A Tale of Yachts and Yacht-Nots

Hemingway's exploration of macho vulnerability

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. Harry looked at Albert busy cutting baits. The fourth man, the big one, came out of the bank door as he watched, holing 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.

-To Have and To Have Not, Ernest Hemingway (1937)

The above passage launches Chapter 10 of Hemingway’s 1937’s To Have and To Have Not, which is set in the Florida Keys and follows the story of Harry Morgan, a man with an unsteady job and a family to support as the Great Depression looms large. It is a hard-prosed book that punches the reader off the page with sentence-level action and maximally minimalistic characterization. Readers are often left to guess what the protagonist, Harry Morgan, will do next out of a desperation to survive and to support his family that is felt but not voiced beyond broken outbursts and ritualistic drinking.

In Chapter 10, (spoilers ahead), it turns out that Harry made a deal with the murderous bank robbers to get them to Havana after they fled with the money. At the last minute, right before the action, Albert, his friend begs to be involved. He is broke, and desperate. Albert doesn’t know the job until he sees the robbers boarding.

“Wait a minute,” Albert said. “Don’t start her. These are the bank robbers.”

The biggest Cuban turned and swung the Thompson gun and held it on Albert. “Hey, don’t! Don’t!’ Albert said. “Don't!”

The burst was so close to his chest that the bullets whocked like three slaps. Albert slid down on his knees, his eyes wide, his mouth open. He looked like he was still trying to say, “Don’t!”

We are not told how Harry feels about Albert being murdered until later, when he is steering his ship toward Havana, he demands to know why the Cubans killed Albert. The reader is kept guessing as to what he will do, and what he feels, until the end become the means. The characters in To Have and Have Not do not bother thinking about what they feel. They act it. Talking to the Cuban revolutionaries on the way to Havana from Key West, the body of his friend now thrown overboard, Harry strikes up conversation with the youngest bank robber about his dreams for Cuba.

“What kind of revolution do you make now?” he asked.

“We are the one true revolutionary party,” the boy said. “We want to do away with all the old politicians, with all the American imperialism that strangles us, with the tyranny of the army. We want to start clean and give every man a chance. We want to end the slavery of the guajiros, you know, the peasants, and divide the big sugar estates among the people that work them…”

The Cuban revolutionary, apologetic about the death of Albert, continues:

“We just raise money now for the fight. To do that we have to use means that are we would never use. Also we have to use people we would not employ later. But the end is worth the means. They had to do the same thing in Russia. Stalin was a sort of brigand for many years before the revolution… I regret the necessarily for the present phase very much. I hate terrorism. I also feel very badly about the methods for raising the necessary money. But there is no choice.”

In response to this earnest confession, Harry responds about the dictators in Cuba: “I guess they’re plenty bad.” The boy continues about tyranny, about justice and the revolution. “It sounds bad,” Harry says again, with all the noted conviction of someone repeating “That’s crazy” to a talkative Uber driver.

“You cannot realize how bad it is,” the boy said. “I love my poor country and I would do anything, anything to free it from this tyranny we have now. I do things I hate. But I would do things I hate a thousand times more.”

To this, Harry reflects:

“I want a drink, Harry was thinking. What the hell do I care about his revolution. F—- his revolution. To help the working man he robs a bank and kills a fellow works with him and then kills that poor damned Albert that never did any harm. That’s a working man he kills. He never thinks of that. With a family. It’s the Cubans run Cuba. They all double cross each other. They sell each other out. They get what they deserve. The hell with their revelations. All I got to do is to make a living for my family and I can’t do that. Then he tells me about his revolution. The hell with his revolution.

“It must be bad, all right,” he said to the boy.

Harry Morgan gets a gun from the cabin and murders the Cubans aboard the ship, including the boy, but specifically looks for the man who killed Albert.

Harry was trying to locate the big-faced man in the dark. The boat was going in a circle now and the cockpit lightened a little. He held his breath and looked. That must be him where it was a little darker on the floor in the corner. He watched it and it moved a little. That was him…

The man was crawling toward him. No, toward the man who lay half overboard. He was after his gun. Crouching low, Harry watched him move until he was abolsutely 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 staopped, he heard him flopping heavily.

