Hemingway's Boat (37 page)

There's some memorable writing in “The President Vanquishes,” which purports to be a tribute to Strater's fishing courage. (In the middle of the fight, Mike's knee went out.) The opening:

Midway in the article: “And as he went off jumping high, clean, throwing himself long, slamming, and clear he seemed smaller all the time. But it was because he jumped out nearly four hundred yards of thirty-nine thread and we were looking at him from a long way away.” Hemingway later told Arnold Gingrich that he had just slapped out the piece—fifteen hundred words, apparently most of it from the top of the house in that wan 3:00 a.m. light—and thus had felt a little guilty for collecting his $250 fee.
What he didn't tell Gingrich—or the readers of
Esquire
—was anything about grabbing the tommy gun at the critical juncture to begin reddening the waters. It was jealous rage that made him do it, or so Strater would always believe. For the rest of his life, he'd nurse this grudge.

Later that summer, Katy Dos Passos described for Gerald Murphy what it was like with Hemingway and sharks and machine guns on
Pilar
. (This was in a letter not connected to the Strater incident.) “They come like express trains and hit the fish like a planing mill—shearing off twenty-five pounds at a bite. Ernest shoots them with a machine gun,
rrr
—but it won't stop them—It's terrific to see the bullets ripping into them—the sharks thrashing in blood and foam—the white bellies and fearful jaws—the pale cold eyes—I was really aghast but it's very exciting.”

From “The President Vanquishes”: “What we landed of him weighed 500 lbs. and the pictures show what the sharks took.” The pictures also reveal what Hemingway tried to take. You'd swear it must be his fish. He stands in closer than the man who's caught it. He holds on to the fish while Strater peers over his shoulder. In the photograph accompanying the
Esquire
piece, Strater and Hemingway are standing on either side of the marlin. Hemingway is reaching up and holding on to a partially eaten fin. He looks at the camera, while Strater, holding his rod, stares across at him with something like an incredulous expression. In Denis Brian's
The True Gen
, Strater said that Hemingway “stood in front of me every time the fish was photographed.” Not quite true.

Strater was in New York when he read the
Esquire
piece. That September he wrote to Hemingway, who was back in Key West from the summer on Bimini. Strater said that his wife, Maggie, had been operated on for an infected sinus. His weight was down to 194. The kids were good. “You sure did me proud,” he said. So why didn't he say what he truly felt, which must have been rage? I can only think that the force field of Hemingway's personality was too great for him to speak up, at least then. But to Carlos Baker, Strater said it unambiguously: Hemingway had helped ruin the largest fish Strater had ever hooked into, and in so doing had ruined something greater, their friendship, if not immediately, soon enough.

Nearly a quarter century after the Baker interview (in the 1980s) Strater told Brian that, on the night of the big marlin, they'd gone off to Bobby Cash's bar at the foot of Alice Town, and everyone in the place had insisted on buying him drinks, and he'd gotten loaded, and finally the place emptied out, which is when Hemingway slugged him in the stomach. Strater said, “You're getting weak, old boy. Can't you hit any harder than that?” (If
you're dead drunk, how could you remember what you said?) Hemingway had been “tonguing the bottle,” meaning that he'd been only pretending to drink, biding his time until Strater was too far gone to fight back.

In
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, published five years afterward, Hemingway, in the voice of Robert Jordan, makes a coded reference to Strater. Jordan is thinking of his friend, Anselmo, whom he has known only in these last four days of his life. “I know him better than I know Charles, than I know Chub, than I know Guy, than I know Mike, and I know them well.” He did know them well. And in Mike's case, no less than with Archie MacLeish, he also must have known what he had wrecked.

