Horsing them in with Hemingway

"Gingrich is a pretty keen fisherman," I said.

"I started him,"said Hemingway.

--Robert Emmett Ginna in a May 1958 interview with Ernest Hemingway

He Didn't, and even if he had, the deep-sea fishing I did with Ernest Hemingway would have been a false start, never leading to any real appreciation of the deepest satisfaction of angling. We fished out of Key West and out of Bimini, first in '34 on the Anita, the boat that belonged to Josie Russell, and later in '35 and '36 on the Pilar, the boat Ernest bought when Esquire advanced him the money he lacked to complete the deal. Most of that fishing was hard work, calling for a great deal of back-bending exertion, and though some of it was fun, none of it was what I later came to consider real angling.

Ernest was a meat fisherman. He cared more about the quantity than about the quality, and was more concerned with the capture of the quarry than with the means employed to do it. He was also--and this is what no true angler is--intensely competitive about his fishing, and a very poor sport. If the luck was out, then nobody around him could do any right, and he was ready to blame everybody in sight, ahead of himself. When things were going right, he was quick to promote everybody in his company to high rank as good fellows, and was jovially boastful about their every least accomplishment, as well as his own. But let a hook pull out and his attitude was never to praise the fish that managed to bend it, but only to blame the hookmaker.

In Bimini in June of '36, when the Atlantic record for marlin stood at 736 pounds, Ernest hooked a beautiful bright silver marlin with the coloration of a young fish. It was big, and as it leaped again and again, with a long, low trajectory like that of a horse going over steeplechase barriers, its faint lavender stripings glistened in the sun like the light flashing off a diamond. Big fish, up in the 600- and 700-pound class, usually looked dark, of an allover blue that almost verged on black. So Jane Kendall Mason, who had pioneered the Cuban marlin fishing with Hemingway some five years earlier, who had a boat of her own and at least as much big-game-fishing experience as he had, ventured the guess that the fish might go about 450 pounds.

The fish was still on, and still in sight--to me it looked about the size of a tank car--when she spoke. Hemingway bridled as if (continued on page 256)Horsing them in(continued from page 123) he'd been hit, turned his head to make an angry answer, and in that same instant felt the heavy line go slack. Back came the hook, a new one from Hardy, hand-forged and monstrous, looking as if it could do in a pinch as a spare anchor for the Queen Mary or the Normandie. It was pulled out to an angle of about 130 degrees, like a bent hairpin. Hemingway began shaking it in Jane Mason's face, so vigorously that he might well have been about to claw her with it.

"Four hundred fifty, huh? Look at that hook--just look at it--fourteen hundred pounds if it was an ounce."

He was beside himself, shrieking about the marlin Zane Grey had landed in Tahiti that went over a thousand pounds even though sharks had taken huge hunks out of its tail section, and insisting that this one would have surpassed that, not merely for a new Atlantic record, but for a world record as well. His wife Pauline and her sister Virginia tried to calm him down. Pauline pressed a drink into his hand, to make him stop brandishing the bent hook, while Ginny wound up her Liberty-phone to drown him out with You're the Top. I finally managed the diversion, like the successful one of three banderilleros trying to district a goring bull, by at least getting him to hear me say that Jane hadn't made the slighting 450-pound estimate herself, but had only been echoing, in astonished disagreement, my own ignorant guess at the weight of the fish.

"She didn't say it was four-fifty--I did, and what the hell do I know about it?" As a gambit, it compared to Peter Lorre's later line, in the film Casablanca: "What right do I have to think?"

His wrath turned, in the instant, upon the Messrs. Hardy. They would certainly hear from him, and in certain colorfully specified terms.

He was more fun to fish with when there were fewer people aboard for him to show off for.

On its inaugural trip, there were just three of us fishing aboard the Pilar, because the fourth, who was supposed to have been F. Scott Fitzgerald, had refused to come, saying: "I can't face Ernest again, when he's so successful and I'm such a failure."The third man in the boat was John Dos Passos, who was even less of a fisherman than Scott Fitzgerald, but mixed a mean drink which he called a Gulf Stream Special. As I remember it, it was a poor country cousin to Pimm's Cup. Dos Passos mixed it in a zinc pail, to which he gave full marks for its contribution to the mixture's peculiar pungency.

The gin gave out at Dry Tortugas, where there were no facilities to acquire any more, but a search of the boat uncovered a case of John Jameson's Irish Whisky up in the bow, which somebody had thoughtfully put aboard as a christening present to the Pilar. It was over the Irish, that evening, that Ernest confided to Dos Passos and me his high opinion of Gary Cooper as Lieutenant Henry in the screen version of A Farewell to Arms, and his correspondingly low opinion of Helen Hayes as the choice to portray Catherine Barkley.

"Who would you have liked, Hem?" asked Dos Passos.

Expecting him to nominate somebody like Dietrich, though she wasn't Scottish, I was utterly unprepared, at least by the book itself, for his answer that there couldn't possibly be any other logical choice, for Christ's sake, than a girl named Jean Harlow. Dos Passos, it seemed, had never heard of her, so Hemingway gave him an animated demonstration, worthy of the Hindu dancer Shan-Kar, of her salient points of personality.

