Hemingway's Coda
Hughes, Catharine
Hemingway's Coda Islands in the Stream,, by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner's. 466 pp. $10. Reviewed by Catharine Hughes "T iterary events" have a way of JLj turning out somewhat less eventful than...
...The action and the reflection seldom interrelate...
...A short time later the boys fly home, where the two younger ones and their mother are killed in an auto accident, at Biarritz...
...In 1952, his plans for the big book underwent another in a series of changes...
...on a Cuban stopover...
...It is an idyllic, at times tempestuous summer, which reaches a moving, enormously powerful climax during young David's six-hour struggle to land a huge swordfish...
...Islands in the Stream is perhaps best described as some of the rest of the big book, the sea section of the "land, sea, and air novel...
...With that, the mood of the remainder of the book has been set...
...Too many of its pages are a reflection of Thomas Hudson's reminder to himself: "Just remember how they were and write them off," and its corollary, "Be glad to have something to do and good people to do it with...
...Reviewed by Catharine Hughes "T iterary events" have a way of JLj turning out somewhat less eventful than their more exuberant heralds anticipate...
...neither lends meaning or resonance to the other...
...But the sum of the book is not equal to its occasionally brilliant parts, to David's superb battle with the great fish, to some of the barroom and other dialogue, or to the erratic tension of the chase...
...What he is doing is done through some sense of Duty, but his heart is not really in it...
...Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream is no exception, yet it does have considerably more than nostalgic interest...
...As they make their relentless way along the Cuban coast, exploring the keys for traces of their prey, Hudson communes with his beleaguered spirit...
...His third son, Tom, has been killed while flying an RAF Spitfire, and Hudson is just back from a wartime patrol aboard his fishing boat...
...Thomas Hudson's three young sons, the products of two marriages which ended in divorce, have come to spend several weeks with him...
...He and his small crew are stalking the surviving members of the crew of a disabled German submarine...
...The scenes of physical action provide its triumphs, and the scenes of introspection provide its pretentiousness and occasional banality...
...But he cannot submerge the pain of his triple loss, not even a few hours later when he finds himself in the arms of his former wife, the woman he still loves, now with the U.S.O...
...Long before his suicide in 1961, there were rumors about Hemingway's "land, sea, and air novel...
...The Bimini section takes place during a summer in the mid-Thirties...
...According to his biographer, Carlos Baker, there were to be three loosely linked novellas entitled The Sea When Young, The Sea When Absent, and The Sea in Be-ing, with a painter named Thomas Hudson as their central figure...
...In 1942, Hemingway used his own yacht, the Pilar, for similar purposes...
...Pursuing the Germans, attempting to inject himself into their minds, he is drawn almost inexorably toward his own death...
...The fourth part, The Old Man and the Sea, was published by itself, won (or helped to win) for him the Nobel Prize...
...In Part III, Hudson has returned to his patrol mission...
...Its three parts—"Bi-mini," "Cuba," and "At Sea"—are uneven (at times agonizingly so), but they contain some of Hemingway's finest, most evocative writing...
...As a rationale for living, they are not enough...
...After a sleepless night in which he is comforted only by his cat, he makes his way to the Floridita bar in Havana and a day of rambling, alcohol-inspired ruminations and conversations with its denizens...
...A fourth part, a sort of coda, was to conclude what Hemingway obviously looked upon as one of his major works, perhaps his magnum opus...
...The result is a fragmentation of the narrative and a diffusion of whatever may have been conceived of as the theme, something closer to three long short stories than to a unified and evolving novel...
...As a novel, it is neither especially good nor especially bad (though it has some extremely bad, self-indulgent moments...
...Either that, or they become pseudo-events...
...Sorrowing and deprived of the only thing in his life, apart from his work, that gives it meaning, Hudson moves on to Cuba in Part II, which is easily the weakest section of the book...
...As the basis for a novel, at least this novel, they are not enough either...
...At times it even threatens to become a very good book...
Vol. 34 • December 1970 • No. 12
