home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
/
TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
/
1930
/
30have
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1994-02-27
|
3KB
|
73 lines
<text>
<title>
(1930s) To Have And Have Not
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Books
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
To Have and Have Not
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(October 18, 1937)
</p>
<p> In the eyes of the polite world, Ernest Hemingway has much to
answer for. Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century,
he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles
right & left, to knock many a genteel pretense into a sprawling
grotesque. Detractors have called him a bullying bravo, have
pointed out that smashing spectacles and pushing over a pushover
are not brave things to do. As the "lost generation" he named
have grown greyer and more garrulous, so his own invariably
disillusioned but Spartan books have begun to seem a little
dated; until it began to be bruited that Hemingway was just
another case of veteran with arrested development and total
recall.
</p>
<p> Hemingway himself did little to encourage any other attitude.
With The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men Without Women (1927) and
Farewell To Arms (1929), he had found himself, in the unique
position of being not only a best-seller but also a writer whom
first-line critics intensely admired and respected. Younger
writers all imitated him, Wielder of a style of unmatched
clarity and precision, matter of the art of conveying emotions,
particularly violent ones, with an effect almost of first hand
experience, he seemed to have established himself as the most
powerful direct influence on contemporary literature. After
these three books, however, came the slump.
</p>
<p> Death forms the background of Hemingway's tenth and latest
book, his only novel with a U.S. background. But readers of
previous love & death stories by Hemingway will find in To Have
and Have Not a maturity which reflects the more serious turn his
personal life has taken in the last year.
</p>
<p> The scene of the book is Key West and Cuba. The story is a
sort of saga, disconnected and episodic, of one Harry Morgan,
burly, surly, hard-natured "conch" (as Key West natives call
themselves), whose life has been spent in the single-minded
effort to keep himself and his family at least on the upper
fringes of the "have-nots."
</p>
<p> The major part of the book is given over to Morgan's career.
This, with its hard, brisk sea-scenes, its sudden shocks of
death, is uniformly convincing. Interspersed in the chronicle,
however, are snapshot glimpses of life on its various planes
on the Keys; War veterans sent to build the Keys highway,
punch-drunk and turbulent, brawling in one of the bars; writers
from the artists' colony amorously intriguing; rich yachtsmen,
cab-drivers. These candidoes, written too deliberately from the
"slice-of-life" point of view, too fortuitously presented in the
plot, are not always so fortunate. But most readers will agree
that Author Hemingway can rest well content with the knowledge
that in Harry Morgan, hard, ruthless, implacable in his lonely
struggle, he has created by far his most thoroughly consistent,
deeply understandable character.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>