To Have and Have Not, by Ernest Hemingway

I was lead to this novel because I had been reading Faulkner. During the 1930s when Faulkner wasn’t making a living from his novels, he turned to screenwriting. One of the scripts he worked on was an adaptation of this Hemingway novel from 1937. The Howard Hawks movie from 1944 stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and was the movie the two were working on when they met. With that kind of pedigree, I decided I’d like to watch the movie but also thought I ought to read the novel first, so I got a copy from the library.

I heard that the movie version is quite revised from the novel. I’m happy to hear so, because sadly, the novel is not good. After having admired Middlemarch but then reading a second tier George Eliot The Mill on the Floss and after having enjoyed all of the Hemingway I’ve read to date (short stories, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Moveable Feast, and back in high school: The Old Man and the Sea) I was pretty disappointed to have a second dud in a row.

Dud is a little harsh. It’s not entirely bad. Second tier Hemingway is still Hemingway. But it reads like a Hemingway admirer trying to imitate his better. The style is there, but it doesn’t snap. It misses the “one true sentence” quality that Hemingway says he aims for in a line from A Moveable Feast. The prose feels false and pumped up. The men are still Hemingway men, but exaggerated to silliness. They fight. They drink. They talk about cojones. The action is over-the-top violent. (I recently watched Pulp Fiction for the first time and kept thinking of that kind of morality-free violence). The philosophy is entirely cynical. Everyone loses. No one’s entirely good. There’s even a paragraph about all the ways that world-weary folks commit suicide, which, knowing how Hemingway would take his own life in 24 years after this novel was published gave me quite a chill.

The protagonist is Harry Morgan. He has a house in Key West with his wife Marie and three daughters. He owns a boat which he uses to make his living.

The first chapter (there are twenty-six), has Harry ferrying a rich dilettante on a fishing trip. But Harry neglected to get the guy to pay up front and at the end of the trip the guy stiffs him, including for the cost of the fishing equipment he ruins. So the next chapter has Harry turning to dishonest use of his boat. A Chinese man hires Harry to smuggle twelve Chinese persons from Cuba to Florida. Harry worries that once the guy and his group are on the boat they will kill him and steal the boat, so he grabs the guy’s money, kills him, tosses the body overboard and forces the group of refuges back on to the Cuban shore. Chapter three starts with a smuggling scheme already in progress and gone wrong. Harry and another man were using his boat to transport liquor from Cuba to the US when they were ambushed, the boat is shot up, Harry and the other man are shot too. In Chapter Four we learn that Harry loses an arm from the bullet wound and his boat is impounded by US Customs.

Hemingway then turns to an extended tale that takes up the rest of the novel: another criminal scheme. This time he’s hired by a corrupt lawyer to take a group of four Cubans from Key West back to Cuba. Harry tries to steal his boat back from the impound but fails. He hires a boat from his friend Freddy who owns a bar. As a favor, Harry reluctantly allows his friend Albert to come along because Albert needs the money. Gradually it becomes clear that the four Cubans have a plan to rob a Key West bank using the boat as a getaway vehicle with the intention of getting the money to Cuba to support the revolution. Almost immediately once the Cubans are on the boat they kill Albert. Nor, Harry understands, do they have any need of Harry once they get across to Cuba, so before they kill him, he kills all four of them, but not without being shot in the belly himself. The drifting boat is towed back to shore by the coast guard. Harry survives, but out of his mind, and dies on the surgical table. The final chapter is Marie meditating on how she will go on without him in a stream-of-consciousness monologue that made me think of the end of Ulysses.

Awkwardly, though, Harry’s story is intercut with another story of wealthy men and women idling in Key West in their summer homes and on their yachts. They’re all identified as Ivy League types: one’s a successful writer, another’s a professor of economics. Sometimes they cross paths with Harry and his compatriots at Freddy’s bar, but the stories are completely separate. And the rich folks are all just as dissatisfied and desperate as the poor ones. They all drink too much. None of them are faithful in marriage. The writer’s wife leaves him for the professor. There’s a too long chapter of a group of soldiers getting drunk and fighting at Freddy’s. There’s another too long chapter peeking in to the lives of all the various occupants of the yachts in the harbor. I didn’t find it exciting to either my adventurous or sympathetic spirit. My mind wandered.

I see that Hemingway’s intention must be to lay the “haves” against the “have nots” and make some kind of a social commentary. During the time he was writing the novel the world was suffering through the Great Depression, and Hemingway was supporting the communists in Spain, which would lead to his great novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. But with all the characters on both sides of the economic divide morally bankrupt, violent, unprincipled, and life-sick, it’s hard to make a case that a new economic order would solve much. If that is Hemingway’s project he leaves it ill-thought and unrealized.

There’s a further strangeness to the novel that comes from its inception, apparently, as two short stories that introduced the character Harry Morgan. Hemingway thought Harry was a strong enough character to sustain a novel, so he added more and wove it together. But the seams show. Several times Harry is introduced as, “the man” and then we’re told his name later, as though we didn’t know. In the story about the failed liquor smuggling operation I kept feeling I wasn’t told enough of what’s going on (how did we get here, with the boat and Harry and his mate already shot?). Later, in places, I felt like I was told too much, as when Hemingway feels like he has to make explicit something I felt was obvious, (e.g. “The woman he had seen was Harry Morgan’s wife, Marie, on her way home from the sheriff’s office” p. 177. Or “It was Richard Gordon on his way home” p. 255. Duh. Yes. I got it.)

It’s a quick read. 262 pages. But the type is large. A lot of it is dialogue. And because it’s twenty-six chapters there’s a lot of blank space on a good number of pages. I started it last evening and finished it this afternoon after having done the laundry this morning.

I had to laugh at one point. Harry uses the word “nigger” very freely: four times on page seven and then throughout the novel. But the one time when Hemingway uses the word “Fuck” (p. 168) the book prints it as “F—-“. Times change.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see other titles on my reading list, click here.