What would you do to feed your family? This is the question facing Harry Morgan, down in Key West during the Depression. He's got a boat and his brawn but not much else. You got all the Hemingway mainstays like fishing, drinking and fighting. You got fellas down on their luck, trying to pretend the hard choices they make are about providing for their families and not their man-pride. There's crime, human trafficking, booze-running, bank robberies and Cuban Revolutions, all competing with the Great Depression to make life hard for a man with no money in his wallet. Mix it together and pour over ice, and you got yourself a great vacation read... His worst novel, is what movie producer Howard Hawks called it, and he said it to his face if you can believe it! In those days, Hemingway was a rising star, and Hawks thought To Have and Have Not could be the next Casablanca. And that's exactly what he did, bringing in no less than William Faulkner to help with the screenplay. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as stars didn't hurt either, and they turned that "worst novel" into one of his most popular movies by... well, basically rewriting it. And don't get me wrong, I haven't seen the movie myself (The Breaking Point is considered the superior adaptation) but by turning it into a classically heroic romance a la Casablanca completely misses the point of this smart, adventurous but heart-wrenching and tragic social critique. Harry Morgan has a boat. But times are changing. It's tough making a living anymore chartering fishing tours to rich guys out of Cuba and the Keys. When one such "Have" stiffs him for a couple weeks of touring after busting all his expensive gear, Harry quickly becomes a "Have Not". He's got barely forty cents left in his pocket and can't return home empty handed. He's got nothing to make a living with except that boat, so he starts taking jobs he shouldn't. Jobs for Chinamen moving other Chinamen. Jobs running liquor after the Prohibition is already over. Jobs involving guns. Jobs involving Cubans. Jobs that start taking a toll on his morality, and his body and his friends.
Harry Morgan is the original Han Solo. The first two sections, "Spring" and "Fall", represent the previously published short stories, "One Trip Across" and "The Tradesman's Return" (with virtually no updates for the novel), and they are awesome. We get slices of Harry Morgan's life en media res, as we slowly infer the larger context. He knows how to fish the biggest marlins, he knows how to shoot first and kill with his bare hands when he has to: "Don't think you can't hear it crack, either." And he'll take the jobs he has to because he won't go home empty handed. But I question what kind of hero he really is. I don't think he's truly doing it for his family. I think he does it for pride and he uses his family as an excuse, and I think this is a nuance a lot of "strong men" might not pick up on (assuming they read Hemingway anymore). I honestly wonder how conscious Hemingway actually was of this subtext, or if it was his own subconscious angst and bipolar depression which snuck these layers into his stories. It's something to chew on, the notion of a man who loves his family, but maybe loves himself even more as the head of it. Especially considering how little time he ever spends with them (I'm speaking of both Harry and Hemingway). "Spring" starts off generally upbeat and easy going at first because there is plenty of work to turn down and plenty of rum for the rummies. But all is not well in the Cuban Paradise, as evidenced by a random drive-by shooting in the opening scene. The larger socio-economic status quo of the island is shifting beneath him whether he realizes it or not. After the rich guy stiffs him, Harry takes the job trafficking Chinese laborers because he needs the cash, but in an unsolicited act of meddling heroism (??), betrays and murders that trafficker. Why? It's not clear. Because he can, maybe? He knows they'll just replace him. He doesn't care about the workers. All he wants is a clean exit. He wants the cash but perhaps he doesn't want any evidence of his moral compromise. Speaking of moral compromises, he has an even harder decision to make now, because his old pal Eddy (the rummy) snuck aboard to play first mate, but isn't on the manifest. He lets him help with the trafficking, sure, but he keeps his thirty-eight on his belt after. He can't arrive on Key West with an extra passenger. Especially a rummy he can't trust not to run his mouth. It doesn't matter that he knew Eddy "when he was a good man", before times got tough for everyone. Just when Harry he goes below to "check the engine" it's only happenstance that he see the manifest. Eddy updated it with the broker before he snuck aboard. "God looks after rummies," Harry says, and puts the gun away afterall (whew!). But the victory is fleeting and bittersweet. By "Fall", we see that no amount of small victories are sufficient to compensate for the larger forces at work. We catch up with Harry Morgan already wounded from some gunfight leaving Cuba, now lost in the Keys and hiding from the Coast Guard. Eddy is out of the picture, replaced by a hired hand, also shot up and bleeding out over the "sacks of liquor, shaped like hams, piled everywhere." How and why things went sour is anyone's guess, but whatever's going on in Cuba is boiling to the surface, and even the honest crime is getting harder to find. Winter is coming, in more ways than one. Part Three, "Winter" is where Hemingway decided to continue his shorts into a larger narrative. It makes up the latter two thirds and has the burden of contextualizing these previous adventures while delivering some kind of common theme and purpose. Harry lost his arm in that last mission and he lost his boat to the impound. He's at the end of his rope but he's got a chance at one more job. You know it ain't gonna be pretty when he gets his Tommy-gun out. So why the hate? It sounds like a pretty exciting read, and to be honest, it was. Driving down Route One from Miami to visit the Hemingway Museum in his former Key West home, it was the perfect vacation novel, with just enough action, drama and emotion to keep me absorbed with the least attention span. It only came more to life while visiting the house where he wrote it, in the 30's (along with 70% of his other fiction). The novel is sloppy. That's probably the easiest criticism, and it's hard not to imagine the editors falling asleep on this one. There is no narrative or stylistic consistency at all. The first short story was from Harry's POV and it was some truly great writing. Real gritty noir stuff. The second though, was in the third person, which is okay because there's a brief moment or two where we