PART ONE
Harry Morgan (Spring)
As previously noted (see pages xxiiâxxv), part 1 of To Have and Have Not appeared under the title âOne Trip Acrossâ in Cosmopolitan April 1934: 20â23, 108â22. The five chapter breaks that divide the novelâs opening adventure do not correspond to the magazineâs section breaks. (The version of âOne Tripâ printed in 1987âs The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca VigĂa Edition does away with breaks completely.) MS 31, item 211, folder 23 in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library includes a set of âtear sheetsâ 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 novelâs chapter divisions were originally designated by Roman numerals until Hemingway decided that he disliked their unadorned look: âWhy not name it Chapter One instead of Iâmuch better,â he wrote on page one of the galleys held today at the Monroe County Library in Key West.
Each of To Have and Have Notâs three parts is titled âHarry Morgan,â with a different season added in parentheses to designate the time of the action. Part 1 is â(Spring),â 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 âPart Oneâ or âBook One.â The use of Harryâs 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 authorâs June 1937 âomnibusâ 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 novelâs 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 Havanaâs Pearl of San Francisco CafĂŠ 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 touristâs ineptitude at deep-sea fishing. After failing to land two separate marlin, Johnson loses Harryâs 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 âLeopard,â which was subsequently included in Towerâs debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009): âYou have not slept well. Donât open your eyes. Stick out your tongue. Search for the little sore above your upper lip. Pray that it healed in the nightâ (111). Yet, unlike âLeopard,â To Have and Have Not almost immediately abandons the pronoun for Harry Morganâs 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 ânarratee,â the audience to whom the story is told. A famous example of an opening direct address employing you is J. D. Salingerâs The Catcher in the Rye (1951): âIf you really want to hear about it, the first thing youâll 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 donât feel like going into it, if you want to know the truthâ (3). Holden Caulfieldâs 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 boyâs asides. In To Have and Have Not, it soon becomes clear that this is close but still not Hemingwayâs 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: âthe same sort of good-looking kid. You know, slim, good clothes, and shiny hairâ). 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 heroâs character, as it is in Holdenâs 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 Calvinoâs If on a winterâs night a traveler (1979, trans. 1982), begins with a sentence that defines you as both character and narratee: âYou are about to begin reading Italo Calvinoâs new novel, If on a winterâs night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every thought. Let the world around you fadeâ (3). Despite the imperative voice, Calvino is not using you in the same manner that Wells Tower does in âLeopard.â Once past its opening chapter, If on a winterâs 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 readerâs reaction, enumerating the distractions that interrupt his concentration and the disappointments with the text that may prevent him from thoroughly immersing himself in the writerâs 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, âMost mornings in Havana bums sleep against the side of the buildings until ice trucks come by with ice for the bars.â The you makes the opening more compelling by involving the reader. Moreover, the second-person invocation defines the narratee as Hemingwayâs ideal readerâhe is someone who knows âhow it is thereâ in Havana, who has seen âthe bums still asleep against the walls of the buildingsâ before âthe ice wagons come by with ice for the barsâ (1:2â4). 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: âYou know how it is, right?â 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 Hemingwayâs 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: âHave 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?â 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 Hemingwayâs memories so the reader can picture him- or herself wandering the romantic streets of Paris in search of literary fame: âYou 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 foodâ (MF 69).
To be sure, not all of Hemingwayâs invocations of you are so genial. Especially in his Esquire columns of 1933â36, he could prove downright belligerent when addressing his audience. âOut in the Stream: A Cuban Letter,â his debut article for the magazine, enumerates his observations on migratory fish patterns in the Gulf, only to end with an overt challenge: âNow you prove me wrong,â 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 âgentlemen,â âboys,â and âgents,â imagining readers specifically as those dissenting critics who deflated his literary reputation in the 1930s. Yet more oftenâand more felicitouslyâhe 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: âYou 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 winningâ (162).
The frequency with which Hemingway invites his reader into his writing by using you should qualify his reputation as a âcamera-eyeâ modernist, one whose narrative perspective was rigorously objective, like a lens.1 In some famous instances (âThe Killersâ), 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 Havanaâs 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 Hemingwayâs most celebrated beginnings. Subsequent practitioners of noir sometimes even begin their own novels with homages to the opening sentence. Daniel Woodrellâs Tomato Red (1998) begins, âYouâre no angel, you know how this stuff happensâ (3) while the author of this readersâ guide kicked off his Dixie Noir (2009) with âYou know how it is when you drop a guy who thought he had the drop on youâ (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 Notâs opening as an example of effective suspense (17â19), and it is often also reprinted in creative-writing and discourse-analysis textbooks where it is studied as a model of an effective âhook.â In a 1996 interview, the late author and teacher Albert Murray (1916â2013) describes how he encouraged students to study the entire first paragraph, noting how it avoids tropical clichĂŠs: âI would ask my students, âDid you see the palm trees?â He didnât even mention them, but with the rest of the description, youâd see them. I read Hemingway and thought, this is it. This is artâ (Conversations 138). Arguably, only two other opening lines of Hemingwayâs are more arresting: those of âIn Another Countryâ (âIn the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any moreâ [CSS 206]) and A Farewell to Arms (âIn the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountainsâ [FTA 3]).
3:2 Havana: The capital of Cuba, often called the âParis of the Antillesâ or the âCasablanca of the Caribbeanâ 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 (1868â78, 1879â80, 1895â98).
Hemingway first glimpsed Havana in 1928 on his âAmerican homecoming,â 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 âJosieâ Russellâs boat, the Anita. During this trip Hemingway began staying at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, his home base in Cuba until the decadeâs end when he and third wife, Martha Gellhorn, relocated to the Finca VigĂa outside the small village of San Francisco de Paulo.
More than his 1932 stay, his 1933 return trip is the one that inspired âOne Trip Across.â That May in Havana, having again chartered the Anita for two months, Hemingway met photographer Walker Evans (1903â1975), who was on assignment from J. P. Lippincott to photograph the city for journalist Carleton Bealsâs The Crime of Cuba, a soon-to-be-published exposĂŠ on the countryâs grave political situation. President Gerardo Machado (1871â1939), 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. Rooseveltâs special envoy to Cuba, Sumner Welles (1892â1961), who engineered an end to Machadoâs 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 Hemingwayâs awareness of Cuban politics. Before the Anita embarked that spring, Hemingway had written Maxwell Perkins requesting a letter certifying that âErnest 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 standpointâŚ. I wish you could get somebody from the State Department stating the same thing.â As he noted, âIn a time of revolution, [the letters] might keep me from getting shotâ (TOTTC 184â85). Yet he and Evans certainly discussed the violence and upheaval in Havana. Hemingway was also aware of the photographerâs 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, âWe were both working against Machado at the timeâ (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 âDinkâ Bruce, the son of Hemingwayâs 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 Evansâs 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 Machadoâs men seized his own negatives when he tried to leave the country. When the negatives indeed made it safely to Ame...