So on balance, over half of those who rated it — 51% — thought it good or indeed very good. It’s shame I can’t ask any of them what persuaded them in their opinion or into which literary category they would have placed the novel. Their responses would be interesting. Just 4,016 of those who rated (13%) did not think the novel much up to snuff at all.
Me? Well, before I explain my rating — and in one respect the novel is not terrible but adequate, and in another it does not work at all — there are one or two things which should be mentioned to give the novel’s existence context.
To Have And Have Not was published in mid-October 1937 after Hemingway had spent the best part of two years writing it, off and on, and he had completed it earlier in the year. He then took off for the first of four trips to the
By many accounts his heart was never really in writing the novel and that is demonstrated not just by why it came to be written but by one or two flaws, flaws that are fatal for a novel intended to be ‘serious literature’ of the kind Hemingway had convinced himself he was producing.
After the roaring success in 1929 of his second novel, A Farewell To Arms, Hemingway published two non-fiction books and a third collection of short stories.
The first, Death In The Afternoon, his guide to bullfighting in Spain and, er, writing (1932), and then Green Hills Of Africa, his account of his East African safari, and also, er, a guide to writing (1935) sold a little, presumably because they were by Ernest Hemingway. But sales were mediocre.
For their part the critics were bemused that Hemingway should assume that a comprehensive guide to Spanish bullfighting would be of interest America’s Joe Public. The critics also wondered why it did not occur to him that publishing his bullfighting guide and, three years later, his account of a safari was ill-advised at a time when one-in-four American working men and women were unemployed and many were on the breadline or worse.
That, ironically, his wife’s very rich uncle and not Hemingway had paid for the safari, which at $25,000 (the equivalent of $516,808 in 2022) did not come cheap, would and could not have been known to jobless Joe and Jo Public.
Winner Take All, the new collection of stories, did sell rather better, but by 1933 the bright young thing of American letters who had made his name six years earlier now had brighter and younger rivals to contend with. Sales of that third collection were thus a comparative disappointment to Scribner’s, Hemingway’s publisher.
Some critics also claimed that Hemingway — who by then had been calling himself ‘Papa’ for more than eight years and was living a pleasant life courtesy of his wife’s trust fund income — had lost the edge which had first so attracted them.
After the two non-fiction duds, Scribner’s (and his editor Max Perkins) who were essentially in the business of making money were tactfully pressing Hemingway to produce another novel. They would have been hoping for one which might emulate the runaway success of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms.
Hemingway was also under pressure from America’s ‘literary left’, which in the midst of Great Depression had grown in influence, to write more ’socially-engaged’ work. When between 500 and 1,000 vets had died in a hurricane on September 1935, deaths that could fairly be blamed on an uncaring government, Hemingway had written a searing criticism of the administration in left-wing magazine New Masses. Thus the left now believed Hemingway was ‘one of them’.
He wasn’t, though, and nor was he keen to tailor his work to a political stance: Hemingway always insisted that a writer’s job was to write, not to engage in politics. But matters were not that straightforward.
For their part the critics were bemused that Hemingway should assume that a comprehensive guide to Spanish bullfighting would be of interest America’s Joe Public. The critics also wondered why it did not occur to him that publishing his bullfighting guide and, three years later, his account of a safari was ill-advised at a time when one-in-four American working men and women were unemployed and many were on the breadline or worse.
That, ironically, his wife’s very rich uncle and not Hemingway had paid for the safari, which at $25,000 (the equivalent of $516,808 in 2022) did not come cheap, would and could not have been known to jobless Joe and Jo Public.
Winner Take All, the new collection of stories, did sell rather better, but by 1933 the bright young thing of American letters who had made his name six years earlier now had brighter and younger rivals to contend with. Sales of that third collection were thus a comparative disappointment to Scribner’s, Hemingway’s publisher.
Some critics also claimed that Hemingway — who by then had been calling himself ‘Papa’ for more than eight years and was living a pleasant life courtesy of his wife’s trust fund income — had lost the edge which had first so attracted them.
After the two non-fiction duds, Scribner’s (and his editor Max Perkins) who were essentially in the business of making money were tactfully pressing Hemingway to produce another novel. They would have been hoping for one which might emulate the runaway success of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms.
