Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane: Twins of the Sea and the Stars
1. On the 21st of July, 1899, a strong earthquake shook sparsely populated areas of California such that two thousand miles to east the North American Great Lakes Basin heaved upwards of twelve inches. U. S. Weather Bureau meteorologists monitoring the surface of Lake Superior noted “We are not a little surprised at the magnitude of the figures.”
On the day that this geological gasp in atmospheric conditions took place over the Great Lakes, on opposite shores both novelist Ernest Hemingway and poet Hart Crane were born, into the same starchy upper middle-class midwestern culture. Hemingway and Crane were arguably the most important American writers of their generation. To reiterate the observation of the meteorologists, “We are not a little surprised at the magnitude of the figures.”
Yet, despite the virtual simultaneity of their incarnations, no systematic comparative consideration has appeared among biographer of these two great lives-and-works. These two massively studied authorial texts have not yielded up a single examination of their intricate relations as products of literally the same cultural moment. In the numerous hefty studies of each, the name of the other appears barely, or not at all. What forces have separated them?
2. Impossible as it is to flee one’s childhood culture, even harder is it to leave behind the stars of one’s birth. Born on the same day, only 350 miles apart, one in the morning, one in the evening, astrologers take note: they are day and night versions of the same sidereal configurations. It is as if on that day a gigantic atmospheric lens, aperture wide open, shutter speed of 12 hours, appeared over the Great Lakes and momentously focused one day’s planetary imprint, a picture of the geo-solar environment, one day’s half turn of sky, one small arc of moon motion, registered in two soul images, positive and negative, halves wrenched apart, agonistic twins swept into the world’s currents, an experiment of the Muse.
In addition to the atmospheric and geological heaving (if not the cause of it), the planetary layout was an uncommon one that day, all the solar system grouped in one half of the sky, as if to make of the spinning day reciprocal or dangerous, wide-open scoopings of existence.
Crane, the ‘lonely only’ in his small family, uttered certain intuitions:
Infinite consanguinity…star kissing star through wave on wave..
Twin-shadowed halves . . . Born cleft to you, and brother in the half.
O brother-thief of time . . .
They could no more touch each other than can one touch one’s double in a mirror. Subject to a geo-magnetic repulsion, their relationship has never been examined to arrive at a broader illumination. They are anti-matter to each other. Between them an unconscious barrier is erected in the mind. There is no relationship, there can be no relationship, turn away!
3. “Born under the star of Luck,” Grace Crane is supposed to have whispered into her child’s ear. But “Crane’s blighted infancy represents as fated a conjunction of unstable heredity and unsettling environment as any novelist could imagine,” writes critic Helen Vendler. In parallel Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds writes “The genetic union [of Grace Hall and Clarence Hemingway] produced serious problems unto the second generation.”
And herein begins a string of what I will not call mere coincidences: Crane’s parents were also named Grace and Clarence.
Both Grace Hall and Grace Hart were religious and artistic: Throughout the Great Lakes region Halls and Harts made a grimly respectable web of cousinage. The poet Crane wrote that his Grace “made it impossible for me to live in my own country.” She was “cannibalistically possessive and self-righteous”, again according to Vendler, while Hemingway’s hatred of his Grace was unconcealed and unreserved, testified to by many, including his 3rd wife Martha Gellhorn, and the writer John dos Passos. Both men continued to rant drunkenly against their mothers well into their adulthood.
Both Clarences are also chastised by biographers. Crane’s Clarence was a driven industrialist assiduously avoiding his neurotic, suicidal wife and her highly problematic mama’s boy, looking after his far-flung businesses. When he divorced Grace, he left the nine year old Harold in her emotionally unstable care. Hemingway’s Clarence presents as another kind of difficult father, a manic/depressive obstetrician, henpecked by his wife but a martinet to his children, who shot himself when Ernest was twenty-nine.
