Papa Watching

Those who forged through last year's biography by Carlos Baker may recall that Ernest Hemingway, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was engaged in writing three loosely linked narratives. Somewhat Delphically, he referred to them as The Sea When Young , The Sea When Absent and The Sea in Being . The first two apparently dealt with a famous painter named Thomas Hudson enjoying a Bahama vacation with his teen-age sons and then, later, hunting German submarines around the Caribbean in his fishing boat during World War II. In his sins, sons, sub chasing and syntax, Thomas Hudson greatly resembled another straight and true artist named Ernest Hemingway.

Hollywood Props
Hemingway later published The Sea in Being separately--as The Old Man and the Sea --and, largely as a result, won a Nobel Prize. But he never released the Thomas Hudson narratives. Now they have been made public by Scribners and Mary Hemingway, admittedly only after long deliberation. The decision may be challenged, for Islands in the Stream is in many ways a stunningly bad book. At his best, Ernest Hemingway the writer knew that Papa Hemingway the public figure was his own worst literary creation. One suspects he would have eventually got round to slashing Islands in the Stream back by a third or a half its present length. Yet for Papa watchers and Hemingway readers the book is welcome enough. Like the recent sale of backlot stage props from old Hollywood films, its publication seems a commendable act of commerce and nostalgic piety.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, called "Bimini," ends when Andrew and David, Hudson's two young sons by an estranged wife, are killed with their mother in a distant automobile wreck. (Patrick and Gregory, Hemingway's two sons by his second wife, were injured in an auto crash in 1947.) In "Bimini," though, Hudson's confrontation with this tragedy is mercifully kept brief. Most of the section is a summer idyl, drenched in martini golds and Gulf Stream blues, centered around the sons and an only slightly too epic fishing trip on what is clearly Hemingway's famous fishing boat, the Pilar .

Honest Lil
Section 2, called "Cuba," is Hemingway at his most expendable--navigating in full anecdotage without benefit of plot. We learn that Tom, Hudson's eldest son by his first wife, has just been killed over Europe in a Spitfire. For one brief, delirious moment of pure fantasy, Tom's grieving mother appears and, after turning out to be none other than Marlene Dietrich, goes briefly to bed with Hudson. Such diversions, alas, are all but drowned in endless talk, mainly in Havana's Floridita Bar, where Hudson, now completely taken over by Papa Hemingway, holds forth to politicians, bartenders, soldiers and sailors and, yes, an elderly, wise, warmhearted prostitute named Honest Lil.

There was a time when Ernest Hemingway's pet name for his kind and enduring last wife, Mary, was "Pickle." Readers emerging from the Floridita Bar may briefly wonder if Mary Hemingway, by publishing the book at all, was subconsciously seeking some sort of subliminal revenge for "Pickle." Such uncharitable thoughts are banished by Section 3. Haunted by grief and premonitions of death, Hudson is at sea at the helm of his fishing boat--now decked out to look like a floating marine research lab in order to lure German subs to close quarters, but actually stuffed with grenades and automatic weaponry.