Islands in the Stream
Coyne, John R. Jr.
Isn't it Pretty to Think So? Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway Scribners, $10.00 Critical fops like Christopher Ricks (in the New York Review of Books) had prepared me for a bad book, and...
...It is to say, however, that he knew it was there and wasn't afraid to face it...
...Islands in the Stream brought much of this back to me...
...Even Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway's worst, was far better than what the competition produced...
...Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway Scribners, $10.00 Critical fops like Christopher Ricks (in the New York Review of Books) had prepared me for a bad book, and Hemingway had never written a bad book...
...It's through this winnowing process that one experiences and appreciates the fullness of life...
...Other things: that remarkable ability to describe, so that we know exactly where his house is, what it looks like, how his boat handles...
...It's time to stop...
...But the problem was, of course, how to get there...
...the twenties ended in 1960 Islands set something off in me, something I'd almost forgotten about...
...The list was finally reduced to one item, by far the most important one...
...And thi...
...But there wasn't time, of course, for when he found himself unable to do the work which made his life meaningful, Hemingway shot himself...
...If you're eighteen you may put down as many as fifty items, and you must try them all, for this is what it's all about, working your life down to manageable units after you've tasted everything...
...But it's rather important not to live out a cowardly life...
...And I also wish that his own life hadn't ended quite in the way it did...
...would not have pleased Hemingway...
...the ability, shared by no other contemporary writer, to record sensory impressions-how it feels to land a perfect six-inch punch, how a good cold drink on a hot day tastes: "Thomas Hudson took a sip of the ice-cold drink that tasted of the fresh green lime juice mixed with the tasteler coconut water that was still so much ir full-bodied than any charged water, str with the real Gordon's gin that mat alive to his tongue....and all of it taut by the bitters that gave it color...
...Pleasure is valuable when you work well...
...He could no longer work, pleasure was no longer possible, and had he hung on much longer he would have become a vegetable...
...Each novel is a tangible example of all those intangible but real values he represented...
...Islands in the Stream is a first-rate piece of writing...
...And one in which, once the necessary interrelationships are no longer possible, no first-rate literature will be produced...
...It was a hard lesson for many of us to learn, the crucial difference between celebration and dissipation...
...Some of us still too easily forget that without meaningful work, only the latter is possible...
...Sure, he drank like a fish and womanized...
...This does not mean that certain periods are too complex to give rise to literature...
...The relationship is an intricate one in which art-and in this case specifically literature-both shapes and reflects your values and life style...
...Jordan had had his money's worth and he was happy...
...Yet somewhere, I suppose, Hemingway is getting a big chuckle out of the whole idea, thinking perhaps, of the last line of The Sun Also Rises, the best last line in American literature: "Isn't it pretty to think so...
...How alien an idea today...
...He knew what life was about...
...His time had come and he was cheated out of the kind of death he deserved...
...You begin, perhaps, by making a list of those things which are most important in life...
...Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms is the stronger of the two lovers, and although Maria is not well-done in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Pilar is one of the great figures in literature...
...You begin with a head full of slush, as did, for instance, the characters in The Sun Also Rises, and the process of living, if it is to be a meaningful process, consists of clearing out that slush, narrowing things down...
...The dialogue between Hudson and Honest Lil the whore as they sit drinking in Havana's Floridita Bar, is as good as any of the exchanges between Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes...
...Life is to death as work is to pleasure...
...This is not to suggest that he was, as the dons forever blabble, morbidly preoccupied with death...
...Lady Brett was a bigger and fuller character than any of the others in The Sun Also Rises...
...Frances Clyne, Robert Cohn's mistress, was a bitch, but only because she found herself stuck with an imitation man...
...The women in Hemingway's novels are judged only by how well they meet the few important standards...
...But he had earned the right to do so, and his jnderstanding of the dignity of work allowed him to understand the joy of play...
...As my suffragette wife points out, Kate Millett and her militant sisters steer clear of Hemingway, for in no sense (though he is perhaps the most masculine of our writers) could he be thought of as a male chauvinist...
...But the conversations in Bimini between Hudson and his friend Roger Davis even top the wisecrackingly profound dialogue from the trout-fishing interlude in The Sun Also Rises-a dialogue I've always regarded as the single best piece of writing in American literature...
...That whole business would have been about thirty-fifth on the list, crossed off long ago...
...Running through this scene, as well as many of the others, is something we've never seen before-Hemingway making fun of himself and of the exaggerated self-image he created, that neanderthal-man image sketched out by Lillian Ross in her New Yorker hatchet-job profile...
...This, of course, is what accounts for great literature and great societies, and the minute you hear a gaggle of academic critics begin to say something like the novel is dead, you can bet that your society has become a fractured one...
...Some of the other things-taste and sense, honesty and courage-were the only standards Hemingway ever demanded...
...John R. Coyne Jr...
...Period...
...The twenties, my friend explained, ended in 1960...
...Thomas Hudson-and Hemingway-had made the full trip...
...But every so often, a generation has the good fortune to live in a period when things fit together, when literature, for instance, is intimately bound up with life...
...It's hard to try to explain why writers like Hemingway were so important during that period, for similar relationships don't exist today...