He shoots the man dead. As Hemingway describes vengeance:

All the cold was gone from around his heart now and he had the old hollow, singing feeling and he crouched low down and felt under the square, wood-crated gas tank for another clip to put in the gun. He got the clip, but his hand was cold-drying wet.

But one of the men isn’t dead.

The Cuban who had lain on the pork bunk and had been shot three times through the left shoulder, two shots going into the gas tank, sat up, took careful aim, and shot him in the belly.

What follows is a description of being shot in the stomach written in a way that only Hemingway, a man who survived some two hundred shrapnel wounds in his legs after a mortar exploded in World War I, could describe.

[Harry] could feel the strength drain out of him in a steady faint nausea. He opened his shirt with his good hand and felt the hole in the base of the palm of his hand, then fingered it. There was very little bleeding. All inside, he thought. I better lie down give it a chance to quiet.”

The moon was up now and he could see what was in the cockpit.

Some mess, he thought, some hell of a mess.

Better get down before I fall down, he thought and he lowered himself down to the cockpit floor.

He lay on his side and then, as the boat rolled, the moonlight came in and he could see everything in the cockpit clearly.

It’s crowded, he thought. That’s what it is, it’s crowded.

There is something romantic about this removal, this resignation, that we may dwell on as a hint of Hemingway’s meditation through violence or, broader than that, what he saw as humanity’s meditation through violence: the communion of brutality that begins and ends with ego.

In dying, Harry wonders what his wife and daughters will do. He thinks of how there’s no honest money in boats anymore. The bullet inside him rolls, just like the sea, and takes him away. “I wish this bitch wouldn’t roll,” he thinks of the bullet in his stomach. Leaving him to drift, Hemingway ends the scene:

He lay on his back and tried to breathe steadily. The launch rolled in the Gulf Stream swell and Harry Morgan lay on his back in the cockpit. At first he tried to brace himself against the roll with his good hand. Then he lay quietly and took it.

The have-nots, desperate and dirty and dangerous, become the ocean in their instincts.

In one of the most extraordinary epilogues in any Hemingway novel, Hemingway travels from Harry Morgan to an affair between a professor who gets beaten up by World War I veterans at a bar and then yacht owners who are tossing and turning in their yachts in the same marina where Harry Morgan’s boat will eventually come back to dock, reeking with the death of dead Cuban revolutionaries and the dying man who only wanted to find a living in a world that had left him behind.

Who is in the yachts? Who are the Haves?

Hemingway enters the mind of aged industrialists, captains of industry, now dreading the consequences of their actions.

One of the largest yachts, a handsome, black, barquentine-rigged three-master, a sixty-ear-old grain broker lay awake worrying about the report he had received from his office of the activities of the investigators from the Internal Revenue Bureau. Ordinarily, at this time of night, he would have quieted his worry with Scotch highballs and have reached the state where he felt as tough and regardless of consequences as any of the old brothers of the coast with whom in character and standards of conduct he had, truly, much in common.”

What does Hemingway mean by old brothers of the coast? Pirates. Bootleggers. Smugglers. The wreckers who raided ships as soon as they capsized off the coast of the Keys. The men who made their fortunes off the backs of others, off a dishonesty that became a religion. Describing this capitalist pirate, Hemingway continues:

He lay, now, in his pajamas, on his wide bed, two pillows under his head, the reading light on, but he could not keep his mind on the book, which was an account of a trip to Galapagos.

Galapagos. Is this an allegory for the evolution of man, for what some have and some have not? Hemingway doesn’t elaborate. He chooses to tell the story of the grain broker:

In the old days he had never brought them to his bed. He’d had them in their cabins and he came to this bed afterwards. This was his own stateroom, as private to him as his office. He never wanted a woman in his room. When he wanted one he went to hers, and when he was through he was through, and now that he was through for good his brain had the same clear coldness always that had, in the old days, been moan after effect.

In reaching a state rotten with decay rather than rampant with growth, this passage compares the fall from power as similar to a post-coital clarity that is clear and cold, removed from the anticipation of joy, of desire, of dreams. It is so visceral a description, at once so common and so plain, that one can feel that sense of loss, the tragedy of temporary greatness and the merciless, unthinking, unapologetic fall back to earth… but without the soft comforts of sex itself, that “kindly blurring” that protected man from maker.

