To Have And Have Not

To Have and Have Not (1959) – Ernest Hemingway
Penguin Books | ISBN: None
Condition: Fair | Sold by Crappy Old Books

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have, and those who have not. Ernest Hemingway, never a man particularly interested in making life cheerful, decided to write a novel about the consequences of belonging to the second category, particularly when the first category appears to have cornered the market in money, comfort, power and the best seats at the bar.

Welcome to To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s hard-boiled tale of desperation, smuggling, violence and economic injustice, set against the sun-soaked but distinctly unromantic waters separating Florida from Cuba. It’s a world of fishing boats, dubious cargoes, desperate men, wealthy tourists and enough whisky to convince practically everyone that their next terrible decision is actually a splendid idea.

At the centre of proceedings stands Harry Morgan, a tough, resourceful fishing-boat captain from Key West who discovers that honest work doesn’t necessarily pay the bills, particularly when customers fail to pay what they owe. Faced with poverty and the responsibility of supporting his family, Harry turns towards increasingly dangerous activities, including smuggling people and contraband across the Florida Straits. Unfortunately, international criminal enterprise proves rather less straightforward than the average entrepreneurial handbook might suggest.

Hemingway presents a society divided between the comfortably wealthy, whose greatest concern might be the quality of their cocktails, and the working poor, whose immediate concerns include survival, employment and avoiding being shot. His characters inhabit a world where morality is frequently a luxury, respectability is often purchased rather than earned, and the American Dream seems to have developed a serious fault somewhere in the engine room.

Originally published in 1937, the novel combines Hemingway’s famously economical prose with violence, social criticism and the sort of masculine stoicism that generally involves refusing to discuss one’s feelings until something catastrophic happens. Nobody wastes three paragraphs describing their emotional vulnerability when they could be staring grimly across the harbour with a cigarette.

The novel also inspired the celebrated 1944 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, although Hollywood took considerable liberties with Hemingway’s material, presumably deciding that audiences preferred romantic intrigue to an uncompromising examination of Depression-era economic misery.

This 1959 Penguin paperback is offered in Fair condition by Crappy Old Books. The spine is slightly angled and slightly concave, suggesting a long and eventful literary existence. One of the front preliminary leaves has approximately half torn away, although there appears to have been little printed on the missing portion. It is emphatically a reading copy rather than a pristine collector’s specimen, but the book remains an appealing vintage edition of a major twentieth-century novel.

Ideal for Hemingway enthusiasts, collectors of early Penguin paperbacks, or readers who prefer their fiction tough, unsentimental and populated by people whose lives make their own problems seem reassuringly manageable.

A novel about money, poverty, survival and the things desperate people do when respectable society has nothing left to offer them.

Rather appropriately, this copy has clearly had rather more adventure than luxury itself.

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