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Published in 1937, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not is that rare example of a novel whose cultural impact far outweighs its critical reputation. Long criticized for its fragmented form, its ham-fisted approach to politics, and its hard-boiled obsession with cojones, this blistering tale of a Florida Straits boat captain named Harry Morgan desperately trying to survive the economic ravages of the Great Depression by running rum and revolutionaries to Havana has fueled tourist industries in Key West and Cuba and has inspired at least three movie adaptations (including a classic cowritten by William Faulkner and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall).In Reading Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, Kirk Curnutt explicates dozens of topics that arise from this controversial novel's dense, tropical swelter of references and allusions. From Cuban politics to multifarious New Deal "alphabet agencies," from rum running to human smuggling to byways, bars, and brothels, Curnutt delves deeply into the plot's rich textural back- drop. Most important, he reminds us what a very different novel To Have and Have Not would have been had Hemingway not undergone a political change of heart while covering the Spanish Civil War and revised a narrative originally feral in its suspicion of partisans and ideologues at odds with the newfound ideals of activism and intervention that Hemingway felt essential to halting the global rise of fascism.More than any study of the only novel Ernest Hemingway set on American soil, this book reads To Have and Have Not in the peculiar juxtaposition of literary innovation and popular appeal that made Hemingway the world's most famous writer. While valorizing Hemingway's artistry, Curnutt never lets readers forget the visceral thrills of what one movie adaptation called "Hemingway-Hot Adventure."

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	09 janvier 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781631012440
Langue	English

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Reading Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not
READING HEMINGWAY SERIES
MARK CIRINO, EDITOR
ROBERT W. LEWIS, FOUNDING EDITOR
Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
H. R. Stoneback
Reading Hemingway’s Men Without Women
Joseph M. Flora
Reading Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees
Mark Cirino
Reading Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not
Kirk Curnutt
Reading Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not
GLOSSARY AND COMMENTARY
Kirk Curnutt
The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO
© 2017 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2016007527
ISBN 978-1-60635-271-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Curnutt, Kirk, 1964- author.
Title: Reading Hemingway’s To have and have not : glossary and commentary / Kirk Curnutt.
Description: Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 2016. | Series: Reading Hemingway | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007527 (print) | LCCN 2016019122 (ebook) | ISBN 9781606352717 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781631012440 (ePub) | ISBN 9781631012457 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961. To have and have not.
Classification: LCC PS3515.E37 T624 2016 (print) | LCC PS3515.E37 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007527
21 20 19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1
This book is for Z AYD M ALIK C URNUTT (b. Feb. 25, 2016) Happiest of travels
“I was all fucked up when I wrote it and threw away about 100,000 words which was better than most of what [I] left in.” —Ernest Hemingway to Lillian Ross on To Have and Have Not , 2 July 1948 ( SL 648)
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments
An Introduction to To Have and Have Not
Abbreviations for the Works of Ernest Hemingway Used in This Book
Series Note
Reading To Have and Have Not
Front Matter
Part One: Harry Morgan (Spring)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two: Harry Morgan (Fall)
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three: Harry Morgan (Winter)
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Appendix A: Manuscripts
Appendix B: A Comparison of the Original Draft of To Have and Have Not and the Published Version
Appendix C: Focalization and Technique: The Narratology of To Have and Have Not
Appendix D: Tense Shifts
Appendix E: Adaptations of To Have and Have Not
Appendix F: Correspondence Regarding the 1938 “Banning” of To Have and Have Not in Detroit, Michigan
Works Cited
Index
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I still remember what a sock to the jaw the passage was.
In the fall of 1991 I was a stereotypically monastic graduate student preparing to embark upon a dissertation on the American short story. One chapter already outlined was to analyze “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927). At the time, this was Ernest Hemingway’s most au courant story, having been plucked from relative obscurity in the late 1980s to become a favorite of classroom anthologies. This had happened because “Hills” not only addressed gender issues, but, unlike previous mainstays such as “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), it sympathized with the female perspective, thereby providing a welcome rebuttal to Hemingway’s reputation for misogyny. Already steeped in the critical history of “Hills”—and perhaps not a little bored with arid stories of expatriate alienation—I decided in the name of completism to familiarize myself with obscurer entries in my cockroach-nibbled copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987). The first neglected piece I flipped to was “One Trip Across” (1934), mainly because the title reminded me of a 1929 F. Scott Fitzgerald story I adored called “One Trip Abroad.” I knew that few Hemingway critics even considered “Trip” a short story, because it subsequently reappeared as the opening section of the 1937 novel To Have and Have Not . On these grounds, a leading scholar named Paul Smith excluded it from his invaluable reference book A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1989), and in those days Paul Smith was my last word on Hemingway stories. I also knew “Trip” had originally appeared in the pages of the high-circulation magazine Cosmopolitan , advertised as a “complete short novel.” Needing a break from contemplating the 150 years separating Washington Irving from Raymond Carver, I actually welcomed the genre confusion. I figured a more obscure, harder-to-categorize Hemingway work would lend me some personal space to articulate my tastes to myself, far from the madding pressure of inherited critical wisdom.
