JOHN DOS PASSOS Coggin is a writer and a poet. He co-manages the John Dos Passos Literary Estate and serves on the advisory board of the John Dos Passos Society.
John Dos Passos was the author of the U.S.A. trilogy, Manhattan Transfer, and Three Soldiers, among many other books, for which, in 1957, he was awarded the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was also my grandfather. I never met him—he died 13 years before I was born—but I have been able to get a sense of his formidable spirit from old family photographs. In one of my favorites, taken when he was in his 60s, he is in a boat on the Potomac River near Dos Passos Farm in Westmoreland County, Virginia. The river is wide there, near where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, and my grandfather is holding up a pufferfish, inflated in full glory before the camera. His smile swings for the fences and reminds me of something he wrote in a 1918 letter to a friend: “While we live we must make the torch burn ever brighter until it flares out in the socket.”
In the beloved mythology of America's Lost Generation writers, the pastime of fishing seems wholly owned by Ernest Hemingway. As Jack Hemingway, Ernest's oldest son, wrote in the foreword to a collection of his father's writing about the sport, “In our family not only fly fishing but all sporting forms of fishing were a sort of religion.” Hemingway first learned to fish as a boy, during the summers he spent at his family's property on Walloon Lake in Michigan. Fishing fed his appetite for adventure and, after he became famous, his public image. Among other places, Key West became a central location in Hemingway lore, but it wasn't until 1928, on my grandfather's recommendation, that he first visited the place. The good fishing and easygoing culture there suited him perfectly. He was on his second marriage by then, to Pauline Pfeiffer, whose uncle bought the couple a house in Key West in 1931. Hemingway loved to share the grit and spectacle of sportfishing with friends. He even took Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, out on the Gulf Stream, a warm, fast-moving Atlantic current that Dos Passos once described as a “magnificent and mysterious phenomenon, always changing and always present like a range of mountains.” In the spring of 1930, Hemingway, Perkins, and a few other friends spent two weeks in the Dry Tortugas, a small island chain about 70 miles west of Key West. There they slept in a shed, subsisted on liquor, canned goods, and Bermuda onions, and, a 38-foot motorboat designed for saltwater fishing, aboard which he stowed a Thompson submachine gun and other firearms for killing sharks. (He once managed to shoot himself in both legs with a .22 Colt pistol when his bullet hit the brass rail and ricocheted in pieces. The shark escaped.) When later in life Hemingway's writing hit a slump, it was the ocean that gave voice to one of his most highly regarded books. , published in 1952, received specific praise from the committee that awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature two years later.
