Ernesto Page 12
In addition to the heads of three lions, a rhino, a wildebeest, impalas, kudus, and many other beasts—twenty-nine kills in total—the African expedition would inspire much material during that year: journalism, nonfiction, and fiction. The “Tanganyika Letters” were the first three trophies of the page, producing spending cash from the good graces of Arnold Gingrich’s bankbook. Like the Cuban Letters, they spread his fame as a hunter and as an explorer far and wide. Read mostly by American males, the letters in Esquire instructed, “there are two ways to murder a lion”: as a “shootist” or as a “sportsman,” so typifying their recurring theme—the authenticity of the experience he had to offer.144 The pact with readers was to take them on the ride of their life. Unlike competitors or would-be imitators, he would not waste time with tourism or cowardly simulations but confront the marvelous mysteries of the great unknown while allowing them to follow.
Reinvesting the capital that he garnered from the articles, he financed future adventures that he could again write home about. As Death in the Afternoon discovered bullfighting from his perspective, Green Hills of Africa, published in October 1935, solidified his larger-than-life persona. The experiential travelogue was reinvented as a genre.
* * *
—
The previous year, Mr. Wheeler, of Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn, had smartly taken it upon himself to send Ernest one of their catalogues. Though he had been studying it for months—carrying it with him since the previous summer, even taking it to Africa with him—he continued to inspect the specifications and cabin arrangements inside the tent under a kerosene lamp of a custom-made fishing boat whose components would later become as familiar to him as a father’s voice or as any number of childhood dreams. The advertisement read, “If you are looking for a fine roomy cruiser with lots of comforts, and ability for long offshore cruising and fishing trips, we suggest that you look this boat over very carefully…Afloat at the plant. For rail or steamer deliveries add $175 for cradle and cover.”145
In March, while still in Paris just before boarding his return ship for New York, Ernest had written his Esquire editor to ask him for an advance against articles he had not yet written about his African exploits.146 The boat cost $7,000, but he had only $3,500, Ernest explained to his editor, who immediately sent him $3,000 to make his down payment on the boat. Before he had even unpacked his travel trunk, he was passing through New York in April on the way to Key West and took a taxi out to the Brooklyn shipyard to order his thirty-eight-foot twin cabin cruiser, designed for offshore cruising and fishing.
She should be painted black, he specified, except for a green roof and her polished mahogany cockpit. The name Pilar would be scripted across the stern along with the name of her home port, Key West. At its origin, Pilar was the name of the Virgin of Saragossa, patron saint of Spain, a country he had held close to heart since the days he first travelled there as a young man with Hadley. Then, Pilar had become his macho-tender, Hispano-military code name for Pauline during their affair and when they met in Madrid while Hadley awaited quarantined with Bumby in Juan-les-Pins. Later, Pilar referred to the daughter Pauline and Ernest had hoped for but who never arrived. Finally, it was the name he gave the heroine of his later novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls.147
* * *
—
With his boat ordered, Hemingway again set his sights on Cuba, where corruption, frustration, and revolution were rising to a boiling point, though not nine months had passed since Machado’s retreat. Students, intellectuals, journalists, laborers, the DEU, and ABC irregulars had supported revolutionary candidates Grau San Martín and Guiteras only to see them shuffled off the stage by Colonel Batista and Ambassador Caffery and replaced with labor leader Carlos Mendieta. These factions from the left, who had seen their causes tabled for corruption and business as usual, grew angrier and bolder every day. In April, one of Cuba’s most popular magazines, Bohemia, printed the alarming words of writer/militant Pablo de la Torriente Brau (whom Ernest would later meet in civil-war Spain), drawing their inspiration from George-Jacques Danton: “Compromise, compromise is always the advice of those false revolutionaries who never understand the real lesson of Danton: that in Cuba, as in any other place, what a revolutionary needs is audacity, audacity and more audacity.”148
The forces of law and order anxiously anticipated the massive demonstrations being planned by labor movements for May Day.149 While police reinforced defenses and distributed riot gear, labor leaders organized two hundred thousand workers to shut down buses, trains, factories, cane fields, refineries, and resorts on the first of the month. Caffery advised the Secretary of State that there had been rumors that Communists would attempt to loot American business that day: “It is therefore expected that the government will take special measures to protect such property.”150
As a student of revolution and as a man who was itching with expectation as he awaited his boat’s arrival, Ernest convinced leftie John Dos Passos to accompany him to Havana to witness the May Day activities and to pre-book a dock for the Pilar’s first fishing season.151 The two writers found the city on the brink of war, an entangle ment of protesters and police.152 They called on Carlos Gutierrez and Manuel Asper, owner of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, who said the situation was extremely serious.153 Twenty-five thousand had gathered in Parque Central to protest a government that did not represent their interests. When police confiscated the protestors’ banners and ordered them to disperse, they retreated to reassemble at Cristal Stadium, and sharpshooters then opened fire to disperse the crowd. Though there were no fatalities, eleven were wounded in the shootings.
