To Have and Have Not

Harry Morgan’s Descent

Harry Morgan is a Key West boat captain who rents his charter to wealthy tourists—the kind of tourists who stiff him for his fee after a three-day fishing trip and leave him stranded in Havana with no way to pay his crew. That moment of being robbed by a client who simply has more power than he does is where Harry’s descent begins. To get back to Key West with enough money to survive, he agrees to transport twelve Chinese immigrants from Cuba to Florida. One job leads to another: rum-running, then something more dangerous still—the transport of a group of Cuban bank robbers fleeing with stolen money.

At each stage Harry Morgan is doing what his code demands: providing for his family, refusing to be broken by circumstances that would break a lesser man. He loses an arm in a shooting. He keeps going. Hemingway’s admiration for this kind of physical and moral toughness is visible throughout, and for long stretches the novel reads like a very good thriller set in the Gulf Stream waters Hemingway knew as well as any living writer.

What the novel cannot quite absorb is its own argument. Harry Morgan’s final words—“a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance”—represent Hemingway’s most explicit political statement and his most direct rejection of the code of individual self-sufficiency that his other heroes embody. The Depression has exposed what war and bullfighting could not: that economic structures are not existential tests, and that no amount of individual courage can substitute for collective action against a system designed to ensure that those without capital stay without it.

The Haves

Hemingway counterpoints Harry Morgan’s story with a series of vignettes set among the wealthy yachts in the Key West harbor—the vacationers insulated from consequence by their inherited or accumulated money. These sections are the novel’s most explicitly satirical, and also its most uneven. Among the yacht-dwellers is a writer named Richard Gordon, widely understood as a self-critical portrait of Hemingway’s own anxieties about what success and money do to a writer: Gordon is producing political fiction that he believes is socially committed but that is actually opportunistic, and his marriage is collapsing under the weight of his self-regard.

The contrast Hemingway is working with is clear: Harry Morgan, who has almost nothing, is fully alive in his body and his moral commitments; the wealthy vacationers, for all their comfort, are doing nothing with their freedom. The women aboard the yachts are particularly sharply drawn—their dissatisfaction with their husbands, their awareness of the gap between the lives they imagined and the ones they are living, the way money has not solved the problems it was supposed to solve.

This counterpoint structure is the novel’s most interesting formal experiment, but it was assembled from three stories Hemingway had published separately, and the joins are visible. The tonal shift between Harry Morgan’s tight-jawed action prose and the satirical yacht-world sections is jarring enough that some readers find the novel fragmentary rather than contrapuntal.

Hemingway’s Least

Hemingway told friends he considered To Have and Have Not his worst novel, and the critical consensus has largely agreed with him while still finding it worth reading. Published in 1937, between A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), it occupies an interesting transitional position: the Depression and the Spanish Civil War are forcing Hemingway toward a more explicitly political view of the world, and this novel is where that pressure first becomes visible in his fiction.

The film adaptation from 1944—directed by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in her screen debut—is a genuine Hollywood classic, but it has almost nothing to do with the novel. The story was transplanted from Key West during Prohibition to Martinique during the Vichy occupation of France, Harry Morgan became a more straightforwardly heroic figure, and the script was co-written by William Faulkner. The film is worth seeing for Bacall alone, but as an adaptation of Hemingway it is essentially a different work.

What the novel offers that the film does not is Hemingway at his most politically uncomfortable: caught between his aesthetic commitment to the individual hero and his Depression-era awareness that individualism is inadequate to collective economic violence. To Have and Have Not is where that tension becomes impossible to ignore, which makes it, for all its unevenness, an essential document in understanding what Hemingway was working through on his way to For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Rating: 3.9/5 — Hemingway’s most politically honest and formally imperfect novel, To Have and Have Not is worth reading as a record of an extraordinary writer straining against the limits of his own code—and as the place where he first arrived, however reluctantly, at the conclusion that a man alone ain’t got no bloody chance.