...The traveller picked up Hemingway and drove him back in time to Africa, where he dies on Kilimanjaro...
...It simply means that in certain periods people become so caught up in the transient topical concerns of the day that they lose sight of the essentials, confuse the trivial with the significant...
...ingway never fails to make me thu remember once reading The Sun Rises and trying to match the charact drink for drink...
...Hudson lays dying at the end of At Sea, shot up in ambush...
...Otherwise, it's a rather tasteless cosmic joke...
...It would be nice to be like what they think," reflects Hudson, a sensitive man understanding the satisfaction and ease of those who are not very sensitive...
...I've said only part of it...
...In the best short story Ray Bradbury ever wrote, he had a character in a time machine disguised as a Land Rover drive to Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway shot himself...
...The perfect chance came in that plane crash in Africa...
...Each novel shows a mature Hemingway doing the things he does best better than he ever did them before...
...If anything characterized Hemingway's life (and the life of his best characters) it was a sense of fierce joyousness...
...Hudson knows that the single most important thing in life is to do something and do it well and take pride in it...
...And the whole pattern is repeated in Islands in the Stream...
...We weren't products of the fifties...
...And he demanded them of women just as much as men...
...and Robert Jordan, the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls, having done the job expected to him, volunteers at the end ot tne novel to die...
...I wish, of course, that he had been around to revise the novel, to make it as perfect as he would have been able to...
...Eddy cooks well and takes pride in it, just as Hudson paints well and takes pride in it (and, of course, just as Hemingway wrote well and took pride in it...
...death is meaningful only when you live well...
...And he was right...
...Andso he accepted the challenge, won, and was rewarded with the right kind of death...
...Hemingway somehow survived, but he probably shouldn't have...
...But there's already too much flapdoodle abroad about men vs women...
...He could have avoided it all, I suppose, lived a few more years, and then died of lung cancer...
...It would have been right...
...Jake Barnes' list was a long one...
...I feel that way nr Forgive my typewriter if it begins stagger...
...There's a terrific fight scene (Christopher Ricks choked on it-it was so violent) in which Davis, throwing perfect economical punches, demolishes a drunken boor of a tourist, and an hilarious scene set in Mr...
...Islands in the Stream is flawed, course, for it is unfinished...
...I admire the courage it took to commit suicide and I think it was proper...
...How can anyone think that you can neglect and despise, or have contempt for craftsmanship...There is no substitute for it, Thomas Hudson thought...
...In such periods great literature is not possible, for great literature is about values, and in times such as the one we live in now, people cannot remember what values are...
...It is this winnowing down process which forms the pattern for the body of Hemingway's works...
...And as novelist Robie Macauley wrote in the best review of the novel: "How much better than a monument it is to publish, nine years after your death, a book much finer than any of the young contenders can write...
...Thomas Hudson did...
...It t as good as a drawing sail feels thought...
...Yet how important, for without work there is no pleasure, "You see," says Thomas Hudson of the cook Eddy, one of the most consistently admirable characters in Islands, "Eddy's happy because he does something well and does it every day...
...I tend to think that had he had time, Hemingway probably would have redone the ending of Bimini and worked the last two novels into one...
...But although Islands is technically flawed, the old talent is there...
...We came out of the twenties and thirties, the last legitimate heirs of the Fitzgerald-Hemingway period...
...Hemingway knew and he taught us...
...In the background, of course, is always a vague awareness of how it should be : "Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing you had it," says Jake Barnes...
...He'dknown the ambush was there, but he felt it necessary to carry out his mission...
...Bobby's bar in which Hudson and Davis outrage a group of yachtsmen by pretending to get the boys drunk...
...Hemingway was concerned with essentials, and especially that last item on the list...
...Frederic Henry, walking out into the rain at the end of A Farewell to Arms, had a much shorter list (and does it strike anyone as significant that Love Story, a sort of classic-comics version of Farewell to Arms, has so surprisingly caught on among the urchins of this generation...
...Work and pleasure, life and death, related in the same way...
...It wasn't a satisfactory job, and I didn'tknowwhy, until very recently, whena friend in Washington, an alumnus of the same period, told me why...
...An he reinforced the lesson by the way in which he practiced his art...
...Islands is actually a trilogy consisting of three loosely related novels-Bimini, Cuba, At Sea-unified by the character of Thomas Hudson, a painter...
...The thing, mention above are instances Hemingway's talent...
...And it's this image, of course, which the more gullible of the boobs-Christopher Ricks, for instance, buy unquestionably...
...But the fops were wrong again...
...It is a hell of a good drink...
...Still, I wish it could have been different...
...Jake and the other characters of The Sun Also Rises never quite made it...
...No writer, American or otherwise, has ever touched Hemingway's ability to write sustained dialogue...
...Then, in your thirties, you make that list again, and this time, if you've learned anything at all, there'll be about a dozen entries...
...In terms of craft manship, there are deficiencies...
...Hemingway taught us something, back in those days when it was still possible to learn from literature...
...Out of all the things you could not have there were some that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good...
...A few months ago I wrote a piece for The Alternative in which I tried to define what it was that set my generation-the one that grew up in the fifties-so far apart from the generation that produced the New Left...
Vol. 4 • May 1971 • No. 6