And he lay now, with no kindly blurring, denied all that chemical courage that had soothed his mind and warmed his heart for so many years, and wondered what the department had, what they had found and what they would test, what they would accept as normal and what they would insist was evasion; and he was not afraid of them, but only hated them and the power they would use so insolently that all his own, hard, small, tough and lasting insolence, the one permanent thing he had gained that was truly valued, would be drilled through, and, if he were ever made afraid, shattered…

In the old days he would to have worked, but the fighting part of him was tired now, along with the other part, and he was alone in all of this now and he lay on the big, wide, old bed and could neither read nor sleep.

Even legacy, feathered with wealth, is an illusion for our poor grain broker:

His wife had divorced him ten years before after twenty years of keeping up appearances, and he had never missed her nor had he ever loved her. He had started with her money and she had borne him two male children, both of whom, like their mother, were fools. he had treated her well until the money he had made was double her original capital and then he could afford to take no notice of her. After his money had reached that point he had never been annoyed by her sick headaches, by her complaints, or by her plans. He had ignored them.

His success has been in speculation which, read a different way, was simply an illusion, a parlor trick now rationalized:

He had been admirably endowed for as speculative career because he had possessed extraordinary sexual vitality which gave him the confidence to gamble well; common sense, an excellent mathematical brain, a permanent bit controlled skepticism; a skepticism which was as sensitive to impending disaster as an accurate aneroid barometer to atmoshphereice pressure; and a value time sense that kept him from trying to hit tops or bottoms. These, coupled with a lack of morals, an ability to amen people like him without ever liking or trusting them in return, while at the same time convincing them warmly and heartily of his friendship; not a distinterested friendship; but a friendship so interested in their success that it automatically made them accomplices; and an incapacity for either remorse or pity, had carried him to where was now. And where he was now was lying in a pair of striped silk pajamas that covered his shrunken old man’s chest, his bloated little belly, his now useless and disproportionality large equipment that had once been his pride, and his small flabby legs, ring on a bed unable to sleep because he finally had remote.

Where does our grain broker find peace? Only in oblivion, a search for the drink that buoyed his gift across a sea of ignorance that became his horizon:

The hell with what the doctor said. So he rings for one and the steward comes sleepy, and as he drinks it, the speculator is not a sucker now; except for death.

Grain broker and Harry Morgan both die on the waters somewhere between Key West and Havana, staring at the moon. Further pages explore other yacht-dwellers, one-by-one, their paltry conflicts contained aboard their own worlds cold and clear against the perspective of the have-nots but overwhelmingly told, in pages and pages of bludgeoning prose, so that by the end of it readers can’t help but sympathize with Hollywood stars having affairs or Estonian journalists or a family of wealthy perfume makers all bobbing under the same sea just as Harry Morgan’s dying body arrives back to the marina beside them surrounded by dead revolutionaries.

The Poetics of Maturity

On Litverse, I’ve written a lot about the act of reading Ernest Hemingway - especially when it comes to reading him wrong. The persona of any artist can corrupt the work, because persona is often what begets legacy in the first place. Art and artist become necessarily fused at the hip. Fitzgerald, who left us with the far more economical and indisputably perfect novel The Great Gatsby (1925) and a definitively more economical catalog stretching only four novels, often tempts us with an image decidedly less prone to posturing and friendly to tragedy. As Fitzgerald put it in 1936:

I talk with the authority of failure — Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again... He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.

Fitzgerald, with an unparalleled perception of people, is right in his evaluation but saw in Hemingway’s works in the late thirties the power of prose that would bless his career with a second wind. To Have and To Have Not, published in 1937, marks a transition in Hemingway’s career. Rocketed to fame by The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), two staples of high school friendly war literature, Hemingway’s first two books contain his twenties. To Have and to Have Not was published when Hemingway was in his late thirties and became his first published novel in nine years. The deeper end of his catalog, punctuated by 1940’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and 1952’s The Old Man and the Sea, easily overwhelms the history of this mid-career work.