The two writers grew up simultaneously in stately, porched, wood-frame houses with attics with grandmothers’ trunks filled with grandmother’s clothing, houses on leafy streets of prosperous towns outside two bursting Great Lakes urbanations, Chicago and Cleveland. Much has been related (though, of course, not correlated) of their childhoods. Both boys were impossibly misbehaving but charismatically charming. Young Harold Crane paraded around the neighborhood in his mother’s clothes, for which he was repeatedly punished (“He cried for two days,” she recalled). Maybe he tried to make a sister for himself in the mirror. Compare Hemingway, whose mother forced him for years to dress like his older sister Marcelline, because Grace thought it was cute to have twin daughters. She actually kept Marcelline back a grade, hoping to make the charade last until high school. It was not just Grace Hemingway’s whim to feminize her son. It was her project, against which he firmly rebelled. Crane’s mother, on the other hand, idolized his poetic afflatus, and suggested he change his name from Harold to hers, Hart.
Born July 21, 1899: two alcoholic, suicidal, Midwestern writers, obsessed by the sea, by miasmic undercurrents of gender confusion, two fathers named Clarence, two mothers named Grace. Too much to handle.
4. Excuses are available for the lack of the so obviously called for comparative study of these two important figures. How different they are, one first notes: grisled macho novelist and young gay poet. Crane died at 32, Hemingway at 61. Hemingway’s image had three extra decades in which to impress itself on the public: in the balancing pans of history he seems much the heavier weight. His tremendous popularity extended to Hollywood and magazine covers. Crane’s work, on the other hand is notoriously obscure, and his readership consequently small. The critical and biographical literature on Hemingway outweighs that on Crane by thousands.
But our authoritative canon-maker, the late Harold Bloom, included Hart Crane in his list of the twelve great American writers, overlooking Hemingway. He held Crane a “Pindar, Shelley, and Rimbaud fused into one creative mind”. He writes of Crane’s “idiosyncratic accent, which though disputed, floats almost everywhere.” Elsewhere Bloom remarked that Hemingway’s “difficulties, even for the trained deep reader, indeed are those of authentic poetry rather than prose.” As time passes the valuations of Crane and Hemingway begin to balance out. The amniotic waters of Crane and Hemingway mingle; perhaps Grace Hemingway had reason to think her boy as a twin. Both writers are ‘polarizing’. Crane’s obscurity parallels Hemingway’s submerged iceberg of meaning. Their deepest resemblances are hidden.
That excuse aside, there are two reasons.
The first is the aversion to astrological woo. I think I’ll call it ‘astrophobia’. Astrology is kryptonite to the modern intelligence, a pernicious substance from another planet. Astrology’s historical persistence in the face of its anti-scientific nature opens the psychological sluice gates of modern dread held against Freud’s ‘black tide of occultism’; or as if the fly that Wittgenstein released from the bottle would become a swarm and never leave the room, buzzing ‘What’s your sign, what’s your sign’. Astrology is the nightmare of rationalism, not to mention academic biography.
Crane and Hemingway are so uncannily parallel that putting them together lends attention to a taboo, brushed away habitually by sensible people as a waste of thought, a sometime mildly disturbing triviality, a mote of dust in the eye of reason. The overemphasis on scientific knowledge since the 1600s has browbeaten us into the assumption that our only options are 1) the presumed safety of the scientific view of the universe, in which we try to stabilize both psyche and society, a replacement for religious faith: or 2) a flood-tide of irrationalism, superstition, and nature red in tooth and claw.
However, with the current breakdown of the rigid categories of Enlightenment rationalism, the symbols which gave birth to the human psyche may again be recognizable. It’s my own shameless obsessive interest in astrology that brought me to studying both Crane and Hemingway, neither of whom had been on my front burners until I noticed their shared birth data. “Funny,” I thought, as perhaps do most people who notice the coincidence. “So different; gay poet versus macho novelist, a few similar but typical American writer traits, alcoholism and suicide, but their shelves are far apart.” I noted that July 21 was the last day of zodiacal Cancer, the Crab, the first water sign: Crane drowned in the waters revered by Hemingway, the Straits of Florida, locale of his most satisfying adventures and the triumphant Old Man and the Sea.