Just after Ernest’s return to calmer Key West, a young stranger appeared on the author’s doorstep. Arnold Samuelson, a twenty-two-year-old valedictorian of his tiny class from White Earth, Minnesota, was struggling to write when he read “One Trip Across”: a Cuban story that formed the basis of the novel To Have and Have Not and which appeared in Cosmopolitan along with a picture of Ernest Hemingway returning from an African safari. This was the way he wanted to write, and this was just the sort of man who could teach him, one whose education came from life itself. Arnold, son of a sharecropping wheat farmer, had completed every course for a degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota but had been so bored and frustrated by formal education that he refused to pay the final fee of five dollars to issue his diploma. Perhaps troubled by the brutal murder of his elder sister or unable during the Depression to secure a job in journalism, Arnold decided to “bum” across the country, hopping railroad trains to make a pilgrimage and learn the craft from a living master.
Summoning up the courage to knock at his idol’s door, Samuelson was suddenly face-to-face with him—a massive man irritated with him for interrupting his writing and not respecting his privacy, but who soon softened under Arnold’s admiring eyes and invited him to return the following afternoon.154 Samuelson could hardly believe it when Hemingway offered him a job aboard the Pilar, a writing “apprenticeship,” and one dollar per day salary.
Just before Ernest left for Miami with Pauline and Bra to meet the Wheeler representative who had come down from Brooklyn to deliver his boat, another worshipper, this time a blood relative, appeared at his door: Ernest’s kid brother, Leicester, whom he’d nicknamed “Baron,” with his buddy Al Dudek. They had blown the trust fund Ernest had set up for him with the movie rights of A Farewell to Arms to build a boat they called the Hankshaw and sail it down from Alabama for high-sea adventure. Cashing in favors with his friends, Ernest found them a place to park it in the naval yard. It had taken them twenty-three days to make a trip down to Key West, though it should have required only ten.155 When Bra Saunders saw the rickety, top-heavy boat, he told Leicester he would give him five dollars for it just to make sure he did not die by trying to take it out to sea again.156 Leicester’s arrival surprised Ernest, as did his declaration that he dreamed of sea adventures and becoming a writer too.
From Miami
harbor, the Wheeler rep accompanied Hemingway during a two-day sea journey back to Key West so that he could get his bearings on the new boat.157 Lovingly Ernest ran his fingers along Pilar‘s rails and felt the weight of her in the water as he steered her through the current. Emerging from the recesses of boyhood fantasies and an overripe imagination, Ernest noted how her every detail had been fashioned from his precise instructions, and, new, she smelled of mahogany, fresh paint, Italian leather, and gasoline.158 Equipped with berthing space for eight, ample storage, a modern galley, a roller bar, and a lowered transom (making it easier to bring the big ones aboard), she had been made for Ernest Hemingway to fish the Gulf Stream.
