Reading Hemingway's To Have and Have Not

Glossary and Commentary

Kirk Curnutt

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781631012440
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

Published in 1937, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not is that rare example of a novel whose cultural impact far outweighs its critical reputation. Long criticized for its fragmented form, its ham-fisted approach to politics, and its hard-boiled obsession with cojones, this blistering tale of a Florida Straits boat captain named Harry Morgan desperately trying to survive the economic ravages of the Great Depression by running rum and revolutionaries to Havana has fueled tourist industries in Key West and Cuba and has inspired at least three movie adaptations (including a classic cowritten by William Faulkner and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall).

In Reading Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, Kirk Curnutt explicates dozens of topics that arise from this controversial novel's dense, tropical swelter of references and allusions. From Cuban politics to multifarious New Deal "alphabet agencies, " from rum running to human smuggling to byways, bars, and brothels, Curnutt delves deeply into the plot's rich textural back- drop. Most important, he reminds us what a very different novel To Have and Have Not would have been had Hemingway not undergone a political change of heart while covering the Spanish Civil War and revised a narrative originally feral in its suspicion of partisans and ideologues at odds with the newfound ideals of activism and intervention that Hemingway felt essential to halting the global rise of fascism.

More than any study of the only novel Ernest Hemingway set on American soil, this book reads To Have and Have Not in the peculiar juxtaposition of literary innovation and popular appeal that made Hemingway the world's most famous writer. While valorizing Hemingway's artistry, Curnutt never lets readers forget the visceral thrills of what one movie adaptation called "Hemingway-Hot Adventure."

PART ONE

Harry Morgan (Spring)

As previously noted (see pages xxii–xxv), part 1 of To Have and Have Not appeared under the title “One Trip Across” in Cosmopolitan April 1934: 20–23, 108–22. The five chapter breaks that divide the novel’s opening adventure do not correspond to the magazine’s section breaks. (The version of “One Trip” printed in 1987’s The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition does away with breaks completely.) MS 31, item 211, folder 23 in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library includes a set of “tear sheets” from Cosmopolitan on which Hemingway first determined the breaks that would appear in To Have and Have Not.¹ In both manuscript and proof, the novel’s chapter divisions were originally designated by Roman numerals until Hemingway decided that he disliked their unadorned look: “Why not name it Chapter One instead of I—much better,” he wrote on page one of the galleys held today at the Monroe County Library in Key West.

Each of To Have and Have Not’s three parts is titled “Harry Morgan,” with a different season added in parentheses to designate the time of the action. Part 1 is “(Spring),” with internal evidence establishing that the year is 1933. With the exception of The Torrents of Spring, Hemingway was not in the habit of titling the interdivisions of his novels, preferring to designate them simply as “Part One” or “Book One.” The use of Harry’s name on the title page of all three parts is both unusual and redundant. The eponym neither enhances the theme by serving as a motif nor conveys a sense of narrative structure by juxtaposing different elements of its organizational design (as the seasonal markers in the parentheses do). One might further suggest that by part 3 the title is not even accurate, considering that the narrative point of view roves through a variety of ancillary characters, including Richard Gordon. The use of the name for a section title is most likely a vestige of the author’s June 1937 “omnibus” plan, which proposed that a novel called Harry Morgan would appear in a book called To Have and Have Not alongside unrelated stories, war dispatches, political editorials, and speeches (TOTTC 250).

NOTE

1. Tear sheets are torn pages from a magazine. It was not uncommon for short-story writers in this period to pencil or pen revisions onto tear sheets of their published work. Typesetters then used these as setting copy for a forthcoming collection instead of working from a newly produced typescript. Presumably because the tear sheets had already been proofread as a magazine went to press, there was less chance of perpetuating typos and errata in the new proofs.

