To Have and Have Not

In his 1930s novel “To Have and Have Not,” Ernest Hemingway narrates the story of Harry Morgan’s death—not his life, for all that is left for Morgan to do is die. Not only through the actual narration, but also with the writing style, Hemingway helps the reader catch a glimpse of Morgan’s life of uncertainty and instability by changing the speaker from time to time, without notice. Once a police officer in Miami, Fla., Morgan later became a fisherman (who also rented his boat out to tourists and taught them how to fish), alternating between Cuba and the Florida Keys.  Morgan’s life is not an easy one; desperate times demand desperate measures, and the 30s sure were desperate times. A Greek philosopher once said that man is born good and society corrupts him—is this Morgan’s case? Is Harry Morgan a victim of the circumstances? Is he a tragic hero?

Harry Morgan lost his arm while bootlegging: he was trying to earn some extra dollars to feed his family with, but American Marshals caught him; to make things worse, his boat got impounded.  This gives the reader a sense of Morgan as a wounded hero—the limitations of his physical body and his possessions express the limitations of his environment.  All these tragedies together do not make a martyr out of Morgan; on the contrary, he is determined to do something to not let his family starve: “But let me tell you, my kids ain’t going to have their bellies hurt and I ain’t going to dig sewers for the government for less money than will feed them. I can’t dig now anyway. I don’t know who made the laws but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry,” (Hemingway, 96).  His determination to get not only himself but also his family out of the current bad situation makes him a hero: He will do whatever he has to do to avoid his family from starving.  However, it all goes bad.

There is not much that Morgan can do—he lost his boat, so he cannot collect money from tourists; he lost an arm, so he can no longer dig for the government; all that is left for him to do is go into illegal businesses: He gets hired by three Cubans who steal a bank, and Morgan’s job is to provide the escape vehicle—a boat.  As they are escaping, things go terribly wrong and all aboard get shot, including Morgan. As he lies dying in the boat, Morgan thinks,

I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had all right up the end. Nobody’ll know what happened. I wish I could do something about Marie: Plenty money on this boat.  I don’t even know how much.  Anybody be O.K. with that money. […] I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go on boats. There’s no honest money in boats any more.  (Hemingway, 174)

As these words echo in the reader’s mind, Morgan is slowly transformed from an evil-doing, revengeful individualist into a caring husband and father (later on in the passage he wonders what will happen to Marie, his wife, and his two daughters), who regrets getting into this dirty business. Whether his regret arises from a sincere remorse for what has happened or because of his pitiful ending is irrelevant—by this time, the reader feels nothing but sympathy and compassion for Morgan, his wife, and kids. As he dies, Harry Morgan becomes a tragic hero.

For Morgan, everything is about the money, or about a job that will bring in money—it all basically boils down to survival. This is certainly a characteristic of male providers during the Great Depression—taking desperate measures during desperate times. David Gagne says that “[Harry Morgan] represents all the characters of the 1930s struggling to continue through hopelessness,” (“Placing Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not in the 1930s”).  Does this relation to the Depression “everyman” compensate for the wrong Morgan did? Does it forgive him? Does the fact that Morgan did all he did to prevent his daughters and wife from starving, or working for the government digging sewers, glorify him?  Is Harry Morgan the ultimate, glorified, tragic wounded hero that was persecuted by censorhip?

 

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. To Have and Have Not. New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1937.

Atkinson, Ted. Law and Order: Gangsters and Fascists.  8 Mar. 2004.  Law and Order: Gangsters and Fascists slide show presentation, 9 Mar. 2004. <http://www.aug.edu/~lngtba/4100/fascism_files/frame.htm&gt;

Poor Land Makes Poor People

A common thought during the Great Depression was that “Poor Land” made “Poor People.”  William Faulkner agrees with this statement in his novel “As I Lay Dying” (1930): The Bundren family each narrate a piece of the story from their own point of view—and it is because of this narrative frame that the reader is able to dive deep into each character’s mind and catch a glimpse of how their poor land has made each of them poor people.

“As I Lay Dying” is the narration of the Bundren family’s journey from New Hope to Jefferson.  They embark on this journey to fulfill Addie Bundren’s death wish: to be buried with her family.  Early in the book, Addie dies, and the journey begins.  However, during the journey Addie (who is dead) speaks to the reader—and it is here when the reader understands why the Bundren family is so complex.

Addie married Anse Bundren for his land.  She was a school teacher who hated her job, and he seemed like a good catch because he owned a small piece of land. Being from “poor land,” having no parents alive, Addie decides to marry Anse—but she does not love him; in fact, she despises them.  She teaches herself that words like “love” are worthless, and lives her life awaiting her death.  Having been brought up in a poor land, Addie knows of nothing else but a poor life—and hence becomes another “poor person.”

This idea is reinforced when she describes her children and her reactions toward them: She does not consider herself mother to Cash nor Darl; she states that she “gave Anse the children,” and says that she “did not ask for them.”  Even Cora Tull told her that she “was not a true mother.”  She refused her breast to Cash and Darl after their time was up; however, with Jewel, her “love child” (she had a child out of wedlock, with the Reverend Whitfield), “there was only the milk, warm and calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence…”  So, Addie had Jewel for herself; then she “gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel,” and then she gave him “Vardaman to replace the child [she] had robbed him of.”  Had she not been a “poor people,” she would have been brought up to love, not only love in the word form, but love in the feeling form.