Right away, I knew something was up. This was a very different Hemingway than classics such as “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925) and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933) had accustomed me to. Those stories are somber, quasi-philosophical meditations on the possibilities for design, reason, and control in a world of chaotic despair. By page 3 of “One Trip Across,” gunfire had erupted, and bad guys’ heads were getting blown off. Although a long episode did seem ethically grounded in the same sportsman’s expertise as “River,” the main character, Harry Morgan, was nowhere near as sympathetic as Nick Adams, the Hemingway alter ego whose coming-of-age experiences are traced through several other oft-studied stories. In fact, my initial response was that Morgan was so unlikable I didn’t understand what Hemingway was doing. “One Trip Across” had neither the sensitivity nor the poignancy that I—a sensitive, poignancy-prone young bookworm—found compelling enough in his work to want to study it. Only one word could describe this tale of Cuban smuggling. Several years would pass before I peeked outside the churchly confines of my academic humanism to embrace it:
This was hardboiled Hemingway.
The passage that stopped my reading cold appeared on page 405 of The Complete Short Stories . It occurs when Morgan snaps the neck of the nefarious Mr. Sing, the smuggler who hires him to traffic a dozen Chinese nationals from Cuba to Key West:
I got his arm around behind him and came up on it but I brought it too far because I felt it go. When it went he made a funny little noise and came forward, me holding him throat and all, and bit me on the shoulder. But when I felt the arm go I dropped it. It wasn’t any good to him any more and I took him by the throat with both hands, and brother, that Mr. Sing would flop just like a fish, true, his loose arm flailing, but I got him forward onto his knees and had both thumbs well in behind his talk box and I bent the whole thing back until she cracked. Don’t think you can’t hear it crack, either. ( CSS 405, THHN 53–54)
Something about that “crack” made me close the book. I couldn’t finish the story. Hardly a wallflower, I wasn’t repulsed by the killing so much as I was embarrassed by the flippant, smart-aleck tone. Here was prose that chuckled over its own capacity to depict brutality. This wasn’t the shell-shocked detachment of World War I soldiers in Hemingway’s classic collection In Our Time . As I had been taught, the experience of bloodshed depicted in that 1925 short-story debut so overwhelms the capacity to comprehend death and destruction that protagonists can only witness it with a “spectatorial attitude” (Cowley, Exile’s Return 47). “One Trip Across,” by contrast, exuded sadistic glee in snapping bone. Here, in one image, I believed I had stumbled upon irrevocable proof of what most of us beginning Hemingway scholars fervently wanted to refute: the conventional wisdom that the author was so obsessed with violence that he lost all capacity for nuance and compassion.
The morning after I broke off my reading, I happened to stroll through Louisiana State University’s quad with my dissertation director, and I confessed how hard I blanched at the murder scene. “Oh, yes,” grimaced the estimable J. Gerald Kennedy. “That’s not my Hemingway.” The judgment was good enough for me. I made a point of ignoring “One Trip Across” and any other work that tried to chokehold the reader.
Fast-forward more than a decade. In 2002 the then-president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society, Scott Donaldson, asked my dear friend Gail Sinclair and me to codirect the Eleventh Biennial Hemingway Conference, which the society’s board had voted to hold in Key West. Our first task was to familiarize ourselves with the works Hemingway produced during his years in the legendary island city. Naturally, To Have and Have Not topped that list. During our first scouting trip to the Conch Republic, I confessed to Gail that the prospect didn’t thrill me. When she asked why, I admitted to bailing on “One Trip Across” because of the murder scene. “That’s not my Hemingway,” I declared, pretending the phrase was mine. Gail made a great point: if aficionados steered clear of any Hemingway that didn’t personally appeal to us, we would end up knowing only a skewed portion of the author’s corpus. Perhaps it was the sangria, but I could not deny the logic. For the price of a key-lime pie slice, I bribed Gail into walking over to the (now defunct) Bargain Books on Truman Avenue for an appropriately salt-warped, wind-worn used copy. That night, after a hearty Cuban dinner, I stayed up late in my hotel room and read the novel, straight through.
This time the experience could not have been more different.
As a literary critic long intrigued by reception theory, I believe firmly that the books we read are products of the people we are at the time we read them. In my twenties, I worked overtime as I prepared for my profession to exhibit a high seriousness that was both aesthetic and political. A “good read” for me meant a text that was