To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway

I was coming home from Key West Florida and had already finished everything I had taken to read.  In the Key West Airport, I picked up a copy of To Have and Have Not.  I finished half of the novel on the flight home to Birmingham from Key West.  It is a quick and easy read.

I have been a fan of Hemingway for a long time, and I have read many of this more notable works several times.  This is one of the few novels I have not read, having about exhausted what is available of the Hemingway Cannon.   

I enjoyed the novel.  It covered many things you may expect to see in a Hemingway novel; it had women with short bleached blond boyish haircuts, Thompson machine guns, boats, big game fishing, lots of drinking, Absinthe drinks, bar fights, extramarital affairs, suicide, death, homosexuality, and it took place in Key West and Cuba.  About the only two things that did not appear were bull fighting and African big game hunting.   Without reading any of the prose, if one simply had a bullet list of topics covered, anyone who is familiar with Hemingway would guess he wrote this novel right away. 

The plot is quite simple.  The main character is Harry Morgan, a decent man with a wife and daughters who makes a living with his boat running fishing charters.  He runs into bad times and starts running contraband between Cuba and Key West to make ends meet which leads to a tragic end for him.  The plot is not especially interesting or complex; however, what is genius about Hemingway is that he took a simple story line and used it as a way to spin a number of subplots and vignettes on subjects he loves to expound upon.   In one of the later chapters of the novel he describes several families who are on their yachts in the yacht basin where the story comes to an end and creates several vignettes that really have no bearing on the plot of this story at all. 

I have never heard a lot of commentary on this novel as it is not considered one of his masterpieces and it is not as moving or as creative as The Sun Also Rises, or For Whom the Bell Tolls; (it was composed in 1937 between those two novels); however it is an enjoyable read because it has the purity of Hemingway prose and style and is well worth the read.