You’ve Got That Right, The Have Not Part-Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

To Have And Have Not, Ernest Hemingway, 1937

Those of us who have been spoon-fed on the film adaptation (and with a screenplay written by William Faulkner) To Have And Have Not starring Humphrey Bogart and a fresh young Lauren Bacall will be somewhat taken aback on reading Ernest Hemingway’s original story. Other than the title and a few names of characters they are two totally different animals. No crusty, no-nonsense, world wary, world weary, everybody looks out for themselves, but in the end unabashedly heroic sea captain Humphrey who succumbs to the charms of Lauren and is lured in by her “you know how whistle, don’t you?” all to the sway of seen it all piano player Hoagie Carmichael” s Am I Blue and How Little We Know. No more Humphrey getting off the dime and aiding the angels in the struggle that was blowing over Europe at the time of World War II as translated into Carib time just because he didn’t like some fat quisling doing Vichy’s dirty work out in the colonies. Or maybe, just maybe he didn’t like that third degree Lauren was put through by that quisling because she was down or her upper. And we will see no more mussing up the bad guys just because he didn’t like the cut of their jibe, and didn’t mind chasing a few windmills if a slender brunette came with it. So mainly we will see no more romantic haze in the night.

The book, conforming more to Hemingway’s interest in how men (and it was mainly men, and first half of the 20^th century manly endeavors liking bull-fighting, soldier fighting, seadog ocean night fighting, hunting men or animals, stuff like that, he was interested in exploring with his pen, centers rather on a small time been around the block sea captain, Harry Morgan, same as in the book, and his struggle, well, his struggle to just make ends meet in 1930s Carib time. And just making ends meet for an uneducated, where is the next buck coming from,non-nonsense guy with limited (and specialized) skills is what drives the bulk of the book. In short, a “to have not” guy. Or better, a guy with cojones (and if you don’t know the word’s meaning or can’t figure it out Google the word and presto you will be in the know).What drives Harry is simply making the next dime to feed the wife and kids, and maybe some time for a drink or seven with the boys down at some gin mill by the docks where a stand-up guy like him could put things on the cuff.

By the way making that next dime legally if possible, but making it. But as the story unfolds old Harry’s life is filled with rough turns and so he is forced, there is no other way to say it, to put himself and his boat at the service of whoever will pay the freight. No reasonable, hell, no unreasonable offer refused out of hand. Bootleggers, drug smugglers, bank robbers and an off-hand revolutionary are in need of his services to either flee Key West or flee some place to get to Key West hi sport of call. And things were going, well, okay until the other shoe dropped on that last voyage, after that last great kiss-off. First a busted deal where he lost his own boat and one arm and then the losing of his small-scale life in another ill-advised caper. Oh yeah, and this story is told, as in the best of Hemingway in that sparse, functional, no-nonsense style that made him a stellar modernist writer in the days when flowery prose was the order of the day in order to sell books. Oh yeah, still see the movie if for no other reason than to see what it was like, in black and white in the 1940s, to see the steamiest sexual foreplay by two people with their clothes on you will ever see.