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At approximately 200 pages long and driven by dialogue and a memorable protagonist, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not had all of the qualities — relative brevity, a preponderance of dialogue, a strong leading character — to make it a good candidate for conversion to film. On a fishing trip in 1939, director Howard Hawks told Hemingway as much.
"Ernest, you're a damn fool. You need money, you know. You can't do all the things you'd like to do. If I make three dollars in a picture, you get one of them. I can make a picture out of your worst story.""What's my worst story?"
"That god damned bunch of junk called To Have and To Have Not [sic.]."
"You can't make anything out of that."
"Yes I can. You've got the character of Harry Morgan; I think I can give you the wife. All you have to do is make a story about how they met."1
To Have and Have Not, the author’s sixth novel, marked perhaps the only time in Hemingway's career that he chose to follow prevalent literary trends rather than creating his own; in this case, the novel became his only protracted attempt at domestic social commentary, the dominant genre of the 1930s. More importantly for literary history, however, To Have and Have Not offered a preview to arguably Hemingway’s greatest novel. In 1935, after the great Labor Day Hurricane hit Matecumbe Key in Florida, Hemingway viewed the bodies of many drowned veterans and the physical wreckage and remarked, "No man alone now has got a bloody fucking chance." That comment became the coda for To Have and Have Not: "'A man,'" Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. "'One man alone ain't got. No man alone now.'" He stopped. "'No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance.'"2 Three years later, Hemingway expanded on the ending of To Have and Have Not, borrowed the "No man is an island" line from John Donne, and created the overarching theme for his 1940 masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls.3
To Have and Have Not also holds a dubious place in Hemingway's canon, as it constitutes clearly his worst novel. Indeed, referring to the book as a "novel" is problematic, since it actually consists of two short stories and a novella loosely linked. Originally titled "One Trip Across" and "The Tradesman's Return," the short stories constitute the novel's first two books, but make up only about one-fifth of the book's overall length. Moreover, since they stand on their own and are told in third- and first-person narration, respectively, they awkwardly stand out from the larger, final third of the book.
Literary reviewers came down hard on To Have and Have Not. J. Donald Adams, in his article for The New York Times Book Review, found the novel "[i]n spite of its frequent strength as narrative writing, … distinctly inferior to ‘A Farewell to Arms’"; an anonymous reviewer for The New Statesman and Nation reiterated Sinclair Lewis’s charge that Hemingway’s characters were little more than "Dumb Oxen," writing that, "[l]ong sentences, allusions, analogies, ideas, all that is thoughtful or educated is alien to [To Have and Have Not] … [;] an admirable medium, but … not capable of any enlargement"; Malcolm Cowley regarded it as lacking "unity and sureness of effect"; Bernard De Voto found the novel further proof that Hemingway’s characters lacked consciousness; and Edwin Muir found the "contrast between the haves and have nots unconvincing."4 Most critics also agreed that To Have and Have Not did not hold up as a complete novel, not even within the small Hemingway oeuvre to date.
To add injury to insult, several places banned To Have and Have Not a year after its release. In Detroit, the book was designated as "obscene." As a result, the city removed it from public sale, the public library halted its circulation, and the Wayne County Prosecutor barred its sale after a complaint from Catholic organizations. Likewise, in New York, the borough of Queens forbade its distribution. The American Civil Liberties Union reported To Have and Have Not as the only book suppressed during 1938.5
There was generally positive response, however, to the character of Harry Morgan. Most notable in this regard was Granville Hicks's article for The New Masses. Hicks daringly, and perhaps unwarrantedly, lauded Harry Morgan as superior to Hemingway's previous characters:
He is Hemingway's most completely realized character. He has his prototype, perhaps, in Manuel in "The Undefeated" and Jack in "Fifty Grand," but these are mere sketches. Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry, in the earlier novels, are fully enough developed, but they are too closely identified with the author's unconscious needs to be fully independent individuals.6
Hicks continued to compliment Hemingway in more general terms:
Hemingway displays — as he has been displaying almost from the beginning of his career — an extraordinary mastery of the art of indirect exposition of character. In life our ideas of other persons are inferences based on what they do and say. Hemingway chooses to let us learn about his characters in the same way, and therefore reports, for the most part, only what could be known to the eye and ear. To do this, with the economy he demands, requires a high order of craftsmanship. We know Morgan because of what he says, sometimes because of what he thinks. We know him, too, because we understand the relations of other persons, particularly his wife, with him. All this Hemingway gives us in a few scenes, each of them relatively brief.7
Unlike the majority of literary critics, Hicks thought To Have and Have Not was a great novel. While Hicks may have been lonely on that front, he was not alone in the idea that Hemingway's creation of Harry Morgan and his fiction, in general, showed "an extraordinary mastery of the art of indirect exposition of character." What Hicks wrote in 1937 was exactly what Hawks emphasized two years later in terms of a motion picture. Connected with Hicks's description of Harry Morgan as a strong character was the idea that Morgan was a perfect vehicle for a lead in a motion picture; connected with Hick's praise of Hemingway's basic style was an outline of what filmmakers wanted when they searched for fiction to adapt to the screen.