I turned to my bibliomantic equipment, The Sabian Symbols in Astrology (M. E. Jones, 1969). The symbol for the day the sun leaves Cancer is “A Muse Weighing Twins.” I see a vast Urania bestriding the Great Lakes. In one hand her compasses touch the vast globe, from the other outstretched arm the balancing pans tumble out two marvelous babes.
This became my pursuit as happiness for several years, assimilating the works of these two great writers, and their copious biographies, whose indices rarely have more than a couple of entries for the name of the other. When I found out that their mothers were both called Grace, and their fathers Clarence I became gripped by the pursuit.
In a recent (June 8 & 15) issue of the New Yorker a previously unpublished and untitled writing of Hemingway’s appeared (as “Pursuit as Happiness”). It shows unmistakable traces of Crane and Hemingway’s submerged relations. I decided that the upcoming shared birthday was my deadline for sharing the principal fruit of my research, which has been to identify the presence of Crane, hitherto unnoticed, in one of Hemingway’s novels.
5. The second reason that Crane and Hemingway are never juxtaposed is gender anxiety. Crane was a flamboyantly gay poet while Hemingway was for half a century a beacon of literary machismo, and reeking of unconcealed homophobia among a basketful of political incorrectnesses: misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, animal-killing and general toxic masculinity. Crane, the young, unabashedly gay rhapsodist of two slim volumes of verse, versus Hemingway the emphatically hirsute, barrel-chested, novelist of war, hunting and fishing: the two frames of reference barely touch.
These are two mighty force-fields with which I come to grips in this writing, and with trepidation, and in the dragging wake of mild post-covid syndrome. Any slight contact between our pair regularly caused breakdowns in Crane. Although the streams of coincidence kept them apart, they finally came close to an actual meeting, as if swirled through waters by fateful fingers, in Havana harbor, precipitating Crane’s climactic tantrum, on April 27, 1932. Their wakes crossed, perhaps literally; Hemingway on board the fishing boat Anita, and Crane on the liner Orizaba stopping midway between Vera Cruz and New York, .
Even though both were obsessed by the sea and suicide, even though Hemingway’s long terrible decline was taking shape just as Crane took his sudden plunge, at 12:04 pm (according to the log of the Orizaba) while Hemingway, a few miles away, was proofing his first disastrous book, Death in the Afternoon which on publication the New Yorker called ‘suicidal’; even though simultaneously with Crane’s drowning a lifelong overwhelming craving to catch a great sea creature in those very waters took hold of Hemingway; even though Crane’s slippered foot was found in the belly of a shark caught under Hemingway’s nose as it were [Key West Citizen May 10, 1934. Crane went under wearing his pjs and slippers]; even though Crane rises (magically eluding the critical confraternity) as a campy wraith in the nightmarish pages of the Key West novel To Have and Have Not; even though Hemingway’s final bitter triumph as a writer came in the tragic and majestic return of the gigantic shark-eaten skeleton of the biggest black swordfish ever seen, taken from those very waters; in spite of all that, none have taken it upon themselves to take this tiger by the tail.
6. The recently discovered Hemingway story that the New Yorker published as “Pursuit of Happiness” might have appeared as one of the hunting, fishing, boxing and drinking potboilers written for Esquire in the 30s, an unused brick in the construction of his virile persona. It begins: “That year we had planned to fish for marlin off the Cuban coast for a month . . . . The thing to have done then would have been to . . . go home. But the big fish had not started to run. . . . and we fished another month.”
In April of 1932 according to Reynolds: “ . . . days turned into weeks, weeks into months. . . For two months Hemingway’s intensity never lessened . . . These Gulf Stream days, pursuing fish as large as his imagination, are the beginning of a new pursuit which will last him the rest of his life.”
Of these days Reynolds writes (with mistaken omniscience), “Chugging back into the harbor that afternoon no one on the Anita noticed that the Orizaba had docked during their absence.” On the contrary the New Yorker’s new story makes a point, in characteristic Hemingwayesque, of noticing the familiar sight of the Orizaba, the large passenger liner regularly running from Vera Cruz to New York and back, which always stopped in Havana harbor. “I looked out the window at the roofs of the old part of town and across at the harbor and watched the Orizaba go out slowly down the harbor with all her lights on. I was tired from working so many fish and I felt like going to bed.”
