Foreword

This book is meant to be a companion piece to Hemingway on Fishing, which Nick Lyons edited and to which he wrote an excellent and comprehensive introduction. My brother Jack wrote a short foreword for this book just six months before his death in December 2000, where he mentioned that hunting and fishing were always very much a family affair with Ernest Hemingway. I am sure Papa would be pleased with the job his grandson Seán has done in editing Hemingway on Hunting. For Seán this has been very much a voyage of discovery, since he was born too late to know his grandfather as a hunter except through the conversations of his own father, Gregory, and his two paternal uncles, Jack and Pat.

If kids don’t have access to parents who love to fish and hunt and who are willing to take the time to share the fun with their young families, it will be much harder for boys and girls to become competent as adults in either of these pastimes. One of the best and most enthusiastic hunters I have ever known, and I have known a great many, was the city-bred son of a painter of religious murals for the archdiocese of Cologne, who never took his son, to the best of my knowledge, outside the limits of that city. I hope these two Hemingway books will inspire as many families as possible to hunt and fish and to stay together.

At the end of World War II, it was really my mother, Pauline, Ernest Hemingway’s second wife and Seán Hemingway’s grandmother, who launched my brother Gregory and me into the then not so crowded world of fly fishing for trout on public water in the American West. She managed to get hold of one of the very first Ford four-door sedans to come off the assembly line for civilians in 1945, but the prospect of her driving his two young sons all the way from Key West to fish in Wyoming, Yellowstone Park, Washington State, and then down the Pacific coast to her sister Jinny’s home in Hollywood, frightened Papa. He suggested that she let Jack, who had been liberated near the end of the war from a German prison camp and was just out of the army, do the driving, for until Pauline had been divorced in 1940, she had not had a driver’s license. Papa had no way of knowing that she had become a perfectly safe driver in the four years since their divorce.

It was a great job for Jack. He did not yet want to go back to college or to work in civilian life. He could teach his two younger brothers what he had learned about fly fishing before the war and get to check out the old fishing grounds he knew, and visit new ones as well. We had bought our first dry flies three weeks before at Dan Bailey’s trout shop in Livingston, Montana, in preparation for driving up to Gardiner, and on to the Madison, the Gibbon, and the Firehole, where we would try them out.

Papa first taught Greg and me to bait-fish for trout with grasshoppers in the valley of the Clarke’s Fork of the Yellowstone. It was always cold enough in the early morning to get a bunch of them before they warmed up along the grassy bank of what, in the 1930s, was as great a native cutthroat trout stream as those near Sheridan, Wyoming, which furnished food and sport to General Crook’s 1876 command before and after their June fight on the Rosebud: “The hundreds and thousands of fine fish taken from that set of creeks by officers and soldiers, who had nothing but the rudest appliances, speaks of the wonderful resources of the country in game at that time . . . Mr. Wasson and I made an arrangement to peruse each day either one of Shakespeare’s plays or an essay by Macaulay and to discuss them together.”

Jack showed us how to use the dry fly on undercut bank browns in the Gibbon: Dan Bailey’s well-tied, stiff-hackled, all-purpose No. 12 Adams, vintage 1945. God knows what binomially nomenclatured real bug those browns preferred to eat, but fish were more literary than Latinists in their tastes half a century ago and any Adams (John, John Quincy, or Henry) would turn them on.

It was on the last stretch of this summer trip that Jack had his opportunity to fish for steelhead. I still have the picture vividly in mind. We were parked near the mouth of the Kalama River, where it empties into the north bank of the Columbia. Along came Jack, whistling to himself as he walked back downstream, holding up a silver-sided monster of a fish that was bigger than any of the trout we had seen mounted on the wall at Dan Bailey’s.

When it comes to hunting, I know now how grateful I am that I was included in a fall hunt for grizzly bear in 1936 on the upper end of the Crandall Creek drainage, high above the Clarke’s Fork Valley, although I was only eight and had failed to learn to read in the first grade. There were two families, the Shevlins and the Hemingways, and all the help, horses, gear, and supplies necessary to sustain a two-week hunting pack trip. Mrs. Shevlin, who was from a high-born Russian émigré family, was more interested in ballet than in bullets. After the very first day’s encounter with a mature grizzly sow and two almost fully grown cubs and the resulting fire-fight that had the sow and one cub, in the words of the hymn, bloodstained, distended, cold, and dead, she asked Papa if he would mind covering her with his Springfield whenever she went to the bathroom.

