To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway

 

This is a strange concoction - a couple of short stories bodged together into a novel with heavy padding for at least a third of it.  And yet it works - works as well as the two major novels I have previously reviewed on this blog, and a sight better than The Old Man and the Sea which I have repeatedly tried and failed to read.

The short stories tell of Harry Morgan, a 'Conch' or societal dropout in Key West, a former rum runner turned arms and people smuggler.  The padding, in an utterly different tone, revolves around the bringing home of Harry's body after his last attempt to raise some cash and the effect this has on the drunken wastrels and society homosexuals who are drawn to spend time in the lawless fleshpots of the Florida Keys.  It is a testament to Hemingway's inimitable style that you keep on reading, no matter how reprehensible Harry's actions, no matter how sordidly the rich folk behave.  Between this and the previous blog post on T C Boyle I started on a well-known modernist classic written perhaps six or seven years before To Have and Have Not, and it was so childish, so full of itself, that I gave up and reached for Hemingway.  That is how good he was and remains. 

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

Published in 1927, A Farewell to Arms was the novel that made Hemingway.  The first-person narration makes it seem autobiographical, but it's not.  Hemingway was not in these battles and he didn't lose the real nurse in the way described here.  There are autobiographical elements, though.  Hemingway was, of course, a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I, he was badly wounded and decorated for it, he did fall for his nurse and - most disturbingly, his real wife was undergoing the traumatic delivery at the time Hemingway wrote the scenes that end the book.

I have listed the autobiographical elements because are the episodes in the novel that hooked me and kept me reading.  Otherwise, the rather antiseptic, offhand affair between Fred and Catherine alienated me.  Having now read the end sequence, I understand why Hemingway took the risk.  The detachment we feel - which he means us to feel - renders the ending all the more harrowing.  The ending makes the novel stupendous and is well worth waiting for.  In the meantime Fred Henry's wartime adventures, the characters he meets, and the brilliant descriptions of landscape keep us just interested enough.

A Farewell to Arms is one of those novels you have an emotional interaction with.  It's like a love affair in itself - frustrating, occasionally captivated, and when it ends, utterly devastating.  A true classic of world literature.