The Orizaba, memorable poetic death boat, like Shelley’s Ariel, was ferrying Hart Crane from Vera Cruz to New York, stopping in Havana harbor, as Crane was in the process of his final spectacular binge. He was accompanied by Peggy Cowley, wife of critic Malcolm Cowley. Cowley, who knew both Crane and Hemingway, and said they were both Jekyll and Hyde figures. Each of them was noticeably split, like misconceived twins.
On the night of 26/7 April 1932, while the Orizaba was in harbor, refueling and picking up passengers for the run to New York, Crane went ashore to cruise the dockside bars and was beaten up and robbed of his wallet and ring. Returning to the ship in the early hours, disheveled and still raucous, he was summarily locked into his stateroom by the captain. His exact manner of escape is unclear, but his last words are said to have been “I am utterly disgraced.” He leapt to his death into the shark-infested Straits of Florida from the rear railing of the Orizaba, in full view of passengers, just after the eight bells that mark shipboard noon. Others have claimed that he was chased or tossed overboard by outraged and freaked out seamen, and the suicide tale was concocted by the Cowleys. We shall never know; the two versions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
. . . shrill shirt ballooning . . . . .
. . . flung into April’s inmost day . . . .
. . . Atlantis, — hold thy floating singer late!
(to cull a few of his ‘inviolable’ lines.)
“5th day [April 27]… E. H. … slept on boat…” (log of the Anita)
An overactive imagination might see Hemingway hopping off the Anita and over to the nearest dive for a few chilled grapefruit margaritas without sugar (his favorite Havana drink), super-charged with his earliest marlin-fishing events, punching out a flirtatious Hart Crane (imagine even that Crane had recognized the famous novelist) and swaggering back to his gently rocking berth on the Anita. That’s how close they might have come on the day of Crane’s death.
One reason this is not entirely silly is that punching out fairies in bars is a recurrent Hemingway motif. A few years later Hemingway gave the elegant American poet Wallace Stevens a black eye (some say broke his jaw) at an afternoon party in Key West and boasted that he put him to bed for five days. Portraitist and fishing buddy Henry Strater said Hemingway “took a fiendish delight in inflicting injury on them [friends, people, gays?] when they were completely helpless. He bragged to me about the time he had managed to get somebody drunk. His technique was to get them very drunk and then say, ‘You need some fresh air.’ Then he would take them out in the dark and slug them, and go away, making no provision for anybody even lifting them off the pavement. . . . He’d get a bottle of whiskey when he was with an intended victim and pretend to drink from the bottle, but he kept his tongue against the opening so he wasn’t drinking anything.” In other words, in this Key West/ Havana/Gulf Stream period, Hemingway was a recreational fag-basher; gay men were among the exotic fauna he hunted in these rough outposts.
He wrestled in Max Perkins’s office with Max Eastman, who made fun of his exaggerated hairy-chestedness. Key West buddy George Brooks made a game of goading Hemingway into fag-bashing at Sloppy Joe’s Bar. Bullfight buddy Sidney Franklin said “Hemingway overreacted to homosexuals and once when they were together in Spain crossed the road to knock an obvious homosexual to the ground with a punch. He confided to Alec Guinness “ You love what you kill. I wouldn’t kill Noel [Coward] — just dust him up a bit.”
Denis Brian, in “The True Gen: an intimate portrait of Hemingway by those who knew him,” amassed this list of assaults and threats: ‘In 1939 he brawled with a lawyer at New York’s posh Stork Club. . . .[he] knocked magazine publisher Joseph Knapp cold — sending him to the hospital; threatened to beat up Charles Fenton, H. L. Mencken, and Irwin Shaw; taunted William Saroyan and Charles Boyer, among others. . . ‘
7. Even in early childhood Crane seemed disassembled by the presence of the Hemingway vibe, recorded in a history of memorable explosive meltdowns in connection with impalpable Hemingway scentings.
