A Sea of Change

Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream - a Contextual Biography

Mark P. Ott

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612779744
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

A fresh perspective on Hemingway's work

Early in his career, when To Have and Have Not was published, Ernest Hemingway's portrayal of themes, setting, and character was often compared to Cezanne's art - abstract. By contrast, in 1952, with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, his style was described as comparable to Winslow Homer's - realistic.

At the center of this evolution is the contention that Hemingway's preoccupation with and scientific study of life in the Gulf Stream moved his theory and practice of writing away from the Paris art circle of the 1920s to the new realism of the 1950s. A Sea of Change explores the importance of Hemingway's relationship to the waters of the Gulf Stream that transformed his imaginative work.

Drawing primarily on Ernest Hemingway's handwritten and unpublished fishing logs and from published and unpublished correspondence and newspaper articles, Mark P. Ott structures this literary biography chronologically to tell the story of Hemingway's life as it becomes immersed in the Gulf Stream. Ott connects To Have and Have Not and
The Old Man and the Sea with Hemingway's philosophical and stylistic transformation as he became increasingly educated in the natural world.

A Sea of Change is the first study to examine Hemingway's complex relationship with the Gulf Stream and how it transformed his fiction.

CHAPTER I

The Sea Change Part I

The Anita Logs

AFTER MOVING TO Key West in 1928, Ernest Hemingway became increasingly enthralled with deep-sea fishing and the Gulf Stream. Hemingway had fished since he was a small boy; photos exist of a three-year-old Ernest, cane pole in hand, trying his luck off a dock in Petosky, Michigan. While fishing for trout in his twenties could be seen as a natural extension of his boyhood hobby, Hemingway’s interest in saltwater fishing was completely different—more scientific than experiential, more ichthyologist than Huck Finn. Soon after his first fishing trip to Cuba in 1932, Hemingway became passionately involved in deep-sea fishing for marlin and tuna. Like his deep lifelong engagement with bullfighting, Hemingway’s deep-sea fishing interest and devotion were instantly established. The unknown depths of the Gulf Stream were especially intriguing to Hemingway, and he became increasingly proficient as a saltwater fisherman. Just as the “great white hunter” Phillip Percival had guided him on safari in Tanganyika, so Hemingway would be a Leather-stocking-like pathfinder to others in search of enormous game fish.

Ernest Hemingway owned two books by James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans and The Two Admirals: A Tale of the Sea. These two novels provide an intriguing entrance into Hemingway’s understanding of the natural world. Nathaniel Philbrick calls Cooper “the originator of the sea novel,” and his ability to write convincingly about both the land and the sea earned Hemingway’s admiration (xiii). At a time when Hemingway was increasingly aware of his place in literary history, the Gulf Stream provided a background for him to write himself into the foreground of American culture.¹ Cooper, like Twain and Melville, was a writer who self-consciously shaped an American tradition that Hemingway yearned to be a part of, and the protagonist of his short stories, Nick Adams, is a recognizable descendant of Leatherstocking, Huckleberry Finn, and Ishmael.

Hemingway, like Cooper, created an artistic vision of the land and an equally robust vision of the sea. Hemingway’s frontier existed simultaneously as an intellectual construction and, to him, a physical fact. He sought open spaces, in Spain, Wyoming, Africa, or the Gulf Stream, far from the civilization of cities, because he firmly believed in the existence of “wild country,” and his hunting and fishing renewed him. Thematically, too, the Gulf Stream presented a stage for exploration, as Hemingway grew to intimately know the sea in a way that would reshape his method of writing. Since 1924, Hemingway had stated that his ambition was to write “like Cezanne painted,” and at the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the Gulf Stream was no longer merely a frontier, for Hemingway had decided he wanted his books illustrated by Winslow Homer.

And though he once saw the Gulf Stream as a frontier, after studying it as a self-taught marine biologist, that view, too, evolved, and according to ichthyologist Henry V. Fowler, Hemingway “revised the classification for marlin for the whole North Atlantic” (Baker, Life 264).

In the early 1930s, Hemingway abandoned the novel as a form. Perhaps nervous about following up the overwhelming popular and critical success of A Farewell to Arms, he wrote Death in the Afternoon (1932), a handbook to bullfighting and an extended commentary on Spanish wine, food, landscape, and art. He then assembled a collection of short stories, Winner Take Nothing (1933). He wrote monthly articles for Esquire and was paid $500 for each one. And he wrote an account of his two-month African safari, Green Hills of Africa (1935). In the midst of this broad range of work, the only constant factor in his life was fishing on the Gulf Stream.

