REVIEWED BY TONY BAER:

   

ERNEST HEMINGWAY – To Have and Have Not. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1937. The initial seed for the novel was the short story “One Trip Across,” published in Cosmopolitan, April 1934, and which introduced the character of Harry Morgan. A second portion was published in Esquire, February 1936, as “The Tradesman’s Return.” Reprinted many times. Filmed in 1944, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

   To Have or Have Not remains the best of the tough novels of its decade and perhaps the best yet written in America”—Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (1968).

   Alright. I guess that means I have to read it then, eh? But perhaps, Professor, you can suggest why you think it’s so great?

   â€œThe world Hemingway portrays in To Have or Have Not is…the essential milieu of all tough novels, a society so dominated by crime and injustice that law and order have become viciously hypocritical terms. Only power, money, and indomitable individual action make for survival, and if one must survive at the expense of others, so be it. Consequently…a man must sometimes act as a ‘criminal’ in order to win decency and dignity as a man….His toughness is both necessitated and justified by the social jungle he inhabits.” (Madden).

   Okay. Well, anyway, the book has nothing to do with the movie. Forget you ever saw the movie — it will only confuse you. Yeah there’s a boat. But that’s about where the similarity stops.

   Harry Morgan has a fishing boat that he charters and captains for wealthy tourists in Key West.

   What turns everything to shit is that Harry is approaching the end of tourist season and he’s banking on his current big-city client to get him enough dough to make it to next Spring. But the customer ‘dines and dashes’, leaving Harry in the lurch.

   So he reluctantly agrees to be wheelman (can you be wheelman on a boat?) in a Key West bank robbery for some Cuban revolutionaries. “[H]e heard a noise like a motor backfiring. He looked down the street and saw a man come out of the bank. He had a gun in his hand and he came running. Then he was out of sight. Two more men came out carrying leather briefcases and guns in their hands and ran in the same direction….The fourth man, the big one, came out of the bank door as he watched, holding a Thompson gun in front of him, and as he backed out of the door the siren in the bank rose in a long breath-holding shriek and Harry saw the gun muzzle jump-jump-jump-jump and heard the bop-bop=bop-bop, small and hollow sounding in the wail of the siren.”

   Once Harry gets them headed towards Cuba, however, it becomes obvious the revolutionaries aren’t planning on leaving any witnesses. So Harry has to do what he has to do to survive. “Crouching low, Harry watched him move until he was absolutely sure. Then he gave him a burst. The gun lighted him on hands and knees, and, as the flame and the bot-bot-bot-bot stopped, he heard him flopping heavily.”

   There’s no happy solutions to Harry’s situation, though (unlike Bogie and Bacall). “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance”. The only equalizer is “the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare”.

   It’s a good book. And it’s tough. Is it the best of the tough-guy novels? I dunno. I’m too uneducated to say. But it’s boiled a whole lot harder than the movie.

   Last thing I’ll say is that one thing the great writers do better than the rest is making the setting part of the story. I knew the book was over when I read the final lines even though more pages were left to turn on my Kindle. I knew it was over. Like the final still in a film. The sea and ship were as much a part of the story as the dialogue. But I didn’t know it until I read the final line. And chills crawled across my neck as I read:

   â€œThrough the window you could see the sea looking hard and new and blue in the winter light. A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.”