Wednesday, Oct. 05, 1983
BOOKS
"All Stories End. . ."
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT--Ernest Hemingway--Scribners ($2.50)
In the eyes of the polite world, Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for. Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century, he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles right & left, to knock many a genteel pretence into a sprawling grotesque. Detractors have called him a bullying bravo, have pointed out that smashing spectacles and pushing over a pushover are not brave things to do. As the "lost generation" he named* have grown greyer and more garrulous, so his own invariably disillusioned but Spartan books have begun to seem a little dated; until it began to be bruited that Hemingway was just another case of veteran with arrested development and total recall.
Hemingway himself did little to encourage any other attitude. With The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men Without Women (1927) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), he had found himself in the unique position of being not only a best-seller but also a writer whom first-line critics intensely admired and respected. Younger writers all imitated him. Wielder of a style of unmatched clarity and precision, master of the art of conveying emotions, particularly violent ones, with an effect almost of first-hand experience, he seemed to have established himself as the most powerful direct influence on contemporary literature. After these three books, however, came the slump. Apart from Winner Take Nothing (1933), a volume of short stories, the eight succeeding years saw only two books, both failures. To most readers Death in the Afternoon (1932) was a verbose testimonial to the author's enthusiasm for bullfighting. Green Hills of Africa (1935) was an exhaustive and exhausting account of a month's big-game shooting.
Overlooked, however, was the fact that Hemingway is far from being a run-of-the-mine writer. Disregarded also were certain further clues. Death in the Afternoon contains much information on its author's basic philosophy. "All stories," he remarked there, "end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. . . ."
Death forms the background of Hemingway's tenth and latest book, his only novel with a U. S. background. But readers of previous love & death stories by Hemingway will find in To Have and Have Not a maturity which reflects the more serious turn his personal life has taken in the last year. For the queasy, it should be added that many of the killings (twelve) in To Have and Have Not are perpetrated with much goriness; for the straitlaced, that the book brings to naked print practically all the four-letter words extant, contains scenes in which copulation and masturbation are impressionistically but vividly presented.
The scene of the book is Key West and Cuba. The story is a sort of saga, disconnected and episodic, of one Harry Morgan, burly, surly, hard-natured "conch" (as Key West natives call themselves), whose life has been spent in the single-minded effort to keep himself and his family on the upper fringes of the "have-nots." Owner of a fast motor boat, he charters it to big-game fishermen, also uses it for running contraband.
No picker and chooser of ways and means, he turns a neat trick on a bunch of Chinese by arranging to ferry them over from Cuba to the Keys, accepts their money, then kills their leader and abandons the rest. Then his luck turns bad. A flier at rum-running results in the confiscation of his boat, the loss of an arm. So the way is paved to the last, most desperate venture of all--an attempt to provide a getaway, in a borrowed boat, for a quartet of bank robbers fleeing from a hold-up at Key West. Morgan knows that unless he kills them first the four will most certainly kill him, as soon as his usefulness to them is ended. He kills them, but not before he has received his own death-wound. In the Coast Guard cutter that has picked him up, half-delirious, dying, he tries to voice the dictum that is the book's real motto: "No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody --* chance."
Tall, heavily-built, dark-skinned and square-featured, Hemingway is still a bullfight aficionado (fan), likes also big-game fishing, hunting, plays tennis regularly to keep his weight down. Divorced (1926) from his first wife, he was remarried a year later to Pauline Pfeiffer, then a Paris fashion writer for Vogue, has had by her two sons, Patrick and Gregory Hancock. Since 1930, he has made his home at Key West, living there in a thick-walled, Spanish-built house, its garden somewhat incongruously inhabited by peacocks. His 30-ft. launch El Pilar he uses for casual pleasure jaunts, trips to Cuba (90 miles away)--and fishing. A Roman Catholic, he is also very superstitious: he never travels on Friday, touches wood constantly, is upset if a black cat crosses his path. Writing (in longhand), he works regular hours, revises conscientiously.
Such, at least, was his pleasant routine till a year ago, when the outbreak of the Spanish War touched off a hitherto well-hidden social consciousness, enlisted him violently on the Loyalist side. No longer big-incomed, he managed to raise $40,000 on his personal notes and dispatched the sum to buy ambulances for Madrid, followed soon after to film The Spanish Earth.
Death, as it must to all Hemingway stories, has not yet come to finish Ernest Hemingway's. At 39, in life's prime, he has chosen to be in the midst of death. Madrid, whence last fortnight he cabled a first dispatch to the N. Y. Times, was what he described as quiet; but a shell hit the hotel where he was shaving one morning. Whether his remaining chapters are to reach a further climax, are to be torn off unfinished or peter out in a dull decline, time alone can tell. But no matter what is to happen to Hemingway, U. S. readers last week could reassure themselves that U. S. writers still have a front rank and that he is still in it.
* Gertrude Stein's remark to him ("You are all a lost generation") he used as motto for The Sun Also Rises, whence it took its wide currency.
* Obscenity deleted.
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