To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

First published: 1937

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The mid-1930’s, during the Great Depression

Locale: Florida and the Caribbean

Principal Characters:

• Harry Morgan, the protagonist, the roughneck owner of a charter fishing boat in Florida
• Marie Morgan, his wife, a former prostitute
• Richard Gordon, a successful novelist
• Helen Gordon, his wife
• Albert Tracy, Morgan’s mate
• Eddy, a “rummy” who sometimes works for Morgan

The Novel

Hemingway’s most episodic novel, To Have and Have Not is arguably his one book in which the sum of the parts does not equal the individual fragments. It certainly is his one novel that does not maintain artistic unity. Although filled with vivid writing and peopled with memorable characters, the book is weak as a novel. In fact, Hemingway was on record as saying that it was conceived as separate short stories although eventually published as a novel.

The first chapters of the novel focus on Harry Morgan’s efforts to support himself and his family. His tools for accomplishing this are his fishing boat, his wits, and his strength. He must depend on the rich, whom he often despises, to charter his boat, and then he must deal with their erratic, often destructive natures. He is not an immoral man, but he is willing to make compromises to achieve his principal goal: clothing and feeding his wife and three daughters. This leads him to progress from fishing trips for rich “sportsmen” to smuggling liquor, ferrying illegal immigrants, and, finally, providing a getaway for gangsters. He is one of the “have nots” and sympathizes with the other “have nots,” but he lives off the “haves.” This means that he must be willing, when necessary, to sacrifice other “have nots” such as the Chinese immigrants, whom he is paid to double-cross.

The episodic chapters reveal Harry Morgan driven closer and closer to the edge, forced to rely more and more on animal cunning and strength. Increasingly, the distance between himself and the “haves” is made clear. In fact, it is the rich who destroy Morgan’s options, so that he must go outside the law and eventually become caught in the violence that ends in his death. A rich tourist, Johnson, sneaks away without paying Morgan for the charter of his boat or the loss of his equipment. Then, when Morgan is smuggling whiskey, he is seen and reported by a pompous rich official, losing the boat that is his only source of income.

The rich, however, exist only in the background of the book, until near the end, when Hemingway focuses on the writer Richard Gordon, his wife, and some of their lovers and acquaintances. Hemingway leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind what he thinks of these characters, but they have nothing to do with the story of Harry Morgan and seem to have been dragged in merely so that their corruption would contrast with the animal power and essential honesty of Morgan.

The episodes of the novel propel Harry Morgan with relentless energy from one situation to another, until he is cornered with no hope of escape. He hates dealing with Johnson, the crooked lawyer Bee-lips Simmons, Mr. Sing (who pays him to double-cross his Chinese passengers), and the Cuban thugs. His distaste and scorn for these people is always evident. He may feel superior to his drunk, part-time helper, Eddy, and to Wesley, the black man who assists with bait, but he respects them more as human beings than he does the slimy characters for whom he must work.

When Morgan loses his own boat, he rents his friend Freddy’s boat so that he can take out the four Cubans. The Cubans rob a bank before boarding the boat, and then kill Morgan’s mate, Albert, because he saw them escaping the bank. Morgan has no time to feel regret, or even fear. When Albert’s body is tossed over the side, Morgan manages to kick over the Cubans’ machine gun. Eventually, he also manages to kill the Cubans, but in doing so he is mortally wounded. The boat drifts until finally it is found by the Coast Guard. They are amazed that he was able to kill the four Cuban thugs. These last moments of Harry Morgan are sharply contrasted with chapters exposing the pettiness of Richard Gordon and others like him, the rich and perverse who think that they are moral and socially aware but who actually are totally selfish and oblivious to true human feeling and morality.

The Characters

Harry Morgan is, in many respects, the most existential of Hemingway’s male protagonists. At forty-two, he is a noble savage, battered but unbowed—at least, in the eyes of Helen Gordon, the novelist’s wife. Actually, there is some truth to this view, but, beyond this superficial picture, he is the tough guy made hero, the survivor who is too much of a loner for his own good. He has a wife and children, he has friends and acquaintances, and he has known many women in the past, yet he is so ingrained with the essential aloneness of the human condition that he achieves his truest moments of being when he is battling alone.

Above all, Harry Morgan is a pragmatist, subordinating everything else to survival. The irony is that, in the end, he does not even survive. Yet he does not feel sorry for himself. It almost does not matter that he dies a brutal and painful death. What else could he expect? He has no illusions about the cards dealt by life. He takes what he gets and does the best he can. His mate, Albert, comments: “Since he was a boy, he never had no pity for nobody. But he never had no pity for himself either.” When Morgan dies, he tries to explain to the Coast Guard men, “A man . . . ain’t got no . . . hasn’t got can’t really . . . isn’t any way out.”