Hemingway was also under pressure from America’s ‘literary left’, which in the midst of Great Depression had grown in influence, to write more ’socially-engaged’ work. When between 500 and 1,000 vets had died in a hurricane on September 1935, deaths that could fairly be blamed on an uncaring government, Hemingway had written a searing criticism of the administration in left-wing magazine New Masses. Thus the left now believed Hemingway was ‘one of them’.
He wasn’t, though, and nor was he keen to tailor his work to a political stance: Hemingway always insisted that a writer’s job was to write, not to engage in politics. But matters were not that straightforward.
By the mid-1930s he was concerned that his reputation and literary standing were flagging — which they were — and he gave in to Scribner’s and Max Perkins persistence. The result was To Have And Have Not, and the novel misfires far, far more than it succeeds.
That is the rather muddled context of the novel’s genesis; but just as relevant is, frankly, that Hemingway did not know what he might write. The Sun had evolved from a week spent in Pamplona, A Farewell To Arms came from his experiences as a Red Cross ambulance driver in 1918 (for four weeks).
But the middle-class, successful, prosperous and self-regarding man he had become by the beginning of the 1930s was now leading a comfortable life and was out of ideas. That might surprise some — after all what is ‘fiction’ but ‘inventing stuff’? — and it does not surprise me.
This writer — that’s me — would argue that, in fact, it shouldn’t be at all surprising: most of Hemingway’s work was derived from his own experiences, and although that in itself is as good as any way of working, the fact is that Hemingway does not seem to have been very good as ‘inventing stuff’.
His one attempt at doing so, his intended follow-up novel to The Sun Also Rises which he called A New Slain Knight — and which was pure invention — went nowhere. It was about an American ‘revolutionist’ who travels around the country in the company of his young son.
That is the rather muddled context of the novel’s genesis; but just as relevant is, frankly, that Hemingway did not know what he might write. The Sun had evolved from a week spent in Pamplona, A Farewell To Arms came from his experiences as a Red Cross ambulance driver in 1918 (for four weeks).
But the middle-class, successful, prosperous and self-regarding man he had become by the beginning of the 1930s was now leading a comfortable life and was out of ideas. That might surprise some — after all what is ‘fiction’ but ‘inventing stuff’? — and it does not surprise me.
This writer — that’s me — would argue that, in fact, it shouldn’t be at all surprising: most of Hemingway’s work was derived from his own experiences, and although that in itself is as good as any way of working, the fact is that Hemingway does not seem to have been very good as ‘inventing stuff’.
His one attempt at doing so, his intended follow-up novel to The Sun Also Rises which he called A New Slain Knight — and which was pure invention — went nowhere. It was about an American ‘revolutionist’ who travels around the country in the company of his young son.
By all accounts — I have not read it — it meanders a great deal this way and that going nowhere, and Hemingway finally gave up and abandoned it after completing around 50,000 words and writing himself into a corner.
I’ve never been persuaded that Hemingway, despite his continued insistence that he was ‘a great writer’, was more than an also-ran in the literary stakes. The proof for my contention might be that for the novel he ‘had to write’ and for which he had no original ideas, he resorted to combining two already published short stories and expanding them into a novel.
Yet even that was not an original idea: it was done at the suggestion of his editor at Esquire magazine and friend Arnold Gingrich.
The two stories that he re-purposed — and which he re-purposed word for word — were One Trip Across which appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1934 and The Tradesman’s Return which appeared two years later in Esquire.
These stories, together totalling about 11,000 words, were then topped off with a longer novella which Hemingway hoped would give the novel the impression of being ‘socially-engaged’ and which might satisfy the ‘literary left’.
Dorothy Parker maintained that Hemingway had a gift for writing short stories but somehow couldn’t manage novels. I agree. He did manage it with The Sun Also Rises (though in my view it is not the ‘masterpiece’ it is reputed to be), but from there on in his novels were all, to a greater or lesser extent, so-so: A Farewell To Arms, To Have And Have Not and For Whom The Bell Tolls don’t really add up to what they might have added up to.
The two shorts stories which make up the beginning of To Have And Have Not do stand on their own as short stories. But as part of the whole novel they stand out in an odd and inconsistent way.
It might seem that those two stories are concluded by the novel’s later description in the third part of the double-crossing Cubans who are eventually massacred by the protagonist: we start with Harry Morgan being ripped off by a wealthy client, then proceed to a description of some kind of liquor smuggling operation gone wrong, before Morgan has his own boat impounded. charters another and sets of with the duplicitous Cubans. But it is all too open-ended and inconclusive. What is the story?
