To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway: book review

To Have and Have Not (1937) is set in Florida's Key West and in Havana, Cuba, in the 1930s.

Harry Morgan is a boat owner – if he loses the boat, he loses his means to make a living. It’s tough making a living, and he is forced to run contraband liquor between America and Cuba. Harry couldn’t tell Freddy the bartender what he was up to, nor could he tell his deckhand Eddy.

One-armed Harry is part of the ‘have nots’ struggling to keep up financially. He serves the needs of the ‘haves’ who are the wealthy yacht owners. The difference between the rich and the poor is starkly contrasted in this brief adventure novel.

Along the east coast, the action is on the water, in the ports and in Freddy’s bar. The characters in Freddy Wallace’s bar are an odd assortment – like the tourists: ‘One was a very tall, thin, wide-shouldered man, in shorts, wearing thick-lensed spectacles, tanned, with a small closely trimmed sandy mustache. The woman with him had her blonde curly hair cut short like a man’s, a bad complexion, and the face and build of a lady wrestler. She wore shorts, too.’

It’s not all high seas drama though. There is a tender love story hidden in the dark.

But, overall, it’s a different time and era, and I prefer Hemingway’s tales of France, Spain, and the green hills of Africa.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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