do with many factors, not least the split from Pauline.

Blixen: the name is intimately bound up with that whole engauzed Hollywood-soaked region of the mind known as British East Africa in the years from, say, the beginning of World War I to the end of the 1930s. You say “British East Africa” and you link it with the word “safari,” and latter-day imaginations begin filling with visions of caravans rumbling
over the Serengeti, of people who look like Robert Redford mucking about in their shiny jodhpurs and bush jackets tricked out with cartridge loops. Hemingway, with his usual genius for showing up in the right symbolic place at the right time, had gotten in on the back edge of the great romantic safari myth in its so-called golden age.

Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke was one of Africa's greatest white hunters in the 1920s and 1930s. He was also a world-class philanderer. Blix, or Blickie, as he was known, is said to have possessed an almost alarming stamina—in bed, in the bush, with liters of alcohol. His authentic love for Africa was something that fairly oozed from his pores. He wasn't Hemingway's African hunting guide, but the two had connected pretty quickly. So, it almost seems, did anybody who ever met him. “The toughest, most durable white hunter ever to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundowner will be gin or whisky,” the East African aviatrix and author and horse breeder Beryl Markham once said of Blixen. (She was also, by almost no one's doubting, one of his uncounted lovers.) He's often claimed to be a model, or one of the models, for the hunting guide Robert Wilson in Hemingway's “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” which isn't as great a short story as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” but is pretty great all the same. In the July 1934 issue of
Esquire
(“Notes on Dangerous Game: The Third Tanganyika Letter”), Hemingway got in on the Blixen mythmaking. He wrote that the baron could stop a rhino at ten yards, and then apologetically explain to his client, whose weapon had been taken back to camp by the gun bearer, “ ‘I could not let him come forever, what?' ”

(The other white hunter whom Hemingway lionized—empurpled might be the better word—in that same
Esquire
nonfiction piece was Philip Percival, an Englishman and partner of Blixen's, said to have been an even greater hunter than Blixen, although far less of a Technicolor human being. Blixen's branch of the business was Tanganyika Guides, Ltd., while Percival, based in Kenya, looked after African Guides, Ltd. Percival, not Blixen, is the guide whom Hemingway chose to employ on his 1933–34 safari. In
Green Hills of Africa
, Percival appears as Pop. In his youth, Pop had been part of Teddy Roosevelt's epic 1909 safari to Africa, which had been avidly followed in Chicago newspapers by a TR-worshiping Oak Park ten-year-old. As for the prototype of Robert Wilson in “Francis Macomber,” it's probably closer to the truth to say that both white hunters, Blix and Pop, as well as other males, were in Hemingway's mind by the time he'd finished the story in the spring of 1936.)

If the name has registered, it's likely not because of Bror, but rather
because of the literary genius to whom he'd once been married: Karen Blixen, who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen, and who authored the haunting memoir
Out of Africa
, published in 1937. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills” is one of the great beginnings in modern literature. Karen was Bror's Danish cousin. They'd gotten married in 1914, on the eve of war, and gone to Kenya to begin their doomed marriage and hilltop coffee plantation outside Nairobi. Not long into both, the adulterous husband, ever hopeless with money, unable to keep himself from sleeping with Masai women or the spouses of friends, had infected his wife with syphilis. They'd separated in 1921 and a few years later had divorced. In Hollywood's seven-Oscar 1985 version of the story, Meryl Streep, as Karen, incants
Out of Africa
's opening sentence three times in her pitch-perfect Scandinavian voice-over. In old age, the real Karen Blixen is claimed to have said, “If I should wish anything back of my life, it would be to go on safari once again with Bror Blixen.” In author Judith Thurman's magisterial 1982 biography of Dinesen, Bror is described as a man almost “maddeningly without moods … one of the most durable, congenial, promiscuous, and prodigal creatures who ever lived.”

No one gets to be durable and promiscuous and prodigal and maddeningly without moods forever. When Bror visited Hemingway's boat in the company of the third Baroness Blixen (
CAN EVA AND SELF VISIT YOU THURSDAY
, he had cabled Hemingway on May 6 from Miami), he wasn't far from fifty, and old-manness was setting in. You can see it in the pictures. By contrast, the newest baroness on his arm was almost twenty years younger. She was the former Eva Dixon (in some accounts, it's spelled “Dickson”), who had come out to Africa from Sweden a few years before mostly for the purpose of snaring Bror. She is said by her biographers to have been a woman ever out for the main chance, someone who loved causing a sensation, faintly ridiculous in her vanities and coquetries. There is apparently some question as to whether they were ever formally married. Friends of Bror's are said to have resented the way she seemed to relish dominating him. As things turned out, they would be together for only a handful of years. Three years after she sunned on Hemingway's boat for most of May 1935, she died in a car crash in India. She was barely thirty-three. By then Eva's union with Bror seems to have been all but finished.