Hemingway might argue that he is showing a ‘have not’ being trampled on by fate and rich people. But that doesn’t wash. For one thing, the nominal ‘have not’ is an unpleasant man and the least admirable example of the ‘have nots’ — he murders the Chinese man who had hired him out of greed and kills another ‘have not’ in cold blood to save his skin.
But even if we turn a blind eye to that, the theme of ‘social injustice’ doesn’t for one second convince and gel with the tone of the first two stories.
The opening short story, told in the first person, is also artistically flawed in that Hemingway, something of a marlin-fishing obsessive, self-indulgently spends far too much time on a lot of technical fishing details which do nothing to advance the story but simply swamp it.
That the client is hopeless at fishing, loses valuable equipment, but then skips out of compensating Harry Morgan is relevant. But the welter of detail Hemingway provides on the correct way of doing this and that merely amount to Hemingway showing quietly bragging. (He does the same when a bullfight features in his work: the description goes on and on and on, for no artistic purpose.)
The story might usefully have been edited down a lot and the story’s strand of the client bilking Harry Morgan would still have stood. But Hemingway ‘the artist’ did not seem to have seen this and simply indulged himself in what amounts to nothing more than showing off his knowledge and expertise.
If one subscribes — as I do, but some might not — to the notion that ‘art should conceal art’, it follows that the artist should take a back seat, stay in the background and that he or she should acknowledge they are not the centre of attention. But all too often Hemingway is, both in his writing as he was in life very much in the foreground. Some might not care, but I do.
Another flaw of the first story (and thus the opening chapters of the novel) is that the ‘first-person’ narrative is too self-consciously brutal. Other hard-boiled fiction might be equally brutal, but it is not quite so intent on establishing just how brutal the central ‘I’ character is. That is something Hemingway seems keen to do. From what we now know about Hemingway, he wanted readers to assume he was Harry Morgan.
Later, Hemingway overtly describes Morgan as a man who has no pity on anyone, but implies that it is a trait supposedly and oddly redeemed by the fact that he has no pity on himself, either. That kind of man certainly does not gel with the almost admirable big and honourable husband Morgan’s wife Marie worships, abjectly, and how he supposedly cares for his family.
The opening short story, told in the first person, is also artistically flawed in that Hemingway, something of a marlin-fishing obsessive, self-indulgently spends far too much time on a lot of technical fishing details which do nothing to advance the story but simply swamp it.
That the client is hopeless at fishing, loses valuable equipment, but then skips out of compensating Harry Morgan is relevant. But the welter of detail Hemingway provides on the correct way of doing this and that merely amount to Hemingway showing quietly bragging. (He does the same when a bullfight features in his work: the description goes on and on and on, for no artistic purpose.)
The story might usefully have been edited down a lot and the story’s strand of the client bilking Harry Morgan would still have stood. But Hemingway ‘the artist’ did not seem to have seen this and simply indulged himself in what amounts to nothing more than showing off his knowledge and expertise.
If one subscribes — as I do, but some might not — to the notion that ‘art should conceal art’, it follows that the artist should take a back seat, stay in the background and that he or she should acknowledge they are not the centre of attention. But all too often Hemingway is, both in his writing as he was in life very much in the foreground. Some might not care, but I do.
Another flaw of the first story (and thus the opening chapters of the novel) is that the ‘first-person’ narrative is too self-consciously brutal. Other hard-boiled fiction might be equally brutal, but it is not quite so intent on establishing just how brutal the central ‘I’ character is. That is something Hemingway seems keen to do. From what we now know about Hemingway, he wanted readers to assume he was Harry Morgan.
Later, Hemingway overtly describes Morgan as a man who has no pity on anyone, but implies that it is a trait supposedly and oddly redeemed by the fact that he has no pity on himself, either. That kind of man certainly does not gel with the almost admirable big and honourable husband Morgan’s wife Marie worships, abjectly, and how he supposedly cares for his family.
Put bluntly, in Harry Morgan Hemingway presents us with a man who cannot exist: if one thing is true about him, it is very unlikely that other aspects attributed to him are also true.
The second story also has its flaws: we don’t have to know exactly what went wrong on the trip to Cuab and why ‘the nigger’ — Hemingway’s very unpleasant description, not mine — was badly injured; but we do wonder why Morgan was still smuggling liquor even though prohibition had ended several years previously, a fact that is touched upon, but never explained.