Tracing the fated maternal line, Crane’s mother actually came from the Hemingway hometown of Lake Michigan’s Oak Park IL (population of under 2,000 in 1890), and she eventually returned there. Quite plausibly the two mothers coincided from time to time, though never as dramatically as the sons finally did. Ernest’s mother, Grace Hall, was related to Halls all over the Midwest. Crane grew up in his father’s Cleveland on Lake Erie with Halls for neighbors. It’s downright eerie that young Crane once had a tantrum so spectacular that decades later people remembered its specific trigger: he was scolded and mocked for having dreamily delivered a bouquet of flowers to the wrong Hall household, doubtless some relatives of Ernest’s mother are involved.
When the Crane and Hemingway families moved out of their home orbits to summer within 50 miles of each other at the premiere northern Michigan summer destination, intersecting like Donne’s ‘swift twin compasses’ at the geographical apex of a Great Lakes triangle, three year old Harold had a dramatic fit with the gamut of medical accompaniments: retching, fainting, fever and catatonia, which had all of Mackinac Island’s Grand Hotel overturned for days. Six decades later minor details of the spectacular tantrum were imprinted on the memories of witnesses. Thirty miles south Hemingway will shortly experience the formative intensities of his early tales at Petosky and Indian River.
8. In the strangely violent and repellent 1937 novel To Have and Have Not, gestated and written in the wake of Crane’s death Hemingway imagines how and why he could have roughed Crane up in a bar the night before the poet killed himself .
To make too much of a metaphorical comparison of Crane’s swift plunge and Hemingway’s long decline would be unfair to Hemingway’s continued interest. A few important short stories of his post-Crane years decades, the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls and the novella The Old Man and the Sea, cannot be eradicated from literary history. But of the 1937 To Have and Have Not, Delmore Schwartz wrote: “.. a stupid and foolish book, a disgrace to a good writer, a book which should never have been printed.” So off-putting is much of the material in this novel that it almost forces the effect of reading Hemingway “with one eye closed.”
To Have and Have Not is about smuggling liquor, guns and maniacal Cuban revolutionaries back and forth in fishing boats, in the romantic Straits of Florida which separate Key West and Havana, awkwardly intersecting with the pursuits of vile, rich, promiscuous and heavy-drinking American yachtsmen and their wives; in fact, the crowd that Hemingway hung out with.
The ‘hero’ figure is Harry Morgan, captain of a small fishing boat, a man’s man many times over; the first two chapters appeared as stand-alone stories in Esquire and Cosmopolitan, soon after the publication of Death in the Afternoon, the bullfight book in which Hemingway announced his transformation from disillusioned romantic to international sportsman. Harry Morgan is strong, respected, ruggedly independent, a husband and father forced by hard times into risky undertakings and coldly killing people. Oh, and one-armed.
Even missing an arm (a loss endured with utter sang-froid in Chapter One) he’s considerably better in the sack than, say, the emasculated Jake Barnes, hero of The Sun Also Rises: his wife worships him as a sexual god; she even craves his stump (Terry Southern parodied this in Candy). Her internal monologue about her sexual thralldom to her one-armed husband is one of the peaks of embarrassment in the novel, particularly as an inept challenge to Molly Bloom. His prowess is described by her at length, a somewhat queasy fantasy. Yachtsmen’s bored wives, even lesbians, throw themselves at him.
The last portion of the novel takes place as Harry lies dying in his boat, drifting into Key West along with the bodies of three men and a boy he’s been forced to kill. Amidst this grim scene his ebbing consciousness is interwoven with vignettes of wealthy tourists aboard their anchored yachts, pickled in alcohol, sexual humiliation and despair. Along with Harry’s ebbing consciousness the narrative reins loosen into montage.
