Sea Fever Read online

  He [the fisherman] can see the slicing wake of the fin, if he cuts toward the bait, or the rising and lowering sickle of his tail if he is traveling, or if he comes from behind he can see the bulk of him underwater, great blue pectorals widespread like the wings of some huge underwater bird, and the stripes around him like purple bands around a brown barrel. To feel that fish in his rod, to feel that power and that great rush, to be a connected part of it and then to dominate it and to master it and to bring that fish to gaff, alone and with no one else touching rod, reel or leader, is something worth waiting many days for.

  Yet there was more than this to his fascination with the sport; in the past he had followed bullfighting and taken up fly fishing with a similar degree of obsession, but the enthusiasm had waned. Out in the stream, things were different. Hemingway articulated his deep fascination with the Gulf Stream thus:

  Because the Gulf Stream is unexploited country, only the fringe of it ever being fished, and then only at a dozen places in thousands of miles of current, no one knows what fish live in it, or how great size they reach or what age, or even what kinds of fish and animals live in it at different depths. When you are drifting, out of sight of land, fishing four lines, sixty, eighty, 100 and 150 fathoms down in water that is 700 fathoms deep, you never know what may take the small tuna that you use for bait. It may be a marlin that will jump high and clear off to your right and then go off in a series of leaps, throwing a splash like a speedboat in a sea as you shout for the boat to turn with him watching the line melting off the reel before the boat can get around. Or it might be a broadbill that will show wagging his great broadsword. Or it may be some fish that you will never see at all that will head straight out to the north west like a submerged submarine and never show and at the end of five hours the angler has a straightened out hook. There is always a feeling of excitement when a fish takes hold when you are drifting deep.

  It was during this early period, fishing aboard the Anita, that Hemingway was first introduced to an old Cuban fisherman by the name of Carlos Gutierrez. Hemingway was like a sponge during this period, attaching himself to anyone who knew more than him about deep-sea fishing and soaking up all the information he could gather until the subject of his attention was wrung dry. Gutierrez, who had fished the stream since 1884, had much knowledge to pass on, and one story that fascinated Hemingway was to lie dormant within the recesses of his brain until 1951, when it simply spilled out onto the page, forming The Old Man and the Sea. He mentioned Gutierrez’s tale briefly:

  An old man out in a skiff out of Cabanas hooked a great marlin that, on the heavy sash cord hand line, pulled the skiff far out to sea. Two days later the old man was picked up by fishermen sixty miles to the eastward, the head and forward part of the marlin lashed alongside. What was left of the fish, less than half, weighed eight hundred pounds. The old man stayed with him a day, a night, a day and another night while the fish swam deep and pulled the boat. When he had come up the old man had pulled the boat up on him and harpooned him. Lashed alongside the sharks had hit him and the old man had fought them alone out in the Gulf Stream in a skiff, clubbing them, stabbing at them, lunging at them with an oar until he was exhausted and the sharks had eaten all that they could hold. He was crying in the boat when the fishermen picked him up, half crazy from his loss, and the sharks were still circling the boat.

  This was to be the first stirring of The Old Man and the Sea. After another season aboard the Anita, Hemingway took the plunge and bought his own boat. The year was 1933 and he had just returned from a season of big-game hunting in Africa when he placed the order for Pilar, a Wheeler Playmate cabin cruiser some 38ft in length. This was a fairly modest vessel straight off the production line, but she was a sleek little motorboat, pleasing to the eye and capable of running at 16 knots or so if required. Hemingway had her especially customised for fishing and painted black. She was comfortable enough to sleep six with a further two in the cockpit if the weather permitted. Hemingway was immensely pleased with his purchase and hired two crew whom he kitted out with matching uniforms with the name of his command, Pilar, monogrammed onto their sailor suits. If that sounds a little overblown for a cabin cruiser, the more acute reader may have noted that in 1933 America was in the grip of the great depression. Millions were unemployed; the country stared into the abyss. Hemingway went fishing on a shiny new boat with a crew dressed up in sailor suits. Yet there is some redemption for the man. One of his crew that first year was Arnold Samuelson, an unemployed bum who had hitched down to Key West from depression-stricken Minneapolis and knocked on Hemingway’s door. The writer took him in at once and promptly offered him a job. For all his image as a merciless swine, Hemingway had a warm and generous side to him. Samuelson recalled the interview:

  EH: Of course, I don’t know you very well, but you seem to be the sort of person that can be trusted. Do you drink?

  AS: Not much, just a little moonshine when I was a kid.

  EH: That’s good, the owner is the only person who can get drunk aboard a boat.

  Pilar set sail for Cuba, where the wizened old fisherman Carlos Gutierrez and a younger Cuban, Gregorio Fuentes, bolstered her crew to three. Hemingway usually hosted a range of drinking buddies aboard during these trips, who he could booze, bully and brag with. On this first trip, however, he brought along a whole troupe of naturalists, hoping to analyse the Gulf Stream and the creatures of the deep therein. This may seem unusual, but Hemingway was actually deeply fascinated by the scientific side of the stream. Indeed, his methodical and thorough method of studying marlin – his endless notes on the habits of this fish are still extant – point to a man who wanted complete understanding of everything to do with this great, mysterious stream. Just as a deep understanding of the tides and reefs and wave formations of the break he rides aid the surfer, so Hemingway was using every ounce of knowledge he could lay his hands on to fish these mysterious waters to best advantage.