Source: Wikipedia

But there is the treasure of vulnerability in Hemingway’s pre-World War II work. To Have and To Have Not represents a foggy era where Hemingway burst with new sympathies for the leftovers of World War I and socialist causes that, like Orwell, he inhabited in his voyage to cover the losing side of the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

What really clarified Hemingway’s narrative for To Have and To Have Not is not a civil war in a foreign country but 1935’s Labor Day Hurricane, the most violent hurricane to ever touch ground in US history and an event that left some 600 people dead. Who was to blame for these deaths? The government, according to Hemingway.

In “Who Murdered the Vets?: A First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane” a piece published in September 1935 just weeks after the hurricane, Hemingway expresses outrage at distant journalists and careless government programs, specifically the Public Works for Veterans program that had sent hundreds of World War I veterans to work on a road between the Florida Keys and live in camps mostly made of tents that weren’t evacuated even as the hurricane approached.

"Whom did they annoy and to whom was their possible presences a political danger?" Hemingway demands in the article. "Who sent them down to the Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months?"

Elaborating, he writes:

The writer of this article lives a long way from Washington and would not know the answers to those questions. But he does know that wealthy people, yachtsmen, fishermen such as President Hoover and Presidents Roosevelt, do not come to the Florida Keys in hurricane months.... There is a known danger to property. But veterans, especially the bonus-marching variety of veterans, are not property. They are only human beings; unsuccessful human beings, and all they have to lose is their lives. They are doing coolie labor for a top wage of $45 a month and they have been put down on the Florida Keys where they can't make trouble. It is hurricane months, sure, but if anything comes up, you can always evacuate them, can't you?

….

It is not necessary to go into the deaths of the civilians and their families since they were on the Keys of their own free will; They made their living there, had property and knew the hazards involved. But the veterans had been sent there; they had no opportunity to leave, nor any protection against hurricanes; and they never had a chance for their lives. Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans, many of them husky, hard-working and simply out of luck, but many of them close to the border of pathological cases, to live in frame shacks on the Florida Keys in hurricane months?

More than 200 veterans died in the Labor Day Hurricane. Hemingway helped recover the bodies. Few made it home. As one source describes it:

Funeral pyres were erected and wooden coffins, stacked one atop of another, were doused with diesel fuel and set aflame.

Hemingway saw, firsthand, how institutions disposed of people who were no longer useful. In To Have and To Have Not, we see a keen perspective on a working man whose feelings are actions and the parallel of wealthy people living in different worlds on the same sea. The prose mimics the perspective of the instinctual and the intellectual, the justifications of the primal and the abstract, and judges neither. The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1937) comfortably stands as the second pillar of Hemingway’s mid-career era and features another Harry, this time a writer dying of gangrene who is desperate to make meaning out of his ending, to fashion a legacy out of loss as raw as rot, as fast-fading as open wounds.

A source accurately summarizes the story:

[Harry’s] intended regeneration is destroyed by his neglect and carelessness intending to an accidental scratch, which is symbolically parallel to the way he destroyed his talent in the first place. While gangrene eats away at him, Harry takes stock of his life, remembers his past and the neglect of his craft, and bemoans the stories he will never write. He quarrels with Helen, the wealthy wife who tries to comfort and care for him. Although he blames her money for providing the luxury and comfort that have caused him to go soft and neglect his writing, he knows that he is really the one to blame. She is only a convenient scapegoat for his failure; her story as he recounts it portrays her as blameless, in fact praiseworthy, for she has survived personal tragedy and constructed a new life. Harry, on the other hand, has destroyed his talent through overindulgence, sloth, and laziness.

Read together as works of the same period, a reader might bequeath Hemingway a new sensibility and self-awareness beyond the immediacy of his macho legacy and accessorize the persona he strained to project in the crown jewels of the immediate catalog that lives beyond him. In reading To Have and To Have Not and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, readers can recognize the blossoming, blinding vulnerability of an artist as the monoliths of the beliefs that served as the foundations of his younger years crumble and leave him to read the dust in the dissolution like so many distant constellations, to tell stories in the language of the shooting stars that promise so many purities to so many people, and disappear all the same into the future night.

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