CHAPTER ONE

At twenty-six pages, the opening chapter is the second longest of the novel’s twenty-six component pieces. Only chapter 22, which runs thirty pages, exceeds it in length. (At twenty-four pages, chapter 18 is a close third.) The action begins at Havana’s Pearl of San Francisco Café with a tense meeting between Harry Morgan and three revolutionaries who want to hire the American charter-boat captain to smuggle them to Key West. Harry no sooner refuses than the revolutionaries are killed in a gruesome shoot-out with government thugs. The captain escapes the melee and returns to the San Francisco wharf where his boat is docked. There he joins his mate, Eddy Marshall, and their customer, Mr. Johnson, in his third week of fishing on the Gulf Stream, running up a large tab, at $35 per day. The core of the chapter centers on the tourist’s ineptitude at deep-sea fishing. After failing to land two separate marlin, Johnson loses Harry’s rod and reel overboard to a third fish and then objects to covering the cost. When the boat returns to Havana, the tourist stiffs Harry Morgan on his $900 bill, leaving the captain with few options. As Harry tells his local errand boy, Frankie, he will now have to smuggle cargo back to the States, and the cargo will have to be human.

3:1 You: The first word of the novel is an excellent example of how Hemingway interpolated his audience into his prose. In its use of you, To Have and Have Not begins ambiguously, somewhere between second-person narration and the authorial tactic of directly addressing readers. Second-person narration involves using you as a substitute for either first- or third-person points of view, both of which are more conventional. In other words, the second-person pronoun is the name given to the protagonist of a narrative, as in the opening line of a 2008 New Yorker story by Wells Tower entitled “Leopard,” which was subsequently included in Tower’s debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009): “You have not slept well. Don’t open your eyes. Stick out your tongue. Search for the little sore above your upper lip. Pray that it healed in the night” (111). Yet, unlike “Leopard,” To Have and Have Not almost immediately abandons the pronoun for Harry Morgan’s first-person I, which is maintained for the rest of part 1. You is therefore not a participant in the plot.

The speed with which the device is abandoned suggests Hemingway employs the opposing narrative strategy associated with the second-person pronoun, the direct address to readers. Here the you is not a formal character but a dramatization of the “narratee,” the audience to whom the story is told. A famous example of an opening direct address employing you is J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951): “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth” (3). Holden Caulfield’s stance toward you is defensive, if not passive-aggressive, his tone suggesting he imagines his audience as a quasi-authority figure, perhaps a therapist at the mental hospital where he implies he is staying; he certainly does not imagine you as a sympathetic listener. Even so, the you to whom Holden speaks is never a physical presence, merely the recipient of the boy’s asides. In To Have and Have Not, it soon becomes clear that this is close but still not Hemingway’s approach, either. Once Harry Morgan reveals himself as the narrator, only occasionally will he invoke you (see, for example, 6:9, in describing one of the terrorists Harry meets with: “the same sort of good-looking kid. You know, slim, good clothes, and shiny hair”). This infrequency of address, coupled with their relatively benign tone, suggests that the relationship between narrator and narratee is not a crucial index to the hero’s character, as it is in Holden’s case.

The difference between second-person narration and direct addresses is not always clear-cut. A work famous for its extended invocation of second person, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979, trans. 1982), begins with a sentence that defines you as both character and narratee: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every thought. Let the world around you fade” (3). Despite the imperative voice, Calvino is not using you in the same manner that Wells Tower does in “Leopard.” Once past its opening chapter, If on a winter’s night a traveler addresses the reader instead of dramatizing him as a main character. You might be caught up in the action of reading, but only rarely in the action of the plot. The story is about you only in the sense that Calvino returns repeatedly to the reader’s reaction, enumerating the distractions that interrupt his concentration and the disappointments with the text that may prevent him from thoroughly immersing himself in the writer’s fictional world.