The Egyptians are said to have provided the earliest written accounts of angling as we know it, that is, something done with a length of thread affixed to a bent piece of metal. That was four thousand years ago. It wasn't until 1898, at the Tuna Club of Avalon, on Catalina Island off Los Angeles, that the idea of big-game sportfishing, with codes of conduct urging conservation ethics and sporting behavior, arose in America. On June 1 of that year, the Associated Press rifled the news that a naturalist and author and professor named Charles Frederick Holder had landed, by rod and reel, a 183-pound leaping tuna, an event eclipsing “all previous achievements in the line of angling for the big Thoroughbreds of the deep.” Holder (his father had been the first curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York) had done it with a stiff stick that weighed sixteen ounces, with twenty-one-thread line made of linen and a seven-foot leader made of piano wire. The
Los Angeles Times
said the epitome of angling had just been reached. Dispatches from the Spanish-American War almost took a back seat that day.

Tuna dreams. The Gulf Stream, tearing with terrific force through the narrow gorge that separates the outer edge of the Bahamas from the east coast of Florida, is said to move more quickly than any other current in all the world's oceans. It's apparently the speed, in conjunction with the heat and stunning clarity of the water, that has historically brought the “granders” close to Bimini, not only the tuna, but the big billfish and marlin as well. Tuna, those so-called oceanic bison, passed yearly in the 1920s and 1930s between Florida and Cuba, but off the northern shore of Cuba they tended to stay deep and were impossible to see. By the time they got up near Bimini, they often swam in close to shore. You could target them. They were like dark torpedo shapes, sometimes in less than a hundred feet
of water. For about five weeks every year, starting in middle or late May, the bluefin came in pods past Bimini, on their migration toward the colder waters of New Jersey and Nova Scotia. But no one had been able to boat a tuna—of any size—in those warm southern waters without first witnessing its mutilation by the sharks. No one had been able to boat one, that is, until Hemingway. The standard angling histories are agreed: he's the first known angler to have ever gotten one in whole, clean, at Bimini.

Tuna dreams. Since at least the early twenties, Bimini had been on big-game maps. Recognized names in the sport, like Van Campen Heilner or George Albert Lyon (an inventor out of Detroit—he had something to do with perfecting the automobile bumper), had discovered the island. Zane Grey had fished there. But it wasn't until the thirties that numbers of fishermen and their boats and their guides began converging on Bimini. For a few years, in the middle of the decade, when much of the country was just trying to keep bread on its table, this slice of colonial earth, which you could fairly hurl a rock across, became the epicenter of big-game angling of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Again, it's no wonder that Hemingway, with his sixth sense for locating himself, channeled his boat to the right symbolic place.

In February 1933, a Bimini angler with an international reputation, S. Kip Farrington, had taken a small blue marlin of 155 pounds. But the news went around: if the small marlins were there, the big ones must be as well. Two weeks later, a female angler, Betty Moore, had hooked and fought a 502-pound blue for four hours at Bimini. (When her arms gave out, another fisherman took over and got it on board, so it was a co-catching and not a pure record.) Bimini was officially the newest
it
place in a very small club. Historians say that there were possibly no more than seventy-five or one hundred truly superior fishermen and guides and charter captains on both coasts of America.

In a first-rate book titled
Profiles in Saltwater Angling
, fishing historian George Reiger makes the case that the mid-thirties represented such an age for deep-sea fishing, and that for many reasons, not least ecological, such a period probably won't be around again. The rise of the age very much had to do with the astonishing abundance of fish, but just as much, maybe more so, with the attitudes of the fishermen, who understood that they were doing something well and first, and were willing to share with one another what they knew. Big-game fishing wasn't a competition so much as a passion undertaken for its own sake. The waste and depopulation of these great nomadic creatures hadn't quite yet begun to haunt
sporting consciences—the ocean was still thought illimitable.
^*
There's a beautiful shipboard letter Hemingway wrote to a fellow Bimini fisherman named Michael Lerner several years later, on his way to cover the Spanish Civil War. He was crossing the ocean once again on the SS
Paris
. He longed to be on Bimini with his boat. He spoke of fishing as “a sport where the competition should be all inside yourself.… It's serious while you're doing it but we have to remember it's fishing.” This was the idealist talking, willing to betray his ideals at nearly every turn. But also a man headed to the battlefront.

