Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway — The Distance That Begins in Cuba
Reading Note: Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway
This reading note discusses the novel in full, including its ending.
In the first part of Islands in the Stream, Thomas Hudson sometimes wakes at night and listens to his three sons breathing. They have disturbed the orderly life he made for himself on Bimini, and he is glad of the disturbance. He already knows how empty the house will feel when they leave. Hemingway gives us that recognition while the boys are still there, before their laughter and quarrels have become things their father can only remember.
I liked this first part more than the rest of the novel. The prose can be beautiful throughout, and the book grows sadder, but my connection to Hudson began to weaken in Cuba and never quite returned during the final pursuit at sea. The later parts are full of feeling. Hudson remembers his sons; other people love him and try to reach him. The question is what changes between our time with the boys and our time inside his grief.
Bimini gives loss a living measure
The house on Bimini is described as solid as a ship. Hudson knows its exposure to storms and the waters around it; he knows where things are kept, when he will work, which meals and books he can look forward to. Those habits have helped him live alone. When his sons visit, the house remains physically the same, but its sounds and demands change. Their belongings scatter through the house; they sleep on cots on the screened porch. Their presence makes his happiness audible while he already anticipates their departure.
Hemingway also gives the boys different ways of occupying their father's attention. David's struggle with a great fish lasts long enough for his strength and pride to become visible in action. Afterward, Hudson asks Eddy, who dived after the fish, what it looked like underwater. He plans to paint it for David, drawing on another man's account of what he could not see himself. The promise joins the painter's skill to a particular child and a particular day.
Andrew's quick remarks, young Tom's familiarity with the adults, David's effort in the fishing chair: each gives the father somebody distinct to notice and gives us time to notice him, too. Hudson sees, uneasily, that his friend Roger Davis understands David better than he does. Love does not give the father perfect knowledge of his children, and the chapter in which he hears them breathing allows him to be happy while he knows they will leave.
Then a radio message reports that David and Andrew have died with their mother in a car accident. The news is delivered with almost brutal economy. Hudson asks about practical arrangements, and the people near him struggle to say anything useful. Even here, Hemingway does not keep us inside an uninterrupted expression of grief. Hudson continues to travel, read and drink; he tests what his mind can bear on successive days. Yet we have already spent many pages beside the boys while they were alive. The message takes its force from that time. We know whose ordinary presence has vanished from the house.
Cuba fills the silence with voices
Years later, during World War II, Cuba opens with Hudson lying on a mat with his cat Boise on his chest. He reads letters, drinks whiskey and speaks to the animal. Boise's purr is silent, so Hudson touches the cat's throat to feel it. He asks, “Do you love me?” The scene is tender: Boise presses against him, and Hudson answers for both of them as he handles the letters. Physical closeness is unmistakable. Their conversation, however, can go only one way.
The purr became more arresting to me after Bimini's sleeping children. There Hudson could listen to the boys and knew they would wake and speak to him. Boise carries one of those relationships into this later house: young Tom had chosen him as a kitten. Early in Cuba, the narration states that the cat has outlived the boy. Tom, too, is gone. Hudson's attachment to Boise includes a shared past that the cat cannot tell back to him.
Cuba then moves among cats, weather, a past affair, paintings, the trip into Havana and talk in bars. Tom's absence belongs to our knowledge throughout this movement. When Ignacio asks after him, Hudson has to say aloud what the narration has already told us. The boy we knew in Bimini has become someone other people inquire about, while his father decides how much he can bear to say.
The crowded bar could have brought him back into the company of people who remember Tom. Ignacio tries to honor the boy with a toast and then talks about his rank and accomplishments. Hudson supplies facts about his son's sports and finally reduces everything wrong to the one fact Ignacio's tribute cannot improve: Tom is dead.
The exchange shows how little a well-meant speech may give a grieving father. It also leaves us listening to a long conversation whose turns keep bringing the pain up and pushing it away. Later Willie challenges Hudson for keeping his grief to himself; Hudson replies, “Grief doesn't split.” Around them the talk goes on.
The bar's noise lets Hudson move from one person to the next without remaining in the moment Ignacio has opened. Hemingway gives these diversions enough time for us to feel their duration. It carries a cost for this reader. Where Bimini allowed affection to accumulate through distinct exchanges with the boys, much of Cuba keeps me beside a man who is working hard to prevent a sustained exchange about what has happened. The writing renders that resistance clearly; the clarity does not always make me feel close to him.
The encounter with Tom's mother, Hudson's first wife, puts a necessary limit on that judgment. Hudson initially conceals the news, and she comes to it by asking him directly. He holds her while she trembles; they recall their son as a child and the life they once shared.
Their old quarrels keep intruding, as if neither knows how to speak about Tom for long without speaking about themselves. This is an intimate and painful scene. It arrives after the bar, their reunion, and his attempt to assure her that Tom is fine. I still missed being with Tom in the present, as we had been in Bimini. The delay has shaped my response even when the conversation finally becomes direct.
At Sea remembers, then returns to work
In the final part, Hudson commands a boat hunting survivors of a German submarine.
The section opens on an empty shore. Hudson studies the missing houses, the entrance through the reef and the position of his boat; he sends men in to discover what happened. The prose follows the work of noticing signs and making decisions under pressure. We have moved from the father's house to a vessel where other lives depend on his attention. Hemingway can make that attention absorbing, and the crew members develop ways of speaking to one another that carry affection along with orders and jokes.
Hudson's losses return in a sustained sequence after a drink. He remembers young Tom asleep with a plover in his arms, the picture he painted of the bird, the boy's fear of another ice age. A glance toward the keys interrupts the recollections, but he deliberately permits himself more. They widen into Paris, bicycle rides, and evenings with Tom's mother, when they could hear their child breathing beside a purring cat. Hemingway gives this remembered life considerable space.
That passage brings me closer to Hudson again. Its tenderness also has a different arrangement from Bimini's exchanges: we hear him giving himself permission to remember, then deciding when to stop. The boy could once surprise the adults by what he said; now his father must summon the words and bear their return.
When Hudson turns back to his waiting crew, the memories have been allowed a real duration. They have not quite restored the earlier feeling of sharing the boy's present.
Once Hudson is wounded, he thinks about the sea he wanted to paint, a future his body may no longer allow, while Willie tries to keep him alive. Willie tells him plainly that he loves him.
Hudson says he thinks he understands; Willie answers, “You never understand anybody that loves you.” The charge reaches back toward the father who loved his boys and could not always know them, and toward the man whose friends have repeatedly tried to enter his grief. It gives the ending a human voice, though it leaves Hudson little time to answer it.
Islands in the Stream was published after Hemingway's death. We cannot simply say how would the version he might have made through further revision look, and that possibility does not tell us what to feel about the pages we have.
On these pages, Bimini lets us live among people before they become memories; Cuba follows his guarded life after another loss; At Sea gives him men to protect and tasks that demand his attention. I hear the love in Willie's last words. I also remember how long ago we last heard the boys breathing without Hudson having to summon them back.
Sources
Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream (Bantam, 1972; first published 1970). Passages discussed: Part I, Bimini; Part II, Cuba; Part III, At Sea.
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