Though he could have asked Uncle Gus, who had purchased Ernest’s home and funded his safari, or any other Pfeiffer, for money, he deliberately bought this boat with his earnings from writing, or at least on credit from Gingrich, so that she would belong to him alone.159 He could hardly believe he had pulled it off, but she was real and she was his. At a time when literary success and growing fame threatened his peace, privacy, and craft even on an island at the end of the world, his new boat offered a floating home, a mobile island granting exhilarating and unprecedented degrees of freedom and power.
Ernest wrote Gingrich to assure him he would honor their agreement, thank him, and gush—during a moment that he seemed completely happy: “The boat is marvelous. Wheeler, 38 footer, cut down to my design. 75 horse Chrysler and a 40 h. Lycoming. Low stern for fishing. Fish well, 300 gal gas tanks. 100 gal water. Sleeps six in cabin and two in cockpit. Can turn on its own tail burns less than three gals an hour trolling and four at cruising speed with the big engine. Will do sixteen with the two motors. The little one will do five hooked up.”160
While the smooth-talking sales rep demonstrated the boat’s innumerable features, listening to him intently, Ernest ordered final adjustments executed without delay. When he returned from this test run, the limitless potential of his sea cruiser was gleaming for a crowd of friends and neighbors at the Key West docks, including his adoring apprentice, Arnold Samuelson, awaiting pearls of wisdom from a true master.161 Filing a manifest with the maritime authorities in Key West port for his first crossing to Cuba aboard the Pilar, Hemingway listed Samuelson as his “engineer” and Charles Lund, a junior seaman with P&O steamship line, as his navigator.162
Ernest’s wisdom was much better received by aspirants than experienced friends, even those who sought it out. Besieged by Zelda’s mental health and by dipsomania, F. Scott Fitzgerald had written his friend, fast becoming the most famous writer in America, eager for his approval on his freshly completed manuscript of Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald had been working on his fourth novel for eight years, and he was desperate to know if it was any good. Though they had grown apart, Scott respected Ernest and his recent accomplishments. When Ernest’s response was delayed by several weeks, Scott fired off a follow-up letter: “Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or the other.”163 In the interim, Ernest had written Max Perkins criticizing Scott and his manuscript: the manuscript was poorly written, and Scott was wasting his potential.164 Yes, Scott’s talent was tremendous, wrote Ernest, but he had to be a man: he needed to grow up.
With his father-in-law in tow, Archibald MacLeish dropped down to Key West to visit his friend. Ernest wanted to help his friend to hook the sailfish, which were plentiful then, but after nine days of trying, the poet would not listen to the writer’s perhaps well-intentioned but overbearing instructions to slack off the line and insisted on striking instead: “He’s after you, Archie! Slack to him! Slack to him!!! Shit! Why the hell didn’t you slack to him? He’s spooked now and he never will come back.” According to Samuelson, “The E.H.-MacLeish friendship was never the same after that.”165
As Ernest’s stature increased during the 1930s, his behavior with friends became “erratic, combative, and sometimes intolerable.”166 Passion, energy, arrogance, intellect, and large quantities of booze could make minor disagreements fester into irreconcilable arguments as he said precisely what he thought of those who got in his way. While he apologized profusely afterward, often recognizing his errors, words and deeds in the heat of the moment could scald to the bone, and his inner sensitivity could result in grudges that he or others were unable to let go. “Papa can be more severe than God on a rough day when the whole human race is misbehaving,” said his friend Robert Capa.167 These troubles and his fame resulted in a steady stream of new relationships, yet acts of generosity mark the mystery of a complex and brightly burning man who will never be fully condemnable or completely understood.
A few days after the blowout with MacLeish, Ernest wrote Scott a response concerning Tender Is the Night. It began, “I liked it and I didn’t like it.”168 The characters were artificial, “faked case histories,” rather than real people, and, in his estimation, Scott was allowing his drinking, his worries, and Zelda to distort his powers of perception and to wreak havoc with his writing discipline. He continued, “All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.”169 At the end of a tough letter, Ernest invited Scott down to fish with him in the fall, perhaps intending to set him straight. But hurt perhaps by his friend’s reproaches, possibly feeling like too much of a failure relative to his success, Scott dodged the invitation with a story, made up, about an ailing mother.170 Ernest was right, for, befuddling its reviewers and slumping in sales, the novel would not fare well. To be right about the faults of one’s friends was easy, to know how to help them was not, nor was avoiding similar failures.
