Abstract
This chapter discusses the origins of the three books included in this 1970 novel, “Bimini,” “Cuba,” and “At Sea,” using Rose Marie Burwell’s The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels and other criticism. The characters of Thomas Hudson, Roger Davis, and Hudson’s three sons are meshed with the residents of the sites and with the crew members of the Crook’s Factory hunts for German submarines in 1943. Themes here are related to Hemingway’s early stories, especially the Michigan fictions as well as Hemingway’s marriages and his writing. Hemingway’s friendship with Colonel Buck Lanham and his World War II experiences are also discussed. Narratively, the relation of David’s fishing to The Garden of Eden is pertinent as is the exploration of the importance of men’s language, of comedy, and of the sea. The deaths of Hudson’s three sons, and of Hudson himself, as more than a thematic display.
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Notes
- 1.
Osterling, Anders. “Award Ceremony Speech,” given at the Swedish Academy, on the occasion of Hemingway’s receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1954.
- 2.
In manuscript “The Killers” begins, “It was very cold that winter and Little Traverse Bay was frozen across from Petosky to Harbor Springs. Nick turned the corner around the cigar store with the wind blowing snow into his eyes.” Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 3.
Hemingway manuscript, “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 4.
Hemingway, “Summer People,” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 1987:497, 503.
- 5.
Hemingway, “Cross-Roads” manuscript, Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 6.
And Hemingway’s reminiscences continued through True at First Light, his “African book,” fueled by those Michigan memories: “It was the smell of Michigan when I was a boy and I wished I could have had a sweet-grass basket to keep it in when we traveled and to have under the mosquito net in the bed at night. The cider tasted like Michigan too and I always remembered the cider mill and the door which was never locked but only fitted with a hasp and wooden pin and the smell of the sacks used in the pressing and later spread to dry and then spread over the deep tubs where the men who came to grind their wagon loads of apples left the mill’s share. Below the dam of the cider mill there was a deep pool where the eddy from the falling water turned out back in under the dam. You could always catch trout if you fished there patiently and whenever I caught one I would kill him and lay him in the big wicker creel that was in the shade and put a layer of fern leaves over him and then go into the cider mill and take the tin cup off the nail on the wall over the tubs and pull up the heavy sacking from one of the tubs and dip out a cup of cider and drink it.”
- 7.
Susan Beegel quotes from a November 23, 1944, letter from Hemingway to Mary: “The streams flooded up to your waist running yellow mud and you can walk in the woods knee deep through dead krauts. Nobody will ever know how many krauts we’ve killed because there’s no way to count them … the kraut counter-attacking, attacking, attacking, attacking, attacking—moving like lemmings in a migration into death.” “The Monster of Cojimar: A Meditation on Hemingway, Sharks, and War,” Hemingway Review 34.2 (Spring 2015):18.
- 8.
Burwell, Postwar Years/Posthumous Novels, 4.
- 9.
Burwell, ibid., 6.
- 10.
Hemingway, Manuscript of “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 11.
Hemingway, Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner’s, 1970:7. (Hereafter cited in text by page).
- 12.
See Susan Beegel, “The Monster of Cojimar” where she comments on the source of this story—told by Gregory rather than Patrick—and discusses as well the translation of Hemingway’s anxiety into his portraits of his sons.
- 13.
Joseph De Falco’s essay, “‘Bimini’ and the Subject of Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream” is one of the rare critiques to find Hudson, with “his dark moods,” less suitable as a father figure than Roger Davis. By casting the “Bimini” section as the key to the entire novel, comparing its characters with Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, this critic faults the protagonist rather than the work. Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda W. Wagner. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1987:313–24.
- 14.
Lisa Tyler, “The Sins of the Fathers,” Edith Wharton Review 36.1 (2020):48–71.
- 15.
The four-chapter excision of the Roger-Helene story comprises “The Strange Country,” published posthumously in 1987. To say that the love-making between the characters is sophomoric and repetitious may be too harsh, but there is virtually no insight into Roger’s character—except his resistence to Helene’s passion. Surely the narrative was intended to be more revealing than it is.
- 16.
Typical of the humor lacing “The Art of the Short Story,” where Hemingway speaks about this particular story, is his musing about this story’s title: “I could have called it Behold I Stand at the Door and Knock or some other stained-glass window title.” (Manuscript, 4, Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library).
- 17.
In contrast, when Roger and Helena make love (in the “Bimini” section that becomes “The Strange Country”), Hemingway writes a scene both adverbial and pyrotechnic: “In the dark he went into the strange country and it was very strange indeed, hard to enter, suddenly perilously difficult, then blindingly, happily, safely, encompassed; free of all doubts, all perils and all dreads, held unholdingly, to hold, to hold increasingly, unholdingly still to hold, taking away all things before, and all to come, bringing the beginning of bright happiness in darkness, closer, closer, closer now closer and even closer, to go on past all belief, longer, finer, further, finer higher and higher to drive toward happiness suddenly, scaldingly achieved.” Complete Short Stories (1987):615.
- 18.
Peters speaks German and is the radio man, so it might be that he is German, but probably he is just an educated person. It seems apparent that only he and Hudson are white.
- 19.
Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, 261.
- 20.
Hemingway, “The Strange Country,” Complete Short Stories (1987):647–48.
- 21.
Hemingway, “The Strange Country,” Complete Short Stories (1987):649. He also enumerates the missing items: “eleven stories, a novel, and poems,” the work of three years.
- 22.
Hemingway, “The Strange Country,” Complete Short Stories (1987):609.
- 23.
Reminiscent of some of the scenes among men in The Sun Also Rises, both Scott Donaldson and Jim Hinkle wrote engagingly about the humorous dialogue in that novel, emphasizing the puns, the sexualized dialogue, the foreign-seeming dialects, and the coding. Men in The Sun Also Rises, for all their competition over Lady Brett, were unified in their postwar hubris, relating to each other with genuine emotion, searching for satisfaction with each other—perhaps even more genuinely than with women characters in the novel. As Hinkle wrote, “Hemingway always claimed to be at least a part-time humorist. He is consistently unsympathetic to those who looked down on him when he himself ‘committed levity.’” “What’s Funny in The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda W. Wagner. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1987:77–92; this p. 78.
- 24.
Debra Moddelmog, “Reconstructing Hemingway’s Identity: Sexual Politics, the Author, and the Multicultural Classroom,” Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998:239–63, this 245, 250.
- 25.
Alex Vernon, “War, Gender, and Ernest Hemingway,” Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009:91–114, this 98.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2021). Islands in the Stream in Retrospect. In: Ernest Hemingway. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86255-8_19
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