The central episode of this nightmarish counterpoint tracks Richard Gordon, a character who barely coincides with Morgan, a sort of double or negative image of our hero. Gordon is a hollow but successful novelist, dissipating in Key West, who has clearly been identified with a literary rival, John Dos Passos. Far from being able to satisfy women unto delirium, his virility has just been decimated successively in back-to-back scenes, overkilled even and without a trace of comedy, by two different women, first his wife, then his mistress. So he hits the Key West drinking holes, so glumly that his first bartender pours three absinthe specials into him; he feels nothing and, against warning, begins to chase them with whiskey. He looks at himself in the bar mirror and considers drinking himself into unconsciousness.
Hemingway is now simultaneously inhabiting the dimmed consciousness of both protagonists, and all this unconsciousness precipitates the apparition of the gay poet Herbert Spellman, our novelist’s avid fan.
“I liked your last book very much . . . I liked them all,” he says, all but batting his eyelashes, a rara avis, a fanciful, daft, inebriated poetaster, who carries a picture of Sylvia Sidney on which to gaze, and says fairy-light things like, “…I’m happy! I’m like a bird. I’m better than a bird. I’m a — ‘ he seemed to hesitate and hunt for a word, then hurried on. ‘I’m a lovely little stork,’ he blurted out and blushed. He looked at Richard Gordon fixedly, his lips working . . . .”
9. Even though we have known (since Jeffrey Meyers’ 1985 biography) that Maxwell Perkins specifically asked Hemingway to remove direct reference to Hart Crane, his sexuality and his suicide, from the manuscript, Hemingway scholar Kirk Curnutt in To Have and Have Not: A Glossary and Commentary (2017, Ohio University Press) writes:
“Herbert Spellman: Given that virtually every character in To Have and Have Not has been identified with a real-life Hemingway friend, enemy, or mere acquaintance, it is curious that this cameo appearance by a Lilac Time habitué has generated absolutely no speculation about his inspiration.” (my emphasis)
Truly Hemingway is read “with one eye closed”!
“Spellman looked at Richard Gordon wildly. “He sneered at a stork,” he said. “He stepped away from a stork. A stork that wheels in circling flight — — -“
“Come on, Harold,” said the big young man.”
“Come on, Harold,” he said. “we’d better be going home.”
The stock poeticism “wheeled in circling flight” mocks Crane’s characteristic trope of poetic soaring, for instance the very second line of The Bridge (“The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him…”), as well as the climactic lines of Crane’s much-quoted swan-song “The Broken Tower”.
— visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, . . .
The crane and the stork, both large birds with long beaks, legs, and necks, are frequently confused. As a substitution for Crane, Stork is both satirical and satyric: the male member has long been represented as winged or a bird and the stork is where babies come from. No wonder Spellman blushed, having identified himself as purely phallic. To mock Spellman’s effeminacy, a few lines down we read “What he say he was? A swan?” The bartender continues, “Other night it was a horse. With wings. Like a horse on a white horse bottle, only with a pair of wings.” Again we are referred to Crane, the conclusion of The Bridge, where Pegasus appears (“Of stars thou art the stitch and stallion glow”) and we are reminded of that Pegasus, already the hackneyed image of poesy, on the cover of every issue of Poetry Magazine, where Hemingway saw a good deal of Crane’s work regularly published.
But most surprising, how did ‘Herbert’ get changed to ‘Harold’? He introduces himself as Herbert Spellman, but his friend (“the big young man”) calls him Harold, twice. Unexplained, or so deeply clever of Hemingway to pull one over even on the proofreader. Harold is of course Hart Crane’s actual first name. Then recall that the hero of To Have and Have Not, at that moment in the narrative tugged in a grim, delirious, maritime cortege into harbor, is one-armed Harry. Harrys with insignias of emasculation proliferate in Hemingway. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a writer named Harry is dying of a gangrened leg. Way back in the In Our Time story ‘Soldier’s Home’, the shell-shocked young veteran, worried about his loss of libido, is named Harold Krebs, German for Cancer. And, piling on the Harrys, when mutual friend and boutique publisher of both Crane and Hemingway Harry Crosby committed suicide in New York in 1929, Harry Hart Crane was closely involved, a fact of which Hemingway was doubtless aware, dining with Crosby’s wife and mother-in-law across town, waiting for the Crosby who never showed up. Moreover, Crosby’s suicide was a double one which revealed him to be a secret sharer in Hemingway’s fetish for twinning and androgyny. Thus Hart (formerly Harold) Crane, as Herbert (to old friends Harold) ‘Little Stork’ Spellman casts his spell over the novel’s terrible finale.
