AFTER THE STORM

Scratch the bark on any American family tree and you are likely to find some maritime heritage, no matter how landlocked that family might be. So it is with Ernest Hemingway, whose great-grandfather on his mother’s side had been the captain of a five-masted schooner that sailed from England to Australia, by way of the horn, before he settled his family in the land-locked state of Iowa. So impressed was Hemingway’s grandmother with her experiences at sea, that she would take her children each summer to the island of Nantucket, where they might experience the sea firsthand. This would become a tradition, as well, with Ernest Hemingway’s mother; however, she handled it in a more personal way. One by one, the six Hemingway children would spend a month during each child’s eleventh summer with their mother on Nantucket; Ernest’s eleventh summer fell in 1910
     And so it was on Nantucket that an eleven-year-old Ernest Hemingway first set foot upon an island, first sailed upon saltwater, first caught a fish in the sea, first met an old fisherman with a tale about catching a swordfish, and first found inspiration for a short story that he called “My First Sea Vouge [sic].”
     Among those whom young Ernest met during his stay on Nantucket was an artist and playwright name Austin Strong, who had established a small sailing school for his own nieces and nephews. Strong was born in San Francisco, but was raised in Hawaii and in Samoa, where he was told many tales of the sea by his own grandfather, Robert Louis Stevenson. There can be little doubt that Stevenson’s grandson shared some of these very stories with a young Ernest Hemingway, but none of those quirky little facts is among the strong ties that bind Jimmy with Papa Hemingway.
     Of The Old Man and the Sea Jimmy says, “I first read it when I was eight years old. The relationship between the old man and the boy is what was most touching, because it reminded me so much of my grandfather and me.” Regardless of the tale’s genesis, the novella was completed at Hemingway’s farm outside Havana in 1951, and it was the only one of his works ever to receive any literary award. The Old Man and the Sea, however, was not Hemingway’s first story involving Cuba. The first one was “One Trip Across,” which was written during Hemingway’s Key West years, and it became the basis for To Have and Have Not. That novel’s the only story he ever set in Key West, but it was written while he was at The Compleat Angler in Bimini. And Jimmy says he stayed in that same room and sat at the same table where Papa is said to have worked on that book. Ironically, when William Faulkner wrote the screenplay for Hemingway’s Key West story, he set the tale in Martinique; the movie version features Humphrey Bogart in the lead role and introduced Lauren Bacall in her first motion picture role.
     Meanwhile, the story called “After the Storm” is about the closest thing you can have to a Key West story by Hemingway without excerpting a passage from either “One Trip Across” or To Have and Have Not. “After the Storm” was written in 1932 during Papa’s Key West years, as well as at the height of his short story period. The tale reveals a bit of the rough and tumble waterfront night life during that period, but its facts are based upon the sinking of the Spanish steamer, Valbanera, at the height of a 1919 hurricane that swept across the Keys, then on through the Gulf of Mexico to the coastline of Texas. More than 600 people were killed in its wake, and 488 of those were aboard the steamer. The tale merges the strengths of Hemingway’s journalism skills with those of his storytelling ways.