In that second story, Hemingway’s does start to attempt to build in a ‘socially-engaged’ dimension, but that seems tacked on: it is not an organic element of the narrative.
The second narrative is just too vague and rather without purpose. Hemingway describes a failed smuggling trip, to which the reader is entitled to ask: why? What is ‘the story’?
The concluding narrative in which Morgan dies is similarly pointless. Yes, what happens might well happen in ‘real life’. But here we are dealing with ‘a fiction’, a creation, a written artifice which is assumed to have an underlying structure to give it ‘purpose’, ‘shape’ and ‘meaning’. Why write the story if it has none of those (or any other compensatory aspect)?
Some might argue that ‘purpose’ is to juxtapose the lives of the ‘haves’ with the ‘have nots’. The problem is that Hemingway is so ham-fisted in how he presents that juxtaposition that he does not carry it off. That ‘social injustice’ element is tacked on almost as an afterthought. And ironically, what we know about the novel’s genesis it was indeed an afterhought.
Those readers who say they enjoyed the ‘adventure story’ element of To Have And Have Not should tell us what they make of those passages in the novel which stick out like a sore thumb, which seem to intrude from a different novel entirely: the confrontation between Richard Gordon and his wife, the encounter of Gordon and the vets in Freddy’s bar, the beating Gordon gets and the scenes on the rich men’s yachts?
These narrative strands appear unannounced as though from nowhere, have nothing to do with the ‘adventure’ story element at all, hang around for a very short while, doing nothing but bewildering the reader, then dissipate unresolved, leaving the reader even more bewildered.
The second story also has its flaws: we don’t have to know exactly what went wrong on the trip to Cuab and why ‘the nigger’ — Hemingway’s very unpleasant description, not mine — was badly injured; but we do wonder why Morgan was still smuggling liquor even though prohibition had ended several years previously, a fact that is touched upon, but never explained.
In that second story, Hemingway’s does start to attempt to build in a ‘socially-engaged’ dimension, but that seems tacked on: it is not an organic element of the narrative.
The second narrative is just too vague and rather without purpose. Hemingway describes a failed smuggling trip, to which the reader is entitled to ask: why? What is ‘the story’?
The concluding narrative in which Morgan dies is similarly pointless. Yes, what happens might well happen in ‘real life’. But here we are dealing with ‘a fiction’, a creation, a written artifice which is assumed to have an underlying structure to give it ‘purpose’, ‘shape’ and ‘meaning’. Why write the story if it has none of those (or any other compensatory aspect)?
Some might argue that ‘purpose’ is to juxtapose the lives of the ‘haves’ with the ‘have nots’. The problem is that Hemingway is so ham-fisted in how he presents that juxtaposition that he does not carry it off. That ‘social injustice’ element is tacked on almost as an afterthought. And ironically, what we know about the novel’s genesis it was indeed an afterhought.
Those readers who say they enjoyed the ‘adventure story’ element of To Have And Have Not should tell us what they make of those passages in the novel which stick out like a sore thumb, which seem to intrude from a different novel entirely: the confrontation between Richard Gordon and his wife, the encounter of Gordon and the vets in Freddy’s bar, the beating Gordon gets and the scenes on the rich men’s yachts?
These narrative strands appear unannounced as though from nowhere, have nothing to do with the ‘adventure’ story element at all, hang around for a very short while, doing nothing but bewildering the reader, then dissipate unresolved, leaving the reader even more bewildered.
Helen Gordon’s longish diatribe against her husband and ‘love’ is particularly irksome: this is not ‘a woman talking’, it is a mediocre novelist trying his hand a creating a ‘fine passage’ of ‘profound thoughts’. It flies like a lead balloon, and Helen Gordon then disappears entirely not to be heard of again. That is amateurish stuff.
What Hemingway hoped he could carry off but did not was to compare different lives. Morgan, his wife Marie, Albert the vet, the brawling vets in Freddy’s and, I suppose, ‘the nigger’ — and my apologies yet again to all who are offended by my using the term, but it does indicate just how bloody crass the novel is overall — were the ‘dispossessed’.
They, Hemingway would have us believe in his desperate attempt to satisfy the literary left, are the ‘have nots’. Conversely, the ‘left-wing novelist’ Gordon and his wife (in her very brief appearance), the professor, the various rich men on their yachts are ‘the haves’.
But none of it works. These wealthy characters are late and rather embarrassed arrivals at the party. If it hadn’t been for the necessity Hemingway felt to make his new novel ‘socially engaged’, they could easily have been dispensed with and, I suggest, the novel would have been improved, though it would simply have been just another adventure story. Their absence would not have been noticed at all.