Hemingway’s introduction to deep-sea fishing came in 1931 aboard Joe Russell’s thirty-two-foot launch, the Anita. Russell owned the nowfamous Key West bar Sloppy Joe’s, and on the side he ran illegal liquor to the United States from Havana. In April of the next year, Hemingway left Key West for Havana, expecting to be gone ten days. That plan was instantly abandoned. According to Michael Reynolds,

Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Wives came and left; all taking their turns at the heavy rods.… Every day but a few they fished early and hard, keeping a running account: the log of the good ship Anita.… For two months, Hemingway’s intensity never lessened. His fishing partners came and left, but he continued unsated. Once, with that same intensity, he was married to trout fishing up in Michigan; then trout fishing gave way to the corrida. Now, with Death in the Afternoon in galley proofs, that ten-year passion is waning. These Gulf Stream days, pursuing fish as large as his imagination, are the beginning of a new pursuit which will last him the rest of his life. (1930s 92)

These days fishing and the nights in Havana would plant new creative seeds in Hemingway’s mind. Hemingway fished the Stream through the end of June, “completely and utterly satisfied on this as sport, living, spectacle and exercise” (qtd. in Reynolds, 1930s 92). The Gulf Stream also provided him with the reality of freedom; escaping his Key West home, where his wife and two young children noisily awaited his return, he discovered deep-sea fishing at the stage in his life when the chains of domesticity might have bound him.

In April 1933, Hemingway again chartered Russell’s boat, Anita, for two months of marlin fishing. He would keep a log of his daily experience in a copy of Warner’s Calendar of Medical History. By the third week of July, he had spent more than a hundred days on the Gulf Stream, catching upwards of fifty marlin (Baker, Life 243). That was the year, too, that the Cuban leftist revolution against the dictator, Gerardo Machado, was reaching its peak, and Hemingway left Havana on August 7, the same day that soldiers opened fire on citizens who were in the streets prematurely celebrating Machado’s resignation. Hemingway’s exposure to the Gulf Stream and Cuban politics fired his imagination, providing him with unexpectedly rich raw material for his fiction.

Hemingway’s first articulation of his Gulf Stream frontier appears in 1936. In order to entice him to write for his new men’s magazine, in 1933 Arnold Gingrich paid $3,000 toward the purchase of Hemingway’s boat, Pilar. In return, Hemingway’s first article for the magazine was about fishing: “Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter.” In the twenty-five articles that Hemingway wrote from 1933 to 1936, the main subject of each piece was Hemingway’s public persona and his leisure activities. His frontier article entitled “On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter” was one of his last pieces for the magazine:

In the first place, the Gulf Stream and the other great ocean currents are the last wild country there is left. Once you are out of sight of land and of other boats you are more alone than you can ever be hunting and the sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats. In a season fishing you will see it oily flat as the becalmed galleons saw it while they drifted to the westward; white-capped with a fresh breeze as they saw it running with the trades; and in high, rolling blue hills the tops blowing off them like snow as they were punished by it so that sometimes you will see three great hills of water with your fish jumping from the top of the farthest one and if you tried to make a turn with him without picking your chance, one of those breaking crests would roar down on you with a thousand tons of water and you would hunt no more elephants, Richard, my lad. (228–29)

The first sentence leaps out: “the last wild country there is left.” Hemingway, apparently blind to the fishermen who have been working here for hundreds of years, and the ecological damage his presence may incur, sees the Stream as a place to explore, conquer, exploit.

Yet even within that same article, Hemingway recognizes his own complex feelings for the Gulf Stream: it is not just a space to be conquered. A relationship can be established with the Stream that allows one to heighten one’s own human experience through intimate contact with nature. Hemingway continues: “But there is great pleasure in being on the sea, in the unknown wild suddenness of a great fish; in his life and death which he lives for you in an hour while your strength is harnessed to his; and there is great satisfaction in conquering this sea it lives in” (234). The key phrase here, of course, is “in his life and death which he lives for you in an hour while your strength is harnessed to his.” A timeless, universal struggle takes place here on the Stream, and Hemingway’s life is enriched by this recognition. The unification within the “great fish,” to feel his immense vitality while trying to destroy that energy, was one of the great satisfactions of fishing. For Hemingway, it is possible to revere the great fish of the Gulf Stream while simultaneously seeking to kill them, to conquer them. As at this point in his life, he recognized no conflict within his own values.

For him, a wilderness was something that was spoiled and destroyed by the encroachment of civilization, as that contact eroded the regenerative power of nature. In “Big Two Hearted River Part I,” Nick laments the “burned over country” but finds solace in watching trout in a stream: “They were very satisfactory” (In Our Time 134).

Outside of his creative work, Hemingway referred to the natural world around him using a language of frank assessment that jars us today. In an Esquire letter entitled “He Who Gets Slap Happy,” Hemingway wrote:

America has always been a country of hunters and fishermen. As many people, probably, came to North America because there was good free hunting and fishing as ever came to make their fortunes. But plenty came who cared nothing about hunting, nothing about fishing, nothing about the woods, nor the prairies … nor the big lakes and small lakes, nor the sea coast, nor the sea, nor the mountains in summer and winter … nor when the geese fly in the night nor when the ducks come down before the autumn storms … nor about the timer that is gone … nor about a frozen country road … nor about leaves burning in fall, nor about any of these things that we have loved. Nor do they care about anything but the values they bought with them from the towns they lived in to the towns they live in now; nor do they think anyone else cares. ...