Have Not

From movie commentaries, I knew that the 1944 film To Have and Have Not bore almost no relation to the 1937 novel of the same title other than featuring a fishing boat owner named Harry Morgan and the prevarication “Ernest Hemingway’s” in the promotional material. The movie is set in Martinique in 1940 when the island was still controlled by Vichy France. Not an adaptation, it is basically Casablanca reset in the French Caribbean though the dynamic between 19-y.o. Lauren Bacall and 44-y.o. Humphrey Bogart is different (on and off film) from that between Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the earlier film – so different that Bogie and Bacall became an item and eventually married. Even that gossipy aspect of the film makes a better story than the novel.

Hemingway is a towering figure in American letters, though the quality of his work varies a lot. (Whose doesn’t, one might fairly ask.) I’ve enjoyed most of his short fiction and a couple of his novels, but struggled to get through others despite his well-crafted sentences. When at long last I picked up To Have and Have Not last week, it was a struggle. Nor was this just my own reaction. After slogging through it, out of curiosity I checked the 1937 review by J. Donald Adams in The New York Times. He writes, “The expertness of the narrative is such that one wishes profoundly it could have been put to better use... Mr. Hemingway's record as a creative writer would be stronger if it had never been published.” Indeed.

Harry Morgan, married with children, is presented as a Have-Not even though he owns a charter fishing boat. In addition to legitimate jobs he smuggles contraband and people between Havana and Key West. He is crude, abusive, obnoxious, and racist, even by 1930s Florida standards. I suppose this is to reinforce his representation as a common man, but if the intent is thereby to make him sympathetic (could that possibly be the intent?) it backfires badly. A rich Have recreational fisherman charters Harry’s boat but cheats him of his fee. This leaves Harry stuck in Cuba without money, so he traffics with criminals and revolutionaries, commits murder to keep an illegal job on track, and undertakes to smuggle Chinese illegal immigrants into the United States. Instead, he bilks the Chinese and strands them on a Cuban beach. Somehow we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when things go bad at the end because he’s a Have-Not. We don’t. (At least I hope most readers don’t.) The Haves in the book are reprehensible, yet Harry behaves far worse than any of them. Further, he doesn’t take responsibility for his actions because of his social position. Hemingway was influenced at the time by the Marxism of his compadres in the Spanish Civil War, but if the intended message was pro-working class it comes across almost backwards.

Recommendation: Be kind to Ernest and skip this book. Opt for A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls instead. Or watch the movie (screenplay by Jules Furthman), which is quite good.