cut away to some other characters, so sure, fine, whatever. It was a short story. Do whatever you want. But they should've reconciled that for the novel and picked just one or the other. Personally I would've gone with first person. It's not as tricky as you'd think to rewrite the second story to match. I could've done it for him in an afternoon: switch a few pronouns, cut some lines and rewrite a few small scenes if you need to keep them at all. Plus it would give the novel a more unique identity from the short stories instead of merely repackaging them whole-cloth. The rest of the novel, though, would've been trickier, because Harry Morgan features less and less prominently as a protagonist until he's almost completely absent from the ending. He becomes an object of the story, and sometimes not even that. We get whole chapters from other characters' points of view, and many more in which the narrator floats around telling us the stories of any number of people around the island, many of them Haves, and others Have Nots. Everyone's got a story. By decentralizing the narrative, Hemingway effectively achieves the same effect as Vonnegut did in Breakfast of Champions (which I reviewed last summer). If the story had limited itself to just Harry's voice, it would've been a hero's story, even with his moral failure and tragic ending. If it had been the usual third person POV, then it would've been a story about plot and circumstances, such as the misadventures he gets himself into and the tribulations of his family and friends. But by jumping in and out of different people's perspectives, Hemingway zooms in and out on many individuals and their stories, showing us how the Depression and the changing times affected everyone in one form or another. We see people who Have and those who Have Not and we see that they're sorta all the same. There is no moral high ground reserved for the rich or the poor. Both make lousy, selfish and desperate choices. Through the third person narration, we see the circumstances as they are: the jobs that are drying up, the work that's hard to find, the larger socio-economic conditions of Key West in the Depression and in Cuba during revolution. When we cut into first person POV, it's to see the way Harry or Albert or Marie rationalize their situation and the hard choices they make to compensate. Near the end as they drag Harry back to shore, dying in Freddy's boat from a gut shot after confronting the Cuban bank robber revolutionaries, Hemingway chooses not to linger on Harry's dying thoughts and experiences, but instead tours us through the various other yachts in the harbor full of rich people and their rich people problems, which to them are just as dire and potentially suicide inducing. Everyone's struggles are relative. "...The money on which it was not worth while for him to live was one hundred and seventy dollars more a month than the fisherman Albert Tracy had been supporting his family on…" Communist or Capitalist? Famous among the expatriates in Paris of the 1920's, and inevitable resident of Cuba itself, I wouldn't have put it past Hemingway to sympathize with the burgeoning communist movements of the era. There are more than a few jabs at the larger corporate powers who want to impoverish the local population of the Keys in order to run them out of town, only to buy up the land and make it a tourist spot (an awkward notion given the context of my visit to Key West...?). And there is a surprising willingness to humanize the Cuban's who rob a bank in order to fund their revolution. But then they kill his pal, Albert, in a fit of edgy adrenaline and Harry finds himself trying to play pal to the youngest one, to lure him into false security, going so far as to admit the guy who murdered his buddy is "probably a good fellow." But he hates himself for it. "Listen to what my mouth says. God damn it, my mouth will say anything. But I got to try to make a friend of this boy..." He nods along as the boy makes his case for the revolution, and the hardships they've experience in Cuba, which resonates with some of the hardships they'd been experiencing everywhere else too, (well... kinda). Everyone's in a sore spot and everyone is making what they think are the hard decisions they have to make to get by. But lest we think Hemingway or Harry Morgan are willing to turn a blind eye to the moral consequences of these choices, he reminds us, Albert was "a working man, he killed. He never thinks of that." And just as he holds the Cubans responsible for the atrocities they are committing, and gives them their comeuppance with his Tommy gun, so too Harry gets his for the compromises he's made. He lives just long enough to mumble nonsense to his rescuers before dying on the operating table, "A man... A man... One man alone ain't got... No matter how, a man alone ain't got no bloody chance..." Unfortunate Racism. I wish I could just skip observations like this, but To Have and Have Not is a product of its time. And in that time, they used the N-word a lot. The first two stories are particularly egregious, as they feature several black characters who are basically deprived of much characterization at all, except their designation as "N-words". The sad part is that Hemingway missed a great opportunity to flesh out his ideas of the Haves and the Have-Nots of the era by excluding them from the larger story. They are reduced to hired help and lazy tropes and as much as I want to imagine Hemingway was making some kind of deliberate observation or critique on "the way things were", there's little evidence that he's doing much more than participating in that racial status quo. Conclusion: I'm really digging Hemingway's Caribbean tales, and I'll have to explore how many more he migth have. His European exploits never really connected with me, but To Have and Have Not is a fantastic, challenging and complex tragedy overlaid with action and adventure that defies the classical stereotypes of romance and heroism and political altruism. Despite some inconsistent narrative techniques, it's a swaggering examination of manly self-delusion and self-destruction as only Hemingway could've told it. Other Literary Reviews Islands in the Stream by Hemingway Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut East of Eden by Steinbeck Don't forget to Like and Subscribe!
2 Comments
9/17/2022 04:31:00 am
As you will gather from my website, I don't worship at the altar of 'Papa' Hemingway. In my view To Have And Have Not is a mess, which - as you hint - his editors at Scribner's should have forestalled.
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C William Perkins
9/19/2022 09:55:27 am
Great insights! Thanks for sharing!
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