To Have and Have Not - Hemingway Noir

Source: The Hemingway Society

 Usually, when you read Hemingway, it's about World War I or the Spanish Civil War. Or the Lost Generation in France. But Papa was all over the map with his short stories. Yet one novel sticks out to me, having just listened to it on audio. To Have and Have Not, which, ladies and gentlemen, is, as the kids say these days, is noir AF.

Mind you, as a boy, I'd have had my mouth washed out for saying AF. I found that Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner taste. Heady, but with a touch of mellow smoothness. I digress.

The story concerns Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain from Key West operating out of Havana. He gets a brief glimpse of is future when three Cubans try to convince him to take them to America. He declines, and good thing he does. The Cubans are gunned down right after talking to him. Anyway, Harry has a client, a rich man who wants to catch a marlin. He lands one, but it gets away, taking Harry's tackle with him. Harry hands him the bill for three weeks and the lost gear.

The rich man skips out on the bill. Now broke, Harry takes a job for a Chinese man running immigrants from Cuba to America. When it becomes clear he's going to kill the unsuspecting Chinese laborers, Harry takes the job. And the money. And kills the Chinese trafficker, leaving his fleeced charges on a beach in Cuba. 

But this becomes his life. He takes these jobs, running illegals and booze and occasionally getting into scrapes. Before long, he loses his boat and unsuccessfully tries to steal it back from the government. After securing the use of someone else's boat, he loses his forearm. Finally, he loses his life. We're left with Hemingway describing the problems of rich people. Most of them don't make it easy to sympathize wit them. 

But To Have and Have Not is a product of the Depression and an act of middle-class rage. (Hmm...Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) Harry Morgan meets the classic definition of the noir protagonist. When I started writing, someone gave me a shorthand difference between hardboiled and noir. Hardboiled = touch. Noir = screwed. And Harry is very much screwed.

But the difference here is there are no femme fatales. There are gangsters, but their menace is vague, men taking advantage of the poor and not caring who gets hurt. Harry is a fundamentally decent man doing bad things to support his family. Rather than the classic man vs. man (or woman, as is often the case in noir), it's man vs. the machine, as in Rage Against the...Harry Morgan's battle is against a rigged system that punishes him for playing along with the game after playing by the rules proves to be a losing bet. 

Between this and For Whom the Bell Tolls, it represents some of Hemingway's darkest work, short or long.