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Overlooked, however, was the fact that Hemingway is far from being a run-of-the-mine writer, and so not entirely subject to such standards. Disregarded also were certain further clues. Green Hills of Africa, by its very ill-temperedness, hinted that the author, too, was worried. Death in the Afternoon, from one aspect a kind of huge "Anatomy of Death," contains much information on its author's basic philosophy. "All stories," he remarked there, "end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. . . . There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it." This almost Elizabethan idea of death as the ever-present alter ego of life is one of Hemingway's fundamental concepts.
The Book. 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. For the queasy, it should be added that many of the killings (twelve) in To Have and Have Not are perpetrated with much goriness; for the straitlaced, that the book brings to naked print practically all the four-letter words extant, contains scenes in which copulation and masturbation are impressionistically but vividly presented.
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." Owner of a fast motorboat, he charters it to big-game fishermen, also uses it for running contraband. At the book's outset he is seen in a Havana cafe considering and refusing another such shady proposition—this time on the part of three young Cuban revolutionaries, who want him to save their skins by transporting them to the U. S.
The Cubans are shot down by gunmen as they leave the cafe, thus making their comrades suspect that Morgan had betrayed the trio. Morgan returns to his tourist fishing parties, only to have his fishing tackle lost overboard by a tourist, who at cruise-end welches on making the loss good. The tackle cost $360, must be replaced if Morgan is to continue as a party-boatman. The rest of the story relates the more & more dangerous expedients he is driven to.