If To Have and Have Not opens with a direct address but fails to use the technique consistently enough for the narrator-narratee relationship to serve a consistent function, what is the purpose? Essentially, you is best understood as a conversational gambit. It immerses readers in the scene, kicking off the action in a far more dramatic fashion than an objective description of setting would. Imagine for a moment if To Have and Have Not simply began, “Most mornings in Havana bums sleep against the side of the buildings until ice trucks come by with ice for the bars.” The you makes the opening more compelling by involving the reader. Moreover, the second-person invocation defines the narratee as Hemingway’s ideal reader—he is someone who knows “how it is there” in Havana, who has seen “the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings” before “the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars” (1:2–4). This point is reinforced by the fact that this opening sentence is not an assertion but an interrogative. And not just any question, either, but a rhetorical one: “You know how it is, right?” The reader is thus encouraged to visualize the scene, even as Hemingway qualifies it in subsequent sentences by noting that on this particular day only one beggar occupies the square.

These distinctions might seem negligible, were Hemingway’s use of you throughout his career not so fascinating for the range of effects it granted him. Instances of the second person can be traced as far back as his early, pre-expatriate journalism days: “Have you a coming Corot, a modern Millet, a potential Paul Potter or a Toronto Titian temporarily adding whatever the new art adds to your home?” begins his debut contribution to the Toronto Star Weekly on 15 February 1920 (BL 3). Far more magisterially, you appears as late as the posthumously published A Moveable Feast (1964), where it universalizes Hemingway’s memories so the reader can picture him- or herself wandering the romantic streets of Paris in search of literary fame: “You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled food” (MF 69).

To be sure, not all of Hemingway’s invocations of you are so genial. Especially in his Esquire columns of 1933–36, he could prove downright belligerent when addressing his audience. “Out in the Stream: A Cuban Letter,” his debut article for the magazine, enumerates his observations on migratory fish patterns in the Gulf, only to end with an overt challenge: “Now you prove me wrong,” he taunts the reader (BL 158). This closing line seems wholly out of place in an essay that otherwise presents itself as a scientific exercise; it suggests how intolerant Hemingway was of even the possibility of readers questioning his authority. In other Esquire essays, he sarcastically addresses his audience as “gentlemen,” “boys,” and “gents,” imagining readers specifically as those dissenting critics who deflated his literary reputation in the 1930s. Yet more often—and more felicitously—he uses the second person to personalize the structure of address, allowing his audience to identify with the experiences described, as in the innumerable instances when Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls speaks to himself in second person: “You went into [this war] knowing what you were fighting for. You were fighting against exactly what you were doing and being forced into doing to have any chance of winning” (162).

The frequency with which Hemingway invites his reader into his writing by using you should qualify his reputation as a “camera-eye” modernist, one whose narrative perspective was rigorously objective, like a lens.¹ In some famous instances (“The Killers”), he did excise signs of his storytelling presence, but in many others he experimented with self-reflexive markers that hint at a narrative exchange between narrators and readers.

Combined, the opening you, the interrogative, and the imagery of Havana’s bum-filled squares are responsible for an interesting paradox that surrounds To Have and Have Not: while the novel is considered an overall failure, its kick-off paragraph is among Hemingway’s most celebrated beginnings. Subsequent practitioners of noir sometimes even begin their own novels with homages to the opening sentence. Daniel Woodrell’s Tomato Red (1998) begins, “You’re no angel, you know how this stuff happens” (3) while the author of this readers’ guide kicked off his Dixie Noir (2009) with “You know how it is when you drop a guy who thought he had the drop on you” (9). In his 2006 study, 101 Best Scenes Ever Written: A Romp through Literature for Writers and Readers, Barnaby Conrad analyzes To Have and Have Not’s opening as an example of effective suspense (17–19), and it is often also reprinted in creative-writing and discourse-analysis textbooks where it is studied as a model of an effective “hook.” In a 1996 interview, the late author and teacher Albert Murray (1916–2013) describes how he encouraged students to study the entire first paragraph, noting how it avoids tropical clichés: “I would ask my students, ‘Did you see the palm trees?’ He didn’t even mention them, but with the rest of the description, you’d see them. I read Hemingway and thought, this is it. This is art” (Conversations 138). Arguably, only two other opening lines of Hemingway’s are more arresting: those of “In Another Country” (“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more” [CSS 206]) and A Farewell to Arms (“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains” [FTA 3]).