If To Have And Have Not was first of all a novel that Hemingway produced because of external pressures to write a new novel and, second, one that had to be of a certain kind endorsing leftist grumbles, we can understand why he came up with — let me be honest — something of an incoherent jumble.
When he was writing the Cosmopolitan and Esquire stories, it is obvious (to me at least) that Hemingway was trying his hand at emulating the hard-boiled style of writers such as Dashiell Hammett and James Cain. He would certainly have been familiar with their work.
The crucial difference was that whereas those writers were clear about what they were doing — and they did it well and were arguably as much ‘artists’ as any other ‘more serious’ writers — Hemingway regarded himself as above all that and liked the world to accept him as a ‘serious artist’, a writer creating literature. Well, not in my book.
As an adventure story, To Have And Have Not is not bad, but it is no better than many other such stories and is thus a three-star work. As a piece of serious literature it is hopelessly bad and gets just one star. Thus I split the difference and shall give it two.
What Hemingway hoped he could carry off but did not was to compare different lives. Morgan, his wife Marie, Albert the vet, the brawling vets in Freddy’s and, I suppose, ‘the nigger’ — and my apologies yet again to all who are offended by my using the term, but it does indicate just how bloody crass the novel is overall — were the ‘dispossessed’.
They, Hemingway would have us believe in his desperate attempt to satisfy the literary left, are the ‘have nots’. Conversely, the ‘left-wing novelist’ Gordon and his wife (in her very brief appearance), the professor, the various rich men on their yachts are ‘the haves’.
But none of it works. These wealthy characters are late and rather embarrassed arrivals at the party. If it hadn’t been for the necessity Hemingway felt to make his new novel ‘socially engaged’, they could easily have been dispensed with and, I suggest, the novel would have been improved, though it would simply have been just another adventure story. Their absence would not have been noticed at all.
If To Have And Have Not was first of all a novel that Hemingway produced because of external pressures to write a new novel and, second, one that had to be of a certain kind endorsing leftist grumbles, we can understand why he came up with — let me be honest — something of an incoherent jumble.
When he was writing the Cosmopolitan and Esquire stories, it is obvious (to me at least) that Hemingway was trying his hand at emulating the hard-boiled style of writers such as Dashiell Hammett and James Cain. He would certainly have been familiar with their work.
The crucial difference was that whereas those writers were clear about what they were doing — and they did it well and were arguably as much ‘artists’ as any other ‘more serious’ writers — Hemingway regarded himself as above all that and liked the world to accept him as a ‘serious artist’, a writer creating literature. Well, not in my book.
As an adventure story, To Have And Have Not is not bad, but it is no better than many other such stories and is thus a three-star work. As a piece of serious literature it is hopelessly bad and gets just one star. Thus I split the difference and shall give it two.
It’s a shame you didn’t learn anything from Hemingway about being concise in your writing. This review is all over the place and comes across as a first draft.
ReplyDeleteI've only just seen your gibe, so forgive the delay.
DeleteYou are obviously a Hemingway fan and are sold on the old fraud's boastful claims. I'm rather with Gore Vidal on Hemingway when he wrote (about the US) 'What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?'
One of the many ironies in Hemingway's life was that he did have a good, journalistic turn of phrase as demonstrated by the - albeit short - pieces feature pieces he wrote for the Toronto Star Weekly and later for the daily Star. But frankly as a novelist and short story writer he was - overall - a non-starter.
Notable, as readable short stories are the two obvious ones, Kilimanjaro and Macomber. Soldier's Home also works, but the list is very short and heavily outweighed by also-rans. The Killers, 'celebrated' as one of his best, his simply Hemingway's attempt at pulp fiction and getting it wrong. Technically it is all over the shop.
If you honestly believe - and I am obliged to assume you do - that To Have And Have not is much more than mediocre shit, we live on different planets. Sun, Farewell, work as rattling along Boy's Own tales, Bell does to a certain extent but there is far, far, far to much dreck in it which ruin what might have worked, And THAT is it.
Whether my writing is crap or not I really don't know, but at least I'm not some narcissistic braggart who sincerely believes he is God's gift to literature.
For more on what an essentially nine-dollar bill 'Papa' was take a look https://hemingway-pfg.blogspot.com/p/the-hemingway-enigma-preface.html