On that fishing trip in 1939, Hawks told his friend Hemingway straight out that the reason he wanted to make a film out of To Have and Have Not was because it was a novel with a strong central character, Harry Morgan, who could be portrayed by a money-drawing, star actor. Hawks knew whereof he spoke: by 1939, he had already worked with some of Hollywood’s greatest stars, including Gary Cooper, who won an Oscar in the title role of Sergeant York. Moreover, with the earlier film success of A Farewell to Arms (1932) and the recent $7.1 million return for 1943's number two film at the box office, For Whom the Bell Tolls, a film based on a Hemingway novel had outstanding prospects. Hawks realized that, regardless of To Have and Have Not's problems, finding a star to take the part of Harry Morgan would not be difficult.8
Assisting Hawks in transferring To Have and Have Not to the screen was William Faulkner. While it would be fascinating to investigate the nexus of two future Nobel Prize winners for literature, it would also be inaccurate. Faulkner wrote the screenplay for the film version of To Have and Have Not, but his exact contributions to the script are unclear. First of all, Jules Furthman and an enigmatic figure known as "Stuttering Sam" assisted Faulkner in writing the screenplay, and there is no reason to believe that they played any less a role than their soon-to-be more famous cowriter.9 Moreover, Hawks played an extremely important and indecipherable part in the story: he was a director specifically known for imposing his vision onto his screenwriters and his radical on-the-set changes to the story and dialogue. Add to these factors the freedom given to Humphrey Bogart and others in the cast to customize their roles, and Faulkner's influence becomes virtually impossible to discern.
Likewise, comparing and contrasting the entire book versus the entire film of To Have and Have Not is difficult and probably pointless, as the incredible number differences between the two works make such an undertaking unfeasible. Even analyzing the one major link that connects Hemingway's book and Hawks's film, Harry Morgan, is problematic. More reasonable is to outline the most major changes Hawks made when adapting Morgan from paper to celluloid. In this way, a look into the context as well as mindset of Hemingway and Hawks becomes clearer.
NEXT PAGE: Transforming a piece of fiction into a successful movie
NOTES
1. Quoted in Bruce Kawin, "Introduction: No Man Alone," in To Have and Have Not. Wisconsin/Warner Brothers Screenplay Series (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 15-16.
2. Edward Fisher, "What Papa Said." Connecticut Review 8 (No. 2): 16-20.
3. Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996 [originally published, 1937]), 225.
4. J. Donald Adams, "Ernest Hemingway's First Novel in Eight Years," The New York Times Book Review (17 October 1937): 2; "Review of To Have and Have Not," The New Statesman and Nation (16 October 1937): 606; Malcolm Cowley, "Hemingway: Work in Progress," The New Republic (20 October 1937): 305; Bernard DeVoto, "Tiger, Tiger!" Saturday Review of Literature (16 October 1937): 8; Edwin Muir, "Review of To Have and Have Not," Listener (27 October 1937): 925.
5. Anne Lyon Haight, Banned Books: Informal Notes on Some Books Banned for Various Reasons at Various Times and in Various Places. Third Edition. (New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1970), 89-90.
6. Jack Alan Robbins, ed., Granville Hicks in The New Masses (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974): 117. Originally published as: Granville Hicks, "Hemingway's Pirate," The New Masses (26 October 1937): 22-23.
7. Ibid.
8. Joseph McBride, ed., Focus on Howard Hawks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), 164-67; ibid., 44.
9. Bruce F. Kawin, Faulkner and Film (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1977), 174.
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