3:2 Havana: The capital of Cuba, often called the “Paris of the Antilles” or the “Casablanca of the Caribbean” for its rich and usually exoticized cultural history. Founded in the early sixteenth century by Spanish explorers, the city served as an outpost for European forays to and from the New World until the country obtained its independence in 1898 after a protracted, bloody struggle that encompassed three separate wars (1868–78, 1879–80, 1895–98).

Hemingway first glimpsed Havana in 1928 on his “American homecoming,” his return to the United States after more than six years of living in Europe (save for a four-month spell in late 1923 / early 1924 in Toronto). The stay was a mere two-day layover, barely long enough to switch from his transatlantic steamer to a quick boat to Key West. Travels would keep him from truly discovering the city for a few years; until then, Havana simply served as the site where Hemingway would catch passage to Europe.

His first extended stay began in April 1932. What was to have been a ten-day charter turned into two months as he fished aboard Joe “Josie” Russell’s boat, the Anita. During this trip Hemingway began staying at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, his home base in Cuba until the decade’s end when he and third wife, Martha Gellhorn, relocated to the Finca Vigía outside the small village of San Francisco de Paulo.

More than his 1932 stay, his 1933 return trip is the one that inspired “One Trip Across.” That May in Havana, having again chartered the Anita for two months, Hemingway met photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975), who was on assignment from J. P. Lippincott to photograph the city for journalist Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba, a soon-to-be-published exposé on the country’s grave political situation. President Gerardo Machado (1871–1939), in power since 1925, ruled with a despotic brutality that in turn roiled opposing forces, factions of whom responded with terrorist tactics. The result was an ever-mounting body count that required the diplomatic intervention of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s special envoy to Cuba, Sumner Welles (1892–1961), who engineered an end to Machado’s reign that August. Although To Have and Have Not is never specific about this political history, it is the backdrop against which this opening chapter is set, and thus central to appreciating the depiction of Havana.

It would be an exaggeration to credit Evans with awakening Hemingway’s awareness of Cuban politics. Before the Anita embarked that spring, Hemingway had written Maxwell Perkins requesting a letter certifying that “Ernest Hemingway is at work on a book dealing with the migratory fish of the Gulf Stream, their habits and capture with special reference to the fishing in Cuban Waters from a sporting standpoint…. I wish you could get somebody from the State Department stating the same thing.” As he noted, “In a time of revolution, [the letters] might keep me from getting shot” (TOTTC 184–85). Yet he and Evans certainly discussed the violence and upheaval in Havana. Hemingway was also aware of the photographer’s project, for he later claimed Evans asked him to secret a set of prints back to the States aboard the Anita. As Ernest recollected of his two weeks with the future coauthor of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “We were both working against Machado at the time” (qtd. in Mellow, Walker Evans 180). As most biographies agree, this is an exaggeration. No evidence suggests Hemingway was involved in any political activism in Havana, in either 1932 or 1933. For many years, it was uncertain whether he had even ferried prints as he claimed. In the early 2000s, Benjamin “Dink” Bruce, the son of Hemingway’s Key West handyman, Toby Bruce, discovered a set of photographs among boxes Hemingway had abandoned in Key West after the 1930s. The images were from negatives already housed in Evans’s own archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and published in Walker Evans: Cuba (2001), raising questions about their origins. After the prints were authenticated, Bruce and Claudia Pennington, then executive director of the Key West Art and Historical Society, surmised that Evans printed the photos in Havana for Ernest to smuggle home in case Machado’s men seized his own negatives when he tried to leave the country. When the negatives indeed made it safely to Ame...