Foreword

In our family not only fly fishing but all sporting forms of fishing were a sort of religion. Being the oldest of Ernest Hemingway’s three sons, I was the first to be converted to the fly rod and later to the fly. My father’s conversion to the fly did not take place early. “Big Two-Hearted River” more than made that point, as did “The Last Good Country” and the trout fishing on the Irati in The Sun Also Rises. I remember that when we went to the L Bar T Ranch near Cook City in 1929 there was a wide selection of Hardy tackle and later, in Key West, there was a trunkful which I remember raiding. I felt less guilty about that when the whole trunk was lost by Railway Express on the way to Sun Valley in 1940.

The streams revisited in my father’s mind in “Now I Lay Me,” as a defense against the frightening prospect of possible death while asleep, bring back to me my years of depression as an unsuccessful young businessman with a heavy load of debt as well as my six months as a prisoner of war; during those times my only escape was imagining and reconstructing trout streams. I now have trouble remembering whether some of those rivers were real or just fantasies that were simply morbid creations of my imagination.

What is obvious, and what Nick Lyons has properly pointed out, is that fishing always was an important part of Papa’s life and that, like all of his interests, he had a passionate desire to know as much as possible about it. He also had a need to share the pleasure fishing gave him. This made him a good teacher. I always felt his close friends and his wives were the prime beneficiaries of this trait.

While his fascination with the sea and with saltwater fishing started during his days as a reporter, Key West was where he first truly caught the bug. There are pictures of him fishing off the bridges on the old overseas highway. His friendships with Charles Thompson and the prototypical Key West conch, Captain Bra Saunders, saw him graduating to boat fishing for tarpon—the quarry of choice; he usually fished for them at night, using mullet for bait. There are fine pictures of him and John Dos Passos with tarpon caught that way and with other friends including Mike Strater and Waldo Peirce, both painters.

Their forays kept stretching farther afield and sailfish then became their favorite prey, along with dolphin and whatever good eating fish were caught trolling on the eighteen-mile ride out to Sand Key light; there the northern edge of the Gulf Stream offered up the best chances for billfish, and there Mike Strater gave Papa his first experience of watching a big marlin taken by sharks. Being a good host, he let Mike take the rod when the big fish struck. That fight was too long for Mike and at the end he pumped in a head and shoulders that weighed over five hundred pounds. The rest had been taken by sharks.

After he acquired his own boat, the Pilar, and no longer depended on Josie Russell’s Anita, he started making the run to Havana for the white marlin run in April and May and began spending a month to six weeks in Bimini. In the process he became a good navigator and a boatman, and in Bimini he became one of the first fishermen to land a big bluefin tuna that was unscarred by sharks. His friendship with Mike Lerner and with some of the professional guides like Tommy Gifford added to his stature and expertise and led to the beginnings of the IGFA.

Is it any wonder that fishing continued to be an element of his fiction? How men fished as well as how they behaved under pressure of all kinds became a part of the “Hemingway code,” as it was called by early critics. His feelings about hunting big game and bird shooting were similar to those he had for fishing; they called for a thorough knowledge of the prey as well as sympathy and even love for it. The Old Man and the Sea, his most widely read work, had all these elements as well as a triumph of the human spirit under tragic circumstances.

This selection of stories and excerpts is important because not only are they splendid reading, but they also illustrate how important fishing was in my father’s life and in his literature—just as it has been in my own on a lesser scale.

—Jack Hemingway

Sun Valley, Idaho

May 2000