* * *
—
Twenty minutes from Havana, Hemingway and his devoted crew noticed a burning smell, and after searching the galley and the engine pit, they discovered that Pilar’s main motor was so hot that it was melting the paint from the cylinder.171 The cooling pump had ceased to function, so they turned off the large engine and puttered slowly into port on the smaller Lycoming engine, which the author had installed for trolling and for such emergencies. Against the current, Pilar took another two hours to arrive, but they had been lucky the trouble started close to port.
As they entered the harbor beside the Morro, a patrol boat approached, and three soldiers in khaki carrying rifles announced their intention to search the boat for contraband weapons intended for the Communists.172 When Ernest explained that he was an American coming to fish marlin, the soldiers laughed, saying it was a good story. They would still have to search the boat. As they prepared to board, another boat approached with a man on it who was shouting, “¡El Hemingway! “¡El Hemingway!”173
In the newspapers, the name “Hemingway” belonged famously to the American millionaire who had caught dozens of marlins last season and gave the meat to all who would care to partake of it along the docks. “¡Hola, Carlos!” Ernest responded as his employee leaped aboard, “his black eyes glistening with emotion.”174 When soldiers heard the name Hemingway, their faces shrank with embarrassment, and apologizing, they explained that they had not recognized him in this new boat, for which they congratulated him, wished him suerte en la pesca, and sent him on his way.175 Fastening the Pilar to the San Francisco dock, Lund, Samuelson, and Hemingway slept their first night in Havana aboard the ship until they could clear customs and a health inspection first thing in the morning. Due to Hemingway’s celebrity status, the inspection was a mere formality, for they did not bother to look beneath the bunks and below deck in lockers where hidden ammunition and illegal rifles were stored.
Upon Ernest’s orders, Carlos sent for an associate who walked on his heels, whom they called “Cojo,” so that he could rebuild their broken pump.176 While Ernest was ashore sending a telegram to Pauline, a man in rags rowed up alongside the Pilar to peddle pineapples. Arnold negotiated with him in broken English and bought a few, but fearing it might be against the law, he refused his offer to trade a jug of wine for American cigarettes. His boss confirmed, “Don’t trust anybody. That fellow might have been
a government spy trying to get you in a bind. You can never tell who they are.”177
Intending to entertain heavily that summer, Ernest asked Carlos if he knew a good cook. Carlos presented a skilled but uncouth Spaniard named Juan. He was hungry looking, fiery talking, and proud, and Ernest hired the young man directly. Expecting his wife by P&O ferry, the author went ashore and booked a room at the Ambos Mundos. Pauline’s four-day visit would celebrate two birthdays—his thirty-fifth and her thirty-ninth.178
The many policemen and soldiers they passed on the streets of Havana did not bother them or spoil their fun. “They nodded their heads at us because we were Americans and they knew Americans never throw bombs or start revolutions but think only of having a good time spending American dollars.”179 As the Hemingways treated Samuelson to a fresh Hatuey beer at a table across from El Capitolio, a reporter approached to snap their picture, and Ernest did not become annoyed; but while they were taking a taxi back, the driver, also knowing they were Americans, charged them double, and “E.H. paid in disgust.” After Cojo had performed a first miracle by fashioning metal pieces with a machinist he knew in Havana, and a second by installing a new pump, the crew of the Pilar patted his back, named him their saint, and extended an open invitation to fish or “drink himself drunk on good whiskey” aboard, or whenever they were in port.180
Acutely conscious of the unusual experiment Ernest had undertaken to convert him from Midwest bumpkin to world-class writer, Arnold seemed as excited as he was terrified. Fretfully, Arnold asked Ernest how many words he wrote a day.