  Yet, for all this fascination with the Gulf Stream, there was still the drinking and the guns and the lovers, all of were present aboard Pilar. These naturally grabbed the headlines. The guns really deserve some mention, for from day one there was always a rifle aboard Pilar and Hemingway was never far from the trigger. One particularly unpleasant incident is recounted by an ex-friend of his, Archibald MacLeish, who was invited out aboard Pilar for a spot of fishing in the early days. MacLeish hooked a sailfish and made rather a hash of reeling it in, probably not helped by Hemingway bellowing orders at him. Once the fish had escaped, Hemingway was so incensed that he vented spleen by firing at the terns that followed the boat. MacLeish was particularly scarred by the experience as seabirds plopped dismally into Pilar’s wake, Hemingway bringing down the first tern with one barrel of the rifle and finishing off the grieving mate with the other. This is not the act of a budding naturalist. Anyone believing in karma, however, will be delighted to know that a year or so later, Hemingway managed to shoot himself in the leg after a bullet accidentally discharged from his pistol while he wrestled with a shark he was reeling in. The bullet hit something metal on Pilar’s capping rail and rebounded into his leg, injuring him in the process. The guns were not really meant for shooting terns – or writers for that matter – at all. Their true purpose was to see off any sharks that might cluster round a stricken marlin before it could be gaffed and brought aboard. After a while, Hemingway decided that a mere rifle was never going to cut it, and therefore opted to buy a Thompson submachine gun. A female friend who went on one of his fishing trips around this time describes the drama the Tommy gun added thus:

  They [the sharks] come in like express trains and hit the fish like a planing mill – shearing off 25 pounds at a bite. Ernest shoots them with his machine gun rrrr – but it wont stop them – it’s terrific seeing the bullets ripping into them-the sharks thrashing in blood and foam – the white bellies and fearful jaws – the pale cold eyes. I was aghast, but it’s very exciting.

  This extremely dangerous machin
e-gunning habit contributed to another deeply disturbing incident, which, again, was subconsciously going to help him write The Old Man and the Sea.

  In 1935, his second season with Pilar, Hemingway took his command up to Bimini, another rich Gulf Stream fishing ground nestled on the western tip of the Bahamas. He hosted the usual selection of friends, kicking off with the old syphilitic ne’er do well and legendary big-game hunter Bror Blixen – now probably most famous for his earlier marriage to Karen Blixen who, under the name Isak Dinesen wrote Out of Africa. Back then though, he was big news in his own right. Hemingway made an impression in Bimini from the off. Making himself comfortable and well oiled at the Compleat Angler hotel and bar, he issued a standing challenge to all and sundry that he would take on all comers and pay out $200 to anyone who could go three rounds of boxing with him. His interest in pugilism wasn’t confined to the ring, and it was in Bimini that the writer famously punched wealthy magazine publisher Joe Knapp in the face after the latter had called him a ‘big fat slob’. This inspired the rather dire local ditty entitled ‘Big Fat Slob’.

  The big fat slob in Bimini

  Is the night we had fun.

  Mr. Knapp called Mr. Hemingway A big fat slob.

  Mr. Hemingway balled his fist and gave him a knob.

  Also among the party was an old friend from his Paris days, Mike Strater, an artist. There had always been a degree of rivalry between these two, but all went well until some weeks into the trip, when Strater hooked into a huge black marlin. The marlin was over 4m (13ft) long and Strater reckoned it weighed somewhere in the region of 450kg (1,000lbs). He later recalled:

  As soon as I hooked him, I knew he was a big one. Then he came out of the water walking on his tail and it was just like a metallic blue express train bursting out of the water. Hem and I were both excited because it was the first one we had hooked; the first big marlin anyone in Bimini had snagged and we wanted very much to land him.

  Both Hemingway and Strater had discussed tactics on landing a big marlin. The problem was that if you played the fish for too long in order to tire him out, the chances were that he would have bled sufficiently to attract sharks. Bimini suffered with this problem more than most fishing spots and there was a real risk that they would devour the marlin before it was landed. Strater had therefore developed a strategy of putting his all into wearing the fish out with a short, brutal fight. He put this strategy into play as he prepared to do battle with this monster fish. All went well, and within an hour the fish was close enough to the boat to be gaffed. This was to be Hemingway’s job, aided by paid hand ‘Bread’ Pindar. Sadly, the writer appears to temporarily have lost his head. According to Strater, this is what followed:

  Bread and I were still occupied with the marlin when suddenly Hem begins to fire the gun off right behind us screaming ‘sharks’, ‘sharks’. We could hear the bullets going past our heads. Bread, who was being paid by the week and not getting paid at all to get shot at, ran immediately to the other end of the boat. If I hadn’t had a record fish on my line, I would have run too.

