To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway — Deep Reader: A Marriage Misread
Reading Note: To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
This reading note discusses the novel in full, including its ending.
Someone crosses the road looking upset, and we supply the quarrel at home, the affair, the disappointment that would explain the face. Sometimes the explanation becomes convincing before we remember how little we were given. A novelist might be especially good at furnishing the missing circumstances. In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway puts that ability in the hands of a man who mistakes the pleasure of invention for the pleasure of having understood somebody.
I remember the book as a pleasant, comparatively light reading break between heavier encounters with Hemingway, though little of the plot stayed with me. Returning to the episode involving Richard Gordon, a novelist within the novel, we can enjoy watching a persuasive explanation being assembled while knowing enough to question its authority.
A marriage ready for the page
Gordon cycles past a crying, heavy-set woman with bleached hair. At home, he makes her a wife in his novel about a textile strike, imagining her husband's disgust and her sexual indifference. Between the roadside encounter and the writing desk, his questions about an unknown woman acquire the certainty of a biography, although nothing has happened to enlarge his acquaintance with her. He can now explain the private life of somebody he still knows only by sight.
We have had time with the Morgans before Gordon's hurried work begins: Marie cuts her one-armed husband Harry's steak, teases him and expresses her desire for him. With that exchange still available to us, his account encounters resistance in the reader before it encounters any resistance within his own mind. He can proceed confidently while we remember the marriage he has just explained so badly; Hemingway leaves the discrepancy for us to hear, sparing the encounter an accompanying lecture on the novelist's foolishness.
Writing fiction gives Gordon a freedom we should grant him. He can transplant somebody into a different household, change her circumstances and invent a husband for the purposes of his strike novel, with no obligation to preserve the stranger's actual life. The trouble enters when he congratulates himself on having perceived “the whole inner life of that type of woman.” Through the word type, his encounter with one person becomes authority over a category, and the tiny amount of information available can seem sufficient for an enormous claim.
In Gordon's private praise of the chapter, possible excellence becomes asserted truth. He calls it “true” before the novel has supplied any reason to trust the discovery, enjoying a sequence of self-approval whose humor depends on his awarding himself every distinction. A gratifying piece of work conveniently certifies the insight that produced it.
In Wai Chee Dimock's Yale lecture, Gordon's failure is described as a failure to notice the woman's tear-reddened eyes. The passage actually includes those eyes in both the encounter and his material for the chapter. His error survives accurate observation: he takes a visible fact and supplies a cause that suits the marriage he wants to write. This makes the episode more unsettling. Greater descriptive attentiveness alone would leave his certainty intact.
Only in the final sentence does the stranger receive her name: Marie Morgan. We can attach Gordon's invented wife to the woman from the earlier household and hear the disagreement between them. The economy of the sentence rests on that remembered exchange, which makes a second portrait of the couple or an inventory of his mistakes unnecessary. Marie never has to confront the stranger who has explained her; the two accounts meet in us while he remains content with his own.
The time inside the blonde hair
The hair is where the difference between the accounts becomes most interesting. Gordon treats its artificial color as one more sign of a wife's deterioration. Near the end of the novel, after Harry's death, Marie remembers first having it bleached in Havana at twenty-six. Hemingway takes a detail that fitted readily into Gordon's judgment and gives it a duration, during which its meaning is uncertain even to the woman having it done.
With the cotton-tipped stick, the repeated lightening, the drying and the final touch of the finished hair, the afternoon returns through the actions that prolonged Marie's apprehension. Harry's delighted response has to wait until this process is over. Each addition to the sentence postpones a result she cannot yet evaluate, keeping us inside the uncertainty that Gordon's finished classification has eliminated.
Her repeated requests for a lighter shade keep desire and fear close together as she continues an alteration whose consequences she worries about. The color is something she has asked for, endured and tested through touch; she has helped create the woman who comes out of the salon. By the time Harry responds, her excitement has already begun. His desire meets a pleasure she is feeling in herself, and the remembered encounter acquires an intimacy that depends on both of them.
Gordon and Marie assign different histories to the same visible feature. In his account it belongs to a marriage exhausted by bodily change; in her recollection the change has a place within their sexual happiness. As we pass from its finished appearance to the experience of acquiring it, a hair color that seemed readily interpretable requires somebody's remembered afternoon to be understood.
We should keep the difference between memory and a certificate of marital truth. Marie is grieving; her recollection belongs to the life she now needs to recover. The monologue gives us access to what she cherishes, including what Gordon's imagined wife cannot accommodate. It also reveals how much of her present sense of herself depended on Harry's desire. After the salon's exhilaration, the absence of that familiar response becomes painful. The same physical detail can hold the pleasure of an earlier transformation and the insecurity of surviving the person who loved its result.
Between recollections, the thought of what must be done keeps interrupting the remembered closeness. Money and the house require attention, while Marie goes back to the man whose absence has made those tasks necessary. Her instructions to herself keep renewing the attempt to act without producing the emotional readiness for it. That repeated failure makes the monologue convincing: she can formulate the next obligation and still remain unable to inhabit the life it belongs to.
Her repeated “I guess” near the end sounds very different from Gordon's delighted certainty. The phrases circle an experience she is undergoing without settling it. He has finished explaining a marriage after a glimpse; she has lived the marriage and still has to discover how to survive its loss. Hemingway's use of repetition keeps that difference audible. The woman described as a type is allowed to hesitate, repeat herself and remain unfinished in her own understanding.
The intimacy has ugly company. Marie's racism, her indifference toward her daughters and her pleasure in remembering Harry assaulting a Black man remain in the monologue. They make it difficult to turn the correction of Gordon into praise of an exemplary couple. The attachment can be convincing while the people attached to each other are capable of cruelty. Hemingway's access to Marie brings those things into the same consciousness, where her affectionate memory cannot cleanly separate them.
There is a limit here for Hemingway too. Much of the space given to Marie makes Harry's desirability and importance visible. Her remembered life remains strongly organized around him, and the monologue's force does not establish that the novel has represented every dimension of her existence. Yet the salon sequence permits a fear, an excitement and a bodily pleasure with their own unfolding. Within that span, she has enough life to resist the account Gordon can write so efficiently.
The novel gives her a passing judgment of her own. On another journey, Marie sees the bloodied Gordon as an anonymous drunk. She also has a brief sight of a stranger and a ready description, though she makes no claim to his whole inner life. This small exchange of positions keeps the joke on Gordon from installing Marie as an infallible observer. We have followed both lives far enough to know what each passing description leaves out. They continue down the street with far less knowledge of each other than the novel has given us.
Sources
Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not. Faded Page transcription 20220356, from a Scribner edition bearing the 1937 copyright. Passages discussed: chapters 14, 19, 25 and 26.
Wai Chee Dimock, “Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, Part II”, Open Yale Courses, AMST 246, chapter 10, on Richard Gordon's reading of Marie.
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