As if to release the aggression which Richard Gordon is too wimpy to exert in one bar, Hemingway has him arbitrarily stumble next into Freddy’s where ‘punchies’ perform a spectacular display of bloody S&M, clobbering each other for the fun of it. “When I hit him just then I felt his jaw go like a bag of marbles,” one of them says “happily. The man lay against the wall and nobody paid any attention to him.” This goes on for twenty pages in which at least that many men are knocked joyously unconscious and lips split amid laughter and joking while a blasé bartender mops up buckets of blood. In ironic counterpoint, the juke-box sings of the notorious gay playground, “The Isle of Capri”, the world-wide hit of 1936.
A few pages on homophobia appears, as the unconscious dying Harry is being towed past the piers, and an omniscient narrator floats through the living quarters of several of the tied-up yachts. The longest of these vignettes arbitrarily offers wholly new characters: a cruelly observed gay couple in the main cabin of the New Exuma II, (“Wallace Johnson, owner, 38 years old, M. A. Harvard, composer, money from silk mills, unmarried, interdit de sejour in Paris . . . with his rather special pleasures”). One of the speakers “postponed his inevitable suicide by a matter of weeks if not months.” We overhear some catty dialogue about “paying blackmail to the busboys and sailors and one thing and another”. This Wallace Johnson seems a conflation of aspects of Virgil Thomson, the Capote-ish, Harvard-educated composer who, after Hemingway fell out with Gertrude Stein, had notability as her collaborator (and instigator) of the two operas, 4 Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All ); and Crane, who was thrown out of Paris for his riotous behavior on just those very French legal terms: “interdit de sejour”, after a severe beating by the police and a week in jail, delicious gossip which directly drew in several of Hemingway’s friends, correspondents and colleagues, the Crosbys, Kay Boyle, e.e. cummings, even Cocteau and Gide.
The intentions of To Have and Have Not have been questioned continually since its publication. Following the similarly perplexing Death in the Afternoon, (killing bulls) and The Green Hills of Africa (killing elephants) it is another murky and anxious episode in Hemingway’s ongoing exploration of the construction of masculinity, gender performativity, and death. What it is not, is the politically conscious, ‘proletarian’ novel that Maxwell Perkins had requested, that Dos Passos was writing. That is the remit of the much abused Richard Gordon character. The effusive Spellman (he’s not even a poet, just a speller) asks him if he’s writing.
“What’s it about?”
“A strike in a textile plant.”
“That’s marvelous,” said Spellman. “You know I’m a sucker for anything on the social conflict.”
“What?”
“I love it,” said Spellman. “I go for it above anything else. You’re absolutely the best of the lot. . .
Richard Gordon edged away a little.”
It couldn’t be more clear that, although the Great Depression impinges on the action of To Have and Have Not, Hemingway has contempt for the so-called ‘Marxist proletarian novel’ he was supposed to be writing. The Cuban revolution in this book is only the pretext for some brutal gore. It necessitates Harry Morgan’s shooting three men (the murderous Roberto and ‘the two Indian-looking ones’) before they kill him.
The fourth body on the floating boat with Morgan is Emilio’s. In sweet young Emilio’s brief appearance Harry manages to look him over appreciatively. First he is ‘the nice-speaking one’, and ‘the pleasant-speaking one’, next he is ‘the boy’ and amidst the tension and danger there is a undercurrent of tenderness, anticipating the tenderness between Santiago and Manolin in The Old Man and the Sea. We learn that unusual among the revolutionaries Emilio is not a brute but a true political idealist, compassionate, doesn’t drink, hates killing.