The women in this novel are portrayed as either “whores” or “earth mothers.” Although Marie Morgan has in her past been a prostitute, she is pictured as a sympathetic and profound character. Married to Harry Morgan for many years, with three daughters, she has gone to fat, but she is seen as a pure, decent human being, a woman filled with love, who nurtures and takes care of her man. The novel concludes with her Molly Bloom-like interior monologue, as she tries to figure out how she will endure without Harry. She, too, faces the trials in her life with an existential stoicism. Somehow, she tells herself, she will get through the pain, and live through the days. There is no choice.

Contrasting to Marie Morgan is Helen Gordon, who, although beautiful and rich, is seen as a neurotic slut who delights in treating her husband viciously. Although on the surface highly civilized, under this glossy veneer, she has no more morals than the lowest prostitute.

Richard Gordon, the successful novelist who represents the “haves” of the world, was based on Hemingway’s onetime friend John Dos Passos. Gordon is portrayed as a second-rate writer whose success is based on having the currently popular social convictions. He is shown as being blind to the real world, eagerly warping reality to fit his preconceived notions. He is so weak that he is vulnerable to Helen’s taunting, yet he is lionized as a great man by tourists who discover him in the bars where he regularly gets drunk.

Morgan’s mate, Albert Tracy, Albert’s wife with her loose dentures, and poor old Eddy, the rummy who sometimes works for Morgan, are representative of the poor but honest “have nots” of the world. They are sketched somewhat more completely than most of the “haves,” who are hardly more than outlines, but they, too, fall short of the full characterizations that Hemingway usually created in his books. Albert and Eddy merely want to get by, to earn a little cash, and live to see another day. They want so little, but cannot even have that.

Critical Context

During the 1930’s, Hemingway was severely criticized for not demonstrating a social conscience in his writing. Other writers of the time, such as Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and Erskine Caldwell, were highly regarded for their commitment to changing a society that had allowed a worldwide economic depression—with all of the attendant hardship for millions of people—to occur. This novel was meant to be Hemingway’s answer to his critics, as is clear from the title.

The novel, however, is severely off-kilter, with the majority of the book devoted to the “have nots,” and the “haves” (from the point of view of material wealth) represented at any length only at the end. There are several reasons for this lack of balance; a major reason is that at the last minute, before publication, Hemingway was required to make significant deletions because of legal pressures on his publisher. Apparently, his portraits of the corrupt “haves” were all too recognizable.

To Have and Have Not unquestionably possesses a socioeconomic dimension not found in most of Hemingway’s other fiction, although this is not necessarily to the benefit of the work. Generally skilled at describing a social milieu when it serves as the background for his story, Hemingway here becomes laborious in his rather transparent setup of the different social classes, and how they are perceived by the characters.

A minor novel in the Hemingway canon, To Have and Have Not nevertheless was successful in its day. Although it never has been as highly regarded critically as his well-known masterpieces, it has remained popular, serving as the basis for the memorable Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall film of 1945. In the 1940’s, it was considered a forerunner of the “tough guy” school of fiction, but it has come to be seen more as a unique work, reflecting Hemingway’s own personal devils. Uneven though it is, it is a fascinating and vivid achievement wedged between Hemingway’s great works of the 1920’s and the 1940’s.

Bibliography

Benson, Jackson J., ed. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Section 1 covers critical approaches to Hemingway’s most important long fiction; section 2 concentrates on story techniques and themes; section 3 focuses on critical interpretations of the most important stories; section 4 provides an overview of Hemingway criticism; section 5 contains a comprehensive checklist of Hemingway short fiction criticism from 1975 to 1989.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. After an introduction that considers Hemingway in relation to later criticism and to earlier American writers, includes articles by a variety of critics who treat topics such as Hemingway’s style, unifying devices, and visual techniques.

Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. A shrewd, critical look at Hemingway’s life and art, relying somewhat controversially on psychological theory.

Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. A well-informed, sensitive handling of the life and work by a seasoned biographer.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Meyers is especially good at explaining the biographical sources of Hemingway’s fiction.

Reynolds, Michael. The Young Hemingway. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1986. The first volume of a painstaking biography devoted to the evolution of Hemingway’s life and writing. Includes chronology and notes.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. Volume 2. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1989. Includes chronology and maps.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The American Homecoming. Volume 3. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992. Includes chronology, maps, and notes.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The 1930s. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1997. Volume 4 of Reynolds’s biography.