Hemingway's Boat (34 page)

Oh, how this boatload of press coverage must have galled Hemingway. At a dinner party in Beverly Hills (the guest of honor got to choose her own guests), she'd had a séance with Dashiell Hammett, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, Anita Loos, and Paulette Goddard. She'd declined a movie offer from Warner Brothers—Hollywood didn't interest her except as a passing spasm of contemporary life. Finally, the summer having almost come, having patchworked and crisscrossed America to her satisfaction for nearly seven months, shed of those coarse-nap woolens designed for dank French winters, longing only to get back to the other side of the ocean (where she had once strolled Bumby Hemingway in a big black pram in the Jardin du Luxembourg), she and Alice had returned to New York.

On Friday, May 3, 1935, the day before the pair had sailed again for Le
Havre on the
Champlain
, Stein had granted one last stateside interview. By then the ex-acolyte and his boat had been on Bimini for something like two weeks. He hadn't been able to fish yet, not for big ones out in the Stream, just some small stuff around the docks. But he was a happy man, even if he was still a little wobbly on his feet. His wife had just been over on a brief visit, and other friends were shortly due. His wounds, as he'd just reported to Max Perkins in a letter, had all but stopped “suppurating,” which was a word his physician-father would have appreciated. In Chicago, “On Being Shot Again” was set in type—subscribers would have the story in their hands in another twelve or thirteen days. In New York,
Scribner's Magazine
had just come out with the first installment of its serialization of
Green Hills of Africa
, which would appear as a book in the fall, containing some tart comments about Miss Stein. (Through that summer, and into the early fall, Max Perkins would try to get him to remove, or soften, some of the Stein passages—with mixed results. Hemingway did relinquish on the word “bitch” in one passage.)

Stein's interlocutor on the third was John Hyde Preston, a semi-obscure Canadian writer who was almost as pretentious-sounding as she was. Most of the talk was in Stein's suite at the Algonquin Hotel, although some of it took place while they were out marching on Madison Avenue. “Walk on my left,” she commanded, above the traffic, “because my right ear is broken.” The “conversation,” as the piece was titled when it appeared in print several months later, was about the terrible thing that happens to American writers: how they feel they must create a new literature; how they get to be thirty-five or forty and the juices dry up, and then what happens? They stop writing altogether or they begin to repeat themselves formulaically. It was all so sad and tragic.

You could almost hear what was coming next. “What about Hemingway?” the interviewer asks, venturing his own opinion that Hemingway was good merely until after
A Farewell to Arms
—say, into the first years of the 1930s.

Oh no, Stein says, he wasn't really any good after 1925. In the early short stories, he had it, but then he betrayed himself. You see, she said,

She elaborated, testing a stubby finger in Manhattan hotel-room air.

Obsessed by sex and violence. Developing, as a shield, your big Kansas City–boy brutality, because your sensitivity to life deeply shames you. A mask for the thing in you that's really gentle and fine.

I've always wondered if at least part of the reason that Ernest Hemingway so grew to revile Gertrude Stein was because he understood how close to the bone she could scrape. A writer and Hemingway friend named Prudencio de Pereda (mentioned earlier) once used a baseball analogy to describe some of the better psychological tries by Hemingway's detractors: the ball looks beautiful from the instant it leaves the bat, seemingly headed straight for the upper deck, clear homer, only to veer off in the last seconds to just this side of the foul pole. It ends up only another strike on the batter, but, damn, wasn't it fine watching that thing fly?

Pilar
departed the Key West docks again early on April 15 and this time the fishing party made it fine. The two newly hired crewmen, who'd been aboard the week before, were again along, and of course they had their nicknames. They were Albert “Old Bread” Pinder (engineer and pilot) and Richard “Saca Ham” Adams (cook and mate); both were both longtime Key West hands. Hemingway's Cuban mate, Carlos Gutiérrez, wasn't making this trip, but Hemingway planned to send for him later in the summer, if things on Bimini turned out to be as good as he hoped. All
winter Carlos had hung the cleaned fishing lines in loose coils in a muslin bag from a rafter in his Havana home where he knew the sun wouldn't hit them but the breezes would. Both Dos Passoses were aboard. But in place of Mike Strater—who'd gone back to his winter residence in West Palm Beach and intended to fly over early in May—was Charles Thompson.

They trolled well out into the current and rode the Stream in the way of an airliner catching a tail wind, letting it carry them eastward and northward along the Keys, for the first leg, which is to say about 150 north-by-northeast miles, past Molasses Reef and French Reef and Dixie Shoal and what's known on nautical charts as the Elbow. They caught some small yellowfin tuna and some dolphinfish with rainbow-colored tails. At night they came inside the coastal barrier reef for safe anchorage in Hawk Channel, which runs all the way up on the Atlantic side of the Keys. The year before, when Hemingway and the Wheeler rep from Brooklyn and Captain Bra Saunders had first steered
Pilar
down from Miami, they'd come via the protected Hawk Channel passage, staying close in to shore. Now he was a much more confident captain.