In the JFK Presidential Library, there are numerous photographs of her. In her fetching two-piece suit, she primps, flirts, sticks out her tongue, tosses her humidity-frizzed hair. She cuddles up to just-landed fish. Pauline
is in some of these photographs. (Her look is quite different: to please her husband, whose hair fetishes are not exactly a secret, she's become an ash blond, and the once boy-cropped hair is now thick and grown out.) In some of the pictures, Hemingway and Eva are standing shoulder to shoulder, pressed lightly against each other, while Bror stands several feet away, wearing a floppy sun hat and holding a box camera. In some of the pictures, the hirsute Hemingway wears only a pair of smeared shorts (leather belt outside the loops), while Strater, vying for Eva's attentions, looks positively jacked in his sleeveless white muscle T-shirt. So look again at the picture at the front of this chapter.

Strater claimed to Carlos Baker (fellow Princetonian) that Hemingway had slept that summer with Eva. Baker interviewed Strater in July 1964, on the third anniversary of Hemingway's death. He wrote up his notes from the interview—at least some of it—in narrative form, with no direct attribution to Strater, but there's no question that he was indirectly quoting Strater. Several copies of Baker's typescript ended up with his Hemingway papers at Princeton. The document contains the following paragraph:

In Baker's
published
account (page 273 of
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story
), the claims are handled differently. The biographer wrote that Hemingway, who had been “carefully excluding” Strater from his conversations with Blixen about Africa, “also seemed resentful when the Baroness showed signs of preferring Strater to himself.”

Mike Strater lived to be ninety-one. He died in 1987. He'd had several wives and eight children. He had kept on painting, a minor American artist who'd nonetheless been there, at the Café du Dôme and the Select and the Rotonde and Les Deux Magots and La Closerie des Lilas, not just with Hemingway, but with Joyce, Pound, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Picasso, all the rest. Near the end of his life, with only bitterness seeming
to be left in his voice for Hemingway, he told an oral biographer named Denis Brian, in an odd, compelling 1988 book titled
The True Gen
, that “Hem” was the kind of charming bully and artful sadist who sought to get you drunk in a bar and then take you out into the dark and sucker punch you. “We were friends, but he was a goddamned thankless friend,” Strater said. The thankless friend and charming bully had left Strater out of
A Moveable Feast
, and stuck the fact in his face by mentioning it in his preface.

As for the baron (who had another eleven years left to him after his stay on Hemingway's boat): if he was resentful (enraged?) about what Hemingway may have been doing with Eva just a few feet out of his sight, that didn't keep him from admiring (empurpling?) Hemingway's fishing prowess in his 1938 autobiography,
African Hunter
. You could say, in fact, that he did Hemingway one better than Hemingway did him in “Notes on Dangerous Game” in the July 1934
Esquire
. Blixen told how on their last day of Bimini fishing, toward the end of May 1935, Hemingway hooked into a monster. Wrote the baron: “With the big, strong Hardy rod quivering under the colossal forces at work on both sides, he slowly began to haul in.… Hemingway toiled at reel and line like a galley-slave at his oar. The sweat stood in drops on his bare back as he strained every muscle to tire out his quarry.” What could it be? It was a hammerhead shark. “There was great disappointment and annoyance on board; when one goes out lion-hunting one is not pleased to get a hyena.”

Eva struck poses with the shark as it lay dead and white on
Pilar
's transom with the gaff still in its jaw. She pretended to be beating it with a club.

But it wasn't any possible cuckoldry that effectively finished the Hemingway-Strater friendship. Rather, it was because of something that happened just between the two of them: the “apple-coring” of a huge fish, and Hemingway's role in that coring, and the lie of omission he afterward told in
Esquire
. “Apple-cored” is a term fishermen use for a fish that gets eaten nearly whole by the sharks.

They were out on
Pilar
one day in middle May when Strater hooked into a trophy black marlin. In forty minutes, he managed to get the fish close to the boat. All hands were trying to get it on board when the first shark or two appeared. That's when Hemingway took out a tommy gun that he'd recently acquired from another Bimini fisherman and started spraying the water—which only had the effect of bringing packs of sharks
to
Pilar
's stern. They came for the blood, which at first was the blood of one of their own. Wasn't Hemingway trying to protect his friend's fish against those cannibals?

It took another hour to get the fish in. What got in weighed five hundred pounds. There are a lot of pictures of the fish, and most of its lower half isn't there. Whole, it might have weighed twice as much. In the July 1935
Esquire
, in a piece titled “The President Vanquishes,” Hemingway wrote: “There were two buckets of loose meat that were knocked off when we took him over the roller on the stern that were not weighed. You take a look at him and figure what he would have weighed whole, remember that all the meat gone is solid meat, that a pint of blood weighs little under a pound, and that the part weighing five hundred pounds was hollow.”

The fish was nearly thirteen feet long (Strater later claimed over fourteen feet), with a sixty-two-inch girth and a forty-eight-inch tail spread. According to Hemingway's piece, “We hung him up and weighed him and took the pictures and eighteen jigs followed the President around singing a song.” It went like this: “Mr. Strater caught a marlin / Tonight's the night we got fun / Mr. Strater caught a marlin / One thousand pounds.”