Though Hemingway is known for his time in Key West, he only has one novel set there. And it is, honestly, one of my favorites: To Have and Have Not. This also happens to be his only novel set in America. It is fitting that his only novel set in America is a place much on the fringe of American life, a foreign place.
The novel depicts Harry Morgan, a boat captain who takes tourists out for fishing trips. When an American client runs up a large tab and skips town, Harry Morgan is left broke. To feed his family, he agrees to pick up Chinese immigrants in Cuba and bring them to Florida. Morgan ends up killing the man who arranged the transaction and is killed in the end by revolutionaries.
Last February, my boyfriend (referred to as “B.”) and I went to Miami and the Keys. It was my first time to that part of Florida and his first time to Florida at all. I feel nostalgic for that trip right now (as I heard someone say recently, “February is the Monday of months.”). We drove down the Keys from Miami in a silver convertible. Even though I am white as white can be, my skin took on a deep tan that week from constantly being in the sun. When we went back to the winter of Memphis, I honestly couldn’t have felt better, like the sun had healed something in me.
I understood what Hemingway loved so much about Key West when I got there. Now, of course, it is touristy as it can be: men charge for photos with their roosters and purveyors of sunglasses crowd the sidewalks. Hemingway’s house itself had the longest line and was like a theme park (though I took pleasure in looking at his bookshelf spine by spine and taking copious photos of the six-toed cats wandering the property). We decided our view of the sunset from the roof of our building overlooking the Mississippi River was much better than the sunset from the end of the island, but if it weren’t for the crowds and the street performers at the sunset celebration that happens nightly in Key West, the sunsets off the edge of the US would be spectacular. We could only imagine how the sunset looked from the top of the lighthouse we’d climbed up that morning.
However, the islands had an indescribable feeling. I could imagine what it had been like there when there was no one around. The tiny beaches with sticks and rocks in the sand, and the close wooden houses with roosters to wake you at dawn. It feels beach-y and vacation-y and festive but also somehow foreign and close.
To Have and Have Not is probably better known as the movie with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. The screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner and though it isn’t quite close to the novel, is a very good movie (I’m a Lauren Bacall fan). The novel itself didn’t do very well, and Hemingway himself is known to have thought it unsuccessful.
Something about this novel felt more accessible to me than Hemingway’s other novels. Maybe it was his love for Key West that comes through in the whole thing. The plot after all is wrapped up in the place—the “0 Mile” is the closest point to Cuba. When B. and I stood there, we pretended we could see that forbidden island in the distance, a mere 94 miles away. If Cuba wasn’t so close and the world wasn’t in the state it was in the 1930’s, To Have and Have Not would have been naught. Maybe the answer to my love for this book is in this title. It appealed to my romantic sensibilities in my early 20s. It somehow captured what I felt as a young (and slightly dramatic) college student—I’d had but I had not lived. While here Harry Morgan, the book’s protagonist is dodging danger, bringing people illegally from Cuba to the US.
Hemingway also uses the poor residents of the islands (“Conchs”) in the early 20th century as a picture of the American depression. It is also said that the book is heavily influenced by Marxism, which Hemingway was fighting for at the time he was writing this novel in the Spanish Civil War. That side of things never interested me. It was Hemingway-esque complexity of Harry Morgan. His no-nonsense, his ulitmate demise, and to an extent his insider position among the Key West locals.
Touristy crowded vacation spot aside, the Florida Keys are truly lovely. The best way to enjoy To Have and Have Not is on the beach with a Mojito where you can scan the distant waters for Harry Morgan’s boat and any trouble that lies ahead.
