Book Review - To Have and Have Not

To Have and Have Not – by Earnest Hemingway (1899-1961), published 1937

Of Hemingway’s novels, I’ve read The Old Man and the Sea (1952), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and The Sun Also Rises (1926) but all a long time ago, about the same time I read many of his short stories, my favorite being The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

I remember in 1961 when Hemingway shot himself with a $10,000 double-barreled shotgun in the foyer of his Ketchum, Idaho home, wearing a house robe. I was home from college and my dad came back from work with the news that one of my heroes was dead; I read all about in Life Magazine, back when I was a big Hemingway fan. I liked his “short declarative sentences” and “his tough, terse prose.”

I still do, but then To Have and Have Not isn’t one of his better efforts. While it did give me a picture of a world I do not know – Depression era life in Key West and Cuba – it was a vague picture, and I had difficulty actually caring about any of the characters. Harry Morgan, the amoral protagonist, is a man with a problem, but he isn’t particularly likeable. Harry is a charter fishing boat captain who gets ripped off by his client, Mr. Johnson; then he resorts to smuggling “Chinks”, liquor (where he loses an arm and his boat), and Cuban revolutionaries, all to support his wife and three daughters. He doesn’t even like his girls; he just feels the obligation. The adventures mount, from the killing of Mr. Sing (I never figured out why it was necessary to kill Mr. Sing) to the Cuban’s robbing a bank for the “revolution” and using Harry in a borrowed boat to flee to Cuba. One-armed Harry kills them all with a Thompson sub-machine gun but is mortally wounded in the process, leaving his wife wondering what the hell she is going to do. Thinking to herself she concludes, “You just go dead inside and everything is easy… I’ve got a good start if that’s what you have to do… I’m way ahead of everybody now.” The end. Depressingly, life goes on.

Though the book switches gears a couple times, from first person narrative to third person, I enjoyed the dialog in Freddy’s bar with Richard Gordon, the drunken vets, and Professor MacWalsey; and later, descriptions of the rich yachtsmen and their women. Also, I suppose herein lies the point of the title – there are the bored alcoholic spouse-cheating rich, then there are those like Harry striving to make ends meet. But I had little sympathy for Harry. I found his disregard for Eddie the rummy, the nigger (a term used freely in 1937), and Albert, his short-lived mate on his fateful last trip, not completely understandable. Perhaps it has to do with Hemingway’s protagonists being people of courage who suffer “unseen scars, both physical and emotional,” as it said on the back of the book. I did like the interior monologues, the stream of consciousness; it added to the enjoyment of an otherwise dark novel.

The 1944 movie of the same name isn’t the same story at all; but here is one of those rare cases where the film is much more entertaining than the book! William Faulkner helped write the screenplay and it was full of crisp dialog, particularly involving 19 year-old Lauren Bacall (Slim) in her debut, and Humphrey Bogart (Steve). It also starred Walter Brennan (Eddie) and Hoagy Carmichael (Cricket). This is the time when gorgeous and single Bacall and middle-aged homely and married Bogart, fall in love; and it shows in the film. There were such corny but great old lines:

Slim: “Okay. You don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle don’t you Steve? You just put your lips together – and blow.”

Or when Slim, a singer in the hotel café, is going to work wearing a silky black dress with bare midriff and Steve says, “You won’t have to sing much in that outfit.” Steve then has to go find Eddie who has been detained by the police:

Cricket: “Stick around for a while, she’s gonna sing.”

Steve: “I’ll be right back.”

Slim: “Give her my love.”

Steve: “I’d give her my own if she had that on.”

Much later, as they’re preparing to leave Martinique, for a midnight departure to Port de Prince, Slim says: “I’m hard to get, Steve. All you have to do is ask me”. Sexy language for a movie in 1944.

Ah, the stuff that dreams are made of!