“You can call me Emilio,” said the boy.
“Go below and you’ll find something to eat,” Harry said. “There’s bread and cornbeef. Make coffee if you want.”
“ . . . The kid is kind of a nice kid . . . . He was a nice-looking boy all right. Pleasant-talking, too.”
Harry shoots Emilio first, in the back of the head, meticulously described. (“Squatting in the engine pit he sighted carefully on the base of the back of the boy’s head where it outlined against the light from the binnacle.”) It is never stated that the boy was armed, and his murder may be absolutely necessary, or gratuitously awful; it’s hard to be sure which. The reader was led to hope that they were going to be friends. No tears are shed, on the contrary, a man does what a man must do, evidently. This is the Hemingway ethic.
Hemingway also murderously commits avian homosexuality to paper in the 1938 Esquire tale “The Butterfly and the Tank,” a story of the Spanish civil war, hardly even a story but rather an anecdote, (told with much heavy-handed pussy-footing about how it’s a story hardly worth telling, but how many people have urged him, against his will, to tell it), of a frail young man who in an access of high spirits uses a “flit gun” to spray people with cologne at Chicote’s (“the best bar in Spain and I think one of the best bars in the world . . . a place sort of like The Stork, without the music and the debutantes”) and is blatantly shot dead then and there by fascist police. “. . . a comic shooting . . . He was gay all right . . . too much like a butterfly. . . . He reminded me more of a dead sparrow.”
The same scenario is mulled over and rearranged at the end of the New Yorker tale, well after the sighting of the Orizaba, where, entirely arbitrary to the preceding marlin-fishing adventure, a brutal armed homosexual fascist officer flirts threateningly with Hemingway’s mate. “ . . But what I didn’t like the most was that policeman saying he liked my face. What the hell kind of face have I got, Cap, that a policeman like that would say he liked it?”)
10. One hesitates to beat a dead horse here, or have I already? Hemingway’s overt homophobia is notorious, from as early as the classic passage in The Sun Also Rises: “I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.” At that sentence, I swept Hemingway off my desk, and never gave him another glance until recently.
By now the figure of Hemingway as Marlboro Man of American literature has been toppled for decades. “Debunking the myth of Hemingway’s monolithic masculinity is the characteristic mode of contemporary Hemingway scholarship.” The fact that Hemingway was every bit as ‘non-normative’ as Crane, a ‘closet everything’ as Truman Capote called him, can now be read as the crux of his famous iceberg theory. The superficial judgment that the two men are somehow fundamentally separated by sexual orientation can cede to the realization that they are brothers in paraphilia. There’s so much to add, about Hemingway’s struggle to express the impermissables of his sexual desires as revealed in the masses of his posthumous papers, strangely shaped into Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden; about the off-limits but hilarious 1934 Torrents of Spring; about the torrents of publications such as Concealments in Hemingway’s Works (Gerry Brenner, 1983), or Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny (Mark Spilka 1990), Hemingway’s Genders (Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes 1994), Hemingway: the postwar years and the posthumous novels (Rose Marie Burwell 1996), Hemingway’s Theater of Masculinity (Thomas Strychacz 2003); anent the wild revelations of the surviving wife Mary; the terrible ordeal of his brilliant manic-depressive transsexual son Gregory/Gloria, who called his father ‘Ernestine’. . . ; the subaqueous intensity of Santiago’s relation to Manolin; and about the poet’s encounter with a drunken, rambling old man of the sea in the ‘Cutty Sark’ section of The Bridge, Crane’s masterpiece, a copy of which Maxwell Perkins sent down to Hemingway, at his request, in Key West back in 1930.
But I gave myself the deadline of the birthday, and so I’m going to cut it off. The mutual horoscopes of Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway are revealing. The Muse Weighing Twins is still a mysterious force. There can be no question that, metaphorically, the gigantic marlin, ‘my brother’, caught in Hemingway’s imagining, in The Old Man and the Sea, reduced to an awesome skeleton by sharks, is Hart Crane.
Copyright Mark Shulgasser 2020