At Bimini, in the summer of 1935, you could run into Tommy Gifford, a charter captain, who, among other innovations, helped to develop the concept of the outrigger, for skipping the baits clear of the boat's wake. (Hemingway had never tried an outrigger until he came to Bimini—Mike Strater made a gift to
Pilar
for her first rather primitive pair.) You might run into Tommy Shevlin, whose family had vast lumber concerns in the Pacific Northwest, and whom Hemingway came to regard as his protégé. (They were fifteen years apart.) You could run into Farrington, a large egoist. You could, not least, run into Mike Lerner, the best of them all, in terms of his generosity and commitment to the values of the sport and also for the modesty with which he lived his life, no matter his wealth. He'd made his fortune in a chain of women's clothing stores. His wife, Helen, was as gracious and serious a fisherperson as he was. At the end of the thirties, both Lerners, but especially Mike, would become the driving force behind the founding and establishment of the International Game Fish Association, which remains the essential governing body for ocean fishing. (The first organizational meeting was held in an office of the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan, on June 7, 1939. Hemingway
had intended to be in the room but couldn't make it. In 1940, Lerner took over as IGFA president, and Hemingway became first vice president, in which office he remained, if in a mostly titular way, for the rest of his life.)

It was Hemingway's friend Lerner who built, in 1933, “solid as a ship,” the great house at Bimini with the three-sided screened-in porch that sat on the tongue of land between the harbor and the sea, the one “shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind,” the one that would end up lasting through not just three hurricanes, but through an aborted novel that was put into a Cuban bank vault in 1951 and that took another two decades to find its light of print. It was Lerner, who, three years after Hemingway's suicide, sat in a room of his great island house, speaking to Hemingway's most troubled son, no longer a dopey little guy with his rolls of baby fat. It was midday and the blinds were drawn. The house was in some disrepair. He didn't look well. He didn't go out on boats much anymore. “There are so many things I'd like to tell you about your father, Gregory,” said Lerner. “God we had fun in those days.” That's on page 37 of
Papa: A Personal Memoir
.

Tuna dreams. In the May 1935
Esquire
, on newsstands and in mailboxes just as he had arrived at Bimini, Hemingway wrote that marlin have something on or in their noses that sharks are afraid of, and consequently they never come for a big marlin until they know that it is tired or bleeding badly. But it's different with tuna, he opined. The main defense a tuna has against a shark is its speed. In this same piece he said, “Your correspondent is as ignorant of giant tuna as any man can be.”

That was hardly true, but what was true was that until then, he'd never had one on the end of his line. In December 1921, on his way to France as a twenty-two-year-old freelancer (with Sherwood Anderson's letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein et al. in his hind pocket), he had witnessed giant tuna leaping on a curve of bay in Vigo, Spain. They'd come down and hit the water with the smack of a stallion. Hemingway had absorbed it all—the way the peasant fishermen baited their hooks with silvery mullet, the way schools of sardines seemed depth-charged out of the water when a bluefin rose. In the town's fish market, he and Hadley had gawked at an eight-hundred-pound tuna laid out on a slab. About two months later, in Paris, from the newly rented cold-water walk-up at 74, rue du Cardinal Lemoine, near the place de la Contrescarpe, where the drunks and working poor of the Left Bank lived, workmanlike sentences got written for readers of the
Toronto Star Weekly:
“A big tuna is silver and slate blue, and when he shoots up into the air from close beside the boat it is like a blinding
flash of quicksilver. He may weigh three hundred pounds and he jumps with the eagerness and ferocity of a mammoth rainbow trout. Sometimes five and six tuna will be in the air at once in Vigo Bay, shouldering out of the water.” A tuna, wrote the stringer in his seven-paragraph color piece (for which he was paid at space rates, meaning not much), was “the king of all fish, the ruler of the Valhalla of fishermen.”