My godfather, Chub Weaver, from Red Lodge, Montana, a person of many talents (horse breaking, bootlegging, and undertaking, to mention just a few) was the cook on the pack trip. Most days, I stayed in camp and he tutored me in deciphering the adventures of two young children of opposite gender in the Saint Joseph’s parochial school reader in which I had made so little progress in the winter of 1935–36 in Key West.

On a few days, as a break from my studies, I got to go out riding with the grown-ups on my horse Pinky, a devilish old strawberry roan pony who knew every nasty trick in the book. His best trick was to swell up his belly when I saddled him, with Chub’s help, of course, and then later deflate, so that the saddle would suddenly slip to the right or left and dump me on the side of the trail. Pinky wasn’t the worst of it, though. That was lunch. Someone had forgotten to pack the yeast, so Chub couldn’t make bread. Instead, we had two grease-soaked pancakes with a thick slab of fatty grizzly bear meat in between, wrapped in the oilpaper that people used back then.

Papa did manage during the two weeks to shoot a mountain grouse (as I remember it, a blue one) with his Colt Woodsman .22 pistol. But as was only fair, he got to eat it all himself; or maybe he shared it with the ladies. He was always a perfect gentleman in that respect.

Despite real hardships, we all slept very well in our four-star Arctic Woods sleeping bags, laid atop beds made of interlaced fir branches. Although Mrs. Shevlin never went hunting again and eventually divorced Mr. Shevlin, and Papa also divorced my mother four years later, we all had a good time up there in Crandall Creek, and Chub had me reading by the time we broke camp.

In the 1930s, if you joined the NRA, you could still order from the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts a military version of the .30–06 bolt-action rifle, essentially the weapon that Theodore Roosevelt took with him to hunt in Africa when Ernest Hemingway was a young boy. Most sportsmen who could afford to do so sent their NRA Springfields on to a custom gunsmith for restocking and other modifications that transformed the utilitarian rifles into handsome sporting weapons. Papa sent his to Griffin & Howe, the gunsmithing subsidiary of the great New York sporting goods store, Abercrombie & Fitch. The finished product was as good, or better, than anything a British firm could have turned out at the time. It is interesting that this was not so in the 1930s for big-game fishing rods, where English Hardys were much better than anything made in America.

In the short story “Fathers and Sons,” Papa credits my grandfather Clarence with superhuman eyesight, and so it must have seemed to the little boy who inherited my grandmother Grace’s nearsightedness along with the rugged frame of his maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, after whom he was named.

What struck Philip Percival—and he mentioned it later, when Carlos Baker interviewed him in the 1960s—was how much Ernest Hemingway reminded him, when they first met, of the Roosevelt he had guided more than twenty years earlier on the Kapititi plains of Kenya. Both Hemingway and Roosevelt had taken up the challenge of reaching and maintaining themselves at a professional level of physical fitness through the sport of boxing, not just as an end in itself but as a necessary condition for mixing with men who lived by the performance of their bodies as well as their minds. Neither Roosevelt nor Hemingway ever hesitated to take up any man’s physical challenge, though it did sometimes require them to take off their glasses.

Ernest Hemingway is not a professional contemporary outdoors writer, and if that is what the reader expects from him they may be very disappointed. Puccini loved to hunt ducks in the marshes near Venice. Italian duck hunters, most of whom are very rich industrialists or titled agricultural landowners, who are not particularly known for their adherence to conventional democratic conservation principles, are very proud of Puccini the duck hunter. All Italians revere Puccini as a composer of operas, an art form of which Italians are inordinately fond. Italian duck hunters are pleased that such a popular Italian also liked to hunt ducks.

For the reader for whom English is a native language and for whom mathematics is a professional tool or even a profession in itself, I would recommend a story by Hemingway that is not in this book, “Homage to Switzerland.” The only literary criticism of this piece that I think does it justice is the late Michael Reynolds’s “ ‘Homage to Switzerland’: Einstein’s Train Stops at Hemingway’s Station.” Since this paper, to the best of my knowledge, is unpublished and is not readily available even on the World Wide Web, I would suggest that readers make their own comparison between Relativity, The Special and the General Theory, by Albert Einstein, and “Homage to Switzerland.” In their respective fields, Einstein and Hemingway have become icons of the twentieth century. We should all be grateful to Albert Einstein for elucidating a peculiarity of the celestial mechanics of the planet Mercury not possible by the insights of Newtonian mechanics, and to Ernest Hemingway for taking us a little further than Shakespeare in the clear depiction of the unchanging human condition.

—Patrick Hemingway

Bozeman, Montana

August 2001