On the run back from Dry Tortugas, in a most unlikely spot, we came upon a school of big barracuda, and Dos Passos, between his eyesight and the Irish, and coupled with his less than passionate addiction to fishing in the first place, seemed to Hemingway to be lousing up what might have proved an excellent chance to break the rod and reel record for barracuda, which back then, in early '35, stood not too much above the record of 69 pounds and some ounces for muskellunge. Dos Passos and Hemingway were both into fish at the same time, but Dos appeared to be more the victim than the master of his, so Hemingway asked me to hand him the Colt Woodsman automatic that was in the cabin. He shot both fish, to avert the threatened foul-up of the lines that might cause us to lose either or both of them in getting them aboard. The more orthodox method would have been to brain them, once they were up over the stern, with a sawed-off baseball bat, but there were signs of so many other fish, any one of which might have broken the record, that he didn't want to waste another moment of fishing time. So Dos Passos was benched, and I was drafted to fill the other fishing chair, and admonished to for Christ's sake horse 'em in fast and not frig around like Dos, to see if we couldn't bring in enough of them that one might break the record. We managed to get some six or seven more before the school let out, but though all weighed in high in the 60s, none went over the 70-pound mark.

After the barracuda explosion, nothing else seemed to be happening for a considerable interval, so as a dead soldier out of the case of Irish went over the stern and bobbed away in the wake where our filleted mullet baits were dragging, Ernest passed me the Colt Woodsman and asked me if I shot. By the time I figured out where the safety catch was and how it worked, the bobbing bottle began to look as far away as a ship on the horizon. But without raising the pistol to sight it--shooting from the lap, as it were--I sheered off its neck with the first tentative and diffident shot. Hemingway, jumping up out of the fishing chair beside me, burbled excitedly that there weren't a dozen men in the world who could make a shot like that, and Jesus Christ if he'd known I shot that well we'd have done some shooting at Dry Tortugas.

My enthusiasm for shooting being somewhat less than that of Dos Passos for fishing, I tried to explain the shot away as a lucky punch, but Hemingway, with the recent eyewitness knowledge to the contrary, refused to believe my disclaimers, so we had to turn around and go back to Dry Tortugas. There our quarry was sandpipers on the shore, delicate tiny birds on toothpick legs. It seemed to me, as a sporting proposition, tantamount to attacking butterflies with a tank, but although we blasted away at them until the ammunition was exhausted, neither of us even nicked one. Hemingway was generally credited with being an excellent shot with rifle and shotgun, but a pistol is something else again.

In all the fishing I did with Hemingway over the three winter seasons of '34,'35 and '36, I never once tied into a marlin, which is, of course, the apex of deep-sea fishing, as salmon is of stream fishing. I would work hours on tuna, however, pumping and reeling to get one up for what seemed like forever, only to have the fish sound like an elevator when the cable breaks, and then pump and reel again until I could barely see, except for red and orange balloons at the corners where my sweat-congealed eyelids seemed to be coming unhinged, and my mouth began to taste of a weird cocktail, compounded of all the elements of sheer fatigue.

Part of that fishing was fun, of course, because any fishing is more fun than no fishing; but most of it was the worst kind of work, the kind of work for which the worker is not in condition. I would fly down from Chicago to Key West or Bimini, in the days when night flights were slow and arduous, having had in the interim no more exercise than that involved in the waving of a pocket handkerchief, and would get back home utterly exhausted.

I won't say I didn't get anything out of it. One thing I got out of it, which is in itself beyond measure, is a wife, that same Jane Kendall Mason to whom Pauline Hemingway introduced me one June night in '36 on the stairs at The Compleat Angler in Bimini. But we didn't get married until two wives and two husbands later, in November of '55, so, as a dividend of that fishing, it was certainly deferred.

What I got out of it at the time was an abiding dislike for all boat fishing, and equally so for all bait fishing. It seemed to me that whatever skill was involved was almost entirely that of the skipper of the boat, and the work that was left for the fisher in the chair was largely the proverbial chore allotted to a strong back and a weak mind. There was no casting, just a letting out of line and subsequent trolling, and no element of hunting, either, except by the skipper. Even then, whatever attraction the lure exerted for the fish was more the skipper's doing than the angler's. The presentation of the bait was affected less by the manipulations of the angler's rod than by the actions of the boatman. Later on, with the development of faster and more maneuverable boats, and with the general adoption of outriggers to release the trolled line to the fish at the moment of the strike, deep-sea fishing became even less dependent on either the skill or the strength of the angler in the fighting chair, and more than ever the province of the boatman.

I soon felt that I would prefer to concentrate on the kind of fishing in which the chief consideration was not how much, but how well, and the size of the quarry was less important than the degree of its elusiveness. It wasn't that I had in any sense lost my taste for fishing. I would still fish for perch off a pier, with pearl buttons for bait, if there were no other fishing to be had. But if there was a choice, I wanted the kind where the challenge was to the individual, rather than to a team. I was to find it, though not right away, in stream fishing with a fly.