Reading Hemingway's To Have and Have Not by Curnutt Kirk;

Author:Curnutt, Kirk;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

CHAPTER TWELVE

After a chapter that feels as if the narrative wheels are beginning to spin in place, we are given a shocking and wholly unexpected glimpse into Harry Morgan’s private life. Indeed, chapter 12 includes one of the most controversial and notorious scenes in all of Hemingway, one at once kinkier and more romantic than the sexual perversion William Faulkner exploits in Sanctuary (1931). For all his bluster about cojones, Harry has lost confidence in the bedroom and worries that his amputated arm renders him an inadequate lover. His wife, Marie, reassures him of his manliness by demonstrating the erotic gratification she can derive from his stump. Of course, given the censorship strictures of the 1930s, Hemingway cannot explicitly picture the Morgans’ lovemaking, and the resulting elusiveness of Marie’s mattress talk (“Go ahead. Go ahead now. … Hold it there. Hold it. Hold it now. Hold it” [114:5]) raises legitimate questions about how adept the author was at depicting amorous intimacy. Despite the sensationalism of the scene, an interior monologue from Marie demonstrates that the couple’s relationship is healthy and positive, certainly more so than any other marriage in the novel. The happiness in the Morgan home, even amid the struggles of the Depression, documents for readers what Harry has to lose by serving as the Cubans’ getaway pilot.

112:26 searching for him and then her hand on him: As the subsequent dialogue implies (“Do you want to? … Do you remember when we’d do it asleep?” [112:28, 113:1–2]), Harry’s wife, Marie, is touching his penis. The awkward scene that follows dramatizes a reality that even the staunchest aficionado must sometimes acknowledge: Hemingway’s sex scenes are more often than not embarrassingly bad. In his classic Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Leslie A. Fiedler suggests why via a contrast to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the “laureate” of the petting or necking party:

For Fitzgerald, “love” was essentially yearning and frustration; and there is consequently little consummated genital love in his novels. … Hemingway, on the other hand, is much addicted to describing the sex act. It is the symbolic center of his work: a scene to which he recurs when nostalgically evoking his boyhood as “Up in Michigan”; illustrating the virtues of the sturdy poor as in To Have and Have Not; reflecting on civil strife and heroism as in For Whom the Bell Tolls; or projecting the fantasies of a man facing old age as in Across the River and into the Trees. There are, however, no women in his books! In his earlier fictions, Hemingway’s descriptions of the sexual encounter are brutal, in later ones unintentionally comic; for in no case, can he quite succeed in making his females human, and coitus performed with an animal, a thing, or a wet dream is either horrible or ridiculous. (316)

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