  Without Pindar’s aid, the marlin was able to wriggle away and soon the line was again screaming off the reel. An exasperated Strater yelled at his friend to stop the shooting, and Hemingway responded by taunting him, shouting that he, ‘couldn’t take the muzzle blasts’. Why did he act like this? Strater has a theory:

  The truth is that Ernest was overcome with jealousy because I had a record marlin hooked and had brought it up in record time. He didn’t want me to be the one to catch the first big fish. In fact the fish was never in danger from sharks because I had already brought it to gaff with no damage whatsoever.

  There followed another hour of desperate wrestling with the giant fish to land it again. This time, the blood from all that machine gunning had definitely attracted the sharks and the anglers had to watch in horror as this giant, beautiful fish was attacked before their very eyes by the thrashing mass of bloodthirsty makos and tiger sharks, in a scene straight out of The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway, over his moment of madness, was extremely helpful and eventually, at least two-thirds of the fish was landed on deck. Pilar returned to Bimini victorious.

  It must be remembered that Mike Strater recalled this incident when Hemingway was long dead and unable to defend himself. That he caught a huge, half eaten marlin is beyond dispute, for there is a picture of Hemingway and Strater posing beside the great fish, its flanks clearly savaged by sharks. It must be said that Hemingway certainly has a slightly proprietary look about him as he stands by. It is possible that Strater was just sore about losing most of his record catch. Then again, he might be telling the truth. Later that evening, flushed with success, the crew of Pilar went out on the town and Strater was bought round after round of drinks by admiring anglers. At the end of the night, Hemingway’s friend claims that his frustrated fellow fisherman slugged him in the guts. Hemingway had gathered some valuable source material for The Old Man and the Sea. He had also lost another friend.

  I realise that this short story of Hemingway’s sea experience is beginning to read like yet another character assassination of the great writer. I do not mean it to be. It is rather meant to be an illustration of his wonderfully nuanced relationship with the sea, which led him down the path to the Old Man and the Sea. And, of course, he must have had a sensitive side, but it is difficult to reconcile this bullet-spraying lunatic with that man. One person who understood him well was Gertrude Stein. Stein, a novelist and poet, had acted as mentor to the young Hemingway when he was in Paris, helping him develop his writing style. She was the godmother to his first son, Jack, but by 1934 Hemingway had long since fallen out with her, generally referring to her as ‘the bitch’. She summed Ernest as follows:

  When I first met Hemingway he had a truly sensitive capacity for emotion, and that was the stuff of the first stories; but he was shy of himself and started to develop, as a shield, a big Kansas City boy brutality about it, and so he was ‘tough’ because he was really sensitive and ashamed that he was. He went the way so many Americans have gone before, the way they are still going. He became obsessed by sex and death.

  …then his agonising shyness escaped into brutality. No, now wait – not real brutality, because the truly brutal man wants something more than bullfighting and deep-sea fishing and elephant killing or whatever it is now, and perhaps if Hemingway was truly brutal he could make some real literature out of those things, but he is not, and I doubt he will ever again write truly about anything. He is skilful, yes, but that is the writer, the other half is the man.

  And of course she was right, at least on one point. Hemingway, in addition to often being a brutal oaf, was also capable of being incredibly sensitive. Whatever Stein thought about his sport-fishing habits, there was no question that the sea brought out the softer side in him, even before The Old Man and the Sea. In 1934 he published The Green Hills of Africa – an experimental non-fiction piece about a hunting safari he had undertaken with his wife. Much of the book is a brutal catalogue of killing, but perhaps one of the finest passages relates to the Gulf Stream:

  When, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, cork
s, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing – the stream.

  As the seasons ebbed and flowed, fishing and the Gulf Stream were giving Hemingway pause for thought, a certain spiritual outlook on life. His rapport with it was interrupted when he went off to report on the Spanish Civil War in 1938. He returned with his third wife and the material for his first critically acclaimed novel in almost a decade: For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book that deals almost exclusively with sex and death. Gertrude Stein must have loved it. In the meantime, Hemingway and his new wife bought a house, La Finca Vigia, located about nine miles out of Havana in the village of San Francisco de Paula. He seemed set up for life and was probably mildly irritated when World War Two came along to disturb him. His reputation as a hard-hitting reporter on big events such as these went before him and he would have felt the weight of expectation lie heavy on his shoulders. It didn’t help that his wife, Martha Gellhorn, was a serious journalist who was champing at the bit to get involved with the seismic chaos going on in Europe. Gellhorn was a tough, chain-smoking journo who was almost as macho as Hemingway. She had no time for wimps and, if Hemingway had been half the man he portrayed himself to be, she would have been an ideal sparring partner. But Hemingway was now over 40, he was tired and he loved the stream and Pilar and that was where he wanted to be. While Gellhorn went off to cover the war deriding him for his lassitude and writer’s block, Hemingway went to ground in Cuba to fight the demons in his own head. He was constantly aware that as a man of action he should be doing something, and his solution was simultaneously ingenious and pathetic: he obtained a commission from the office of Naval Intelligence to fit out the Pilar as an anti-submarine craft and took to the stream with serious intent to destroy German submarines with a 38ft wooden cabin cruiser.