They slept on board and cooked up what they caught. On the morning of the third day, when they were up near Key Largo, Hemingway cut his boat directly across the Stream, taking his bearing from Carysfort Light (which is how it's listed on nautical charts), steering east-northeast for Gun Cay, and then on up to Bimini itself.

Within days, he was inhaling it whole, claiming it for his own. Within days, he was junking his original plan, which was to stay for only a couple weeks on this first visit. No, he'd probably stay right on through and send for the family later in the summer. Maybe Cuba would have to wait this year until late summer or even the fall. He wouldn't catch up to Gertrude Stein's near-miss of a homer until he'd gotten back home and had unwrapped several months' worth of magazines and newspapers. (The piece appeared in the August 1935
Atlantic.
) It isn't known whether he read her piece up in his writing studio with the door closed and began suppurating all over again. (The medical definition means to form or discharge pus.)

Now and again in the years ahead, he'd claim he'd not turned around and gone back to Key West after he'd shot himself, but had wadded up his wounds and taken shots of whiskey and gone on fishing and steaming toward that speck of British-held soil on the eastern side of the Stream whose original settlers (somewhere around
AD
500) were said to be seafaring Indians from South America called Lucayo. Maybe Hemingway forgot he'd written “On Being Shot Again.” More likely, he didn't care.

Go back for a moment to the photograph at the start of the previous chapter. He had been on Bimini three months when it was taken. The following day he'd turn thirty-six. That's
Pilar
flying her American colors in this back-of-the-moon Crown Colony, where there's one policeman; where two-thirds of the population is black; where the native kids go to school barefoot but also in clean white uniforms; where drinking water and ice and the fresh vegetables and mail for the visiting anglers arrive every Tuesday on the pilot boat from Miami; where the slattern little waterside bars are so inviting and dark when you've ducked in from the glare of the white coral road; where wedding parties strut and jive through the center of town to calypso beats, with the whole island taking a holiday; where it's an almost unheard-of thing for a house or a school or one of the Protestant missionary clapboard churches to have glass in its windows—they have wooden hurricane shutters instead. They get propped outward with a stick, so that the light refracts in at a cooling slant
.

In this early-evening Bahamian light, the fisherman stands proudly, victoriously, with his three boys, ages seven, eleven, and three. This is at Brown's Dock, which is where he usually parks
Pilar
after her labors. Just out of sight is a pole with a saggy wind sock, and close by a sign with large block lettering: ENTRANCE DOCK GAS AND OIL. In wider shots, you get the pleasing ricketiness
.

The four beaten things in the background are blue marlin. They'd been caught by three fishermen in three boats within several hours of each other. The two at the left are Hemingway's, smallest of the four, which must have agitated deeply. One weighed 362 pounds, the other 330
.
They were his tenth and eleventh big-game catches of the season. All four fish were taken by rod and reel, and each was fought solo to the boat by the fisherman who'd hooked it, thus honoring the codes of the sport
.

Perhaps an hour before, Hemingway had brought in his two marlin, maneuvering
Pilar
through the shallow, narrow channel that separates North Bimini from South Bimini, flying the victory flag, clanging the bell, hauling the prizes up onto the dock, winching them into place along with the other two, getting the native boys to scrub them down with soapy pails of water so that they'd properly glisten in the photographs. Later in the
evening he got very drunk. Soon after, possibly the next day, when he was sober, he wrote down some notes about his catches—they may, in fact, be several days' worth of cryptic notes. He was using for a logbook the title page of his 1932 Modern Library edition of Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain,
which is one of the fifty or so books that had come across the Gulf Stream in
Pilar
's hold back in April. Using a pencil, he wrote around and through the publisher's logo, around and through the name of the translator, around and through the large type of the title itself
.

Hemingway noted that he was using his new Vom Hofe, with thirty-nine-thread line, and that one of his fish had “jumped 3 times straight toward boat—then ran about 350
—
got him alongside boat—He hooked up and jumped 33 times against the current,” and that once they'd gotten the other fish “on board alive” he managed to jump “20 times or more in cockpit.” Such minutiae, even if they defy credulity, help bring the day that much more alive. (How could he know in the midst of all that watery chaos his fish jumped thirty-three times against the current? Sure it wasn't thirty-four? Never mind, that's being a literalist, and this is a fabulist, inventing his life even as he's living it.)

But all of what I've said thus far has little to do with the real reason why I asked you to turn back and gaze again at the image at the start of the previous chapter. What I wanted to dwell on is the terrifying and unwitting but no less destructive influence of a man's unconscious on those whom he deeply loved. That's an idea, not possible to prove, that the youngest child of Ernest Hemingway spoke about at length when I met him in Miami in 1987
.
In a sense, that's all that Gregory Hemingway spoke of in a surreal conversation that started in the evening, before it was dark, and didn't end until close to midnight. I had this photograph in my hand that night
.