It would be easy to blame all the poorness on the mother and wife, Addie, having only read her chapter. However, throughout the novel Anse shows his signs of poorness, having lived all his life in poor land.  Anse is a farmer who has “a little property,” and a “good honest name.”  Anse is very rapidly depicted as the “anti-hero,” the character who does everything to get the bigger and better end of any circumstance. For instance, he makes his son Cash make the coffin for his mother; persuades Jewel and Darl to work to get $3.00 extra while their mother is dying (claiming that he himself cannot work, for he is allergic to sweat); convinces his neighbors to help him when he needs them (for example, getting the team of mules, food and housing while on the journey, and the spades while in Jefferson) using the argument of “good Christians;”  makes Cash, Darl and Jewel transport the coffin across the river; sells Jewel’s horse to purchase a team of mules; and ends up stealing Dewey Dell’s $10.00.

Anse’s poor mentality has made him a poor person; one who finds the need to carry his wife’s dead body from one town to another, in a journey that lasts long enough for the body to rot, stink, and attract buzzards.  However, Addie is not much better than he is: She was getting her revenge by asking Anse to promise to take her “back to Jefferson when [she] died.”

Had this couple not lived in poor land, they might not have grown to be such poor people.  Poorness in “As I Lay Dying” is not only seen in economical poverty, but in intellectual, social and emotional poverty: During the journey, when Cash breaks his leg only a few miles out of Jefferson, Anse’s solution is to cover his leg with cement; Peabody says it best when he says that he would “be damned if the man that’d let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement aint got more spare legs.”  This shows Anse’s intellectual poverty—not even adding some kind of cream or gel to Cash’s leg before applying the cement; the Bundren’s social poverty is depicted when they stop at Grummet’s hardware store, and the marshall approaches the wagon parked in front, and requests that Anse remove that dead body from the town—a body which has been dead for more that eight days, and whose stench saturates the city until the Bundrens reach Jefferson; finally, the emotional poverty of the Bundrens is shown through the children, mostly, and their lack of a clear mother figure: Vardaman’s mother is a fish; Jewel’s mother is a horse; Darl’s mother is “is not”; and Cash’s mother is a wooden plank.  This, of course, relative to a mother who did not have children for herself, but rather gave them all to Anse.

Throughout the novel, Faulkner goes around and around the idea of poor land making poor people. The Bundrens are an example of poor land making poor people, in more than one generation.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

It is not easy for people in the XXI century to understand what life during the Great Depression must have been like—let alone for a legal alien belonging to the Generation X to try and comprehend a situation seven decades ago.  However, the way Edna St. Vincent Millay puts it in her untitled sonnet XXX published in “Fatal Interview” in 1931, anyone from any time and place can take a glimpse into a part of life during the Great Depression that few people think about.  How much of her sonnet corresponds to the literary style of the 1920s, as opposed to that of the 1930s?

Commonly known as “Love is not all,” this traditionalist poet uses her excellent way with words to talk about love.  However, Millay is not directly responding to the depression, but rather posing a question: “What would a person give up for love?”  According to Millay, she would give up everything—even peace and food.  A seemingly straight-forward poem, there is more to the poet’s words than one can read.  Experimenting with form, Millay begins by saying “Love is not all.”  This sets the tone of the poem, one might think: this will be an exemplary poem for the depression times, in which a woman shares how much love lacks the power to help with survival during hard times.  Yet, in the middle of the poem the author goes on to say that “It well may be that in a difficult hour / [. . .] I might be driven to sell your love…”  Here is the twist of the poem—Millay states that love is not enough to live with, and then proceeds to say that she might sell it.  But the very last verse, “I do not think I would,” allows the reader to understand that some might: Some people might have sold their love for food, or shelter, or peace—but not her.  As a true traditionalist poet, she remains true to her principles, to her love, to her significant other.  Does Millay have a political agenda up her sleeve that she tries to address with this poem? Is she striving for some kind of reform for “reform’s sake”?

A simple—yet not simplistic—poem like this leaves the reader doubtless: This is a work of art created for the enjoyment of the power of sheer creation, not to establish some sort of social reform, with no political agenda at hand.  Millay is not trying to convince all the women in America to fight for love until the end; she is not trying to convince men to lose all in the name of love; she is not implying that it is acceptable to starve in the name of love.  All the poet is stating in her poem is that love is not all—a timeless statement.  Love does not provide food nor shelter, as Millay states.  She also states that some people might give away their love to get something in return—but she would not.  That is it.  This is the “message” of her poem: She would not let go of love.  She is not standing on a soapbox telling women that love is all that is needed to survive the depression; she has no political agenda.  Millay is not writing this poem to express the power of social reality, and have people live their lives like she does.  This apolitical work of art is meant to please readers with it’s inutility—there is no “swift action” in this poem; there is no deep moral in this poem; there is no political or social reformation undertones.  All there is, is art for aesthetic pleasure, art for art’s sake.

With her poetry, Millay won many awards—including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.  She led a very peculiar life (being bisexual and leading a very open marriage to a man, living the perfect bohemian life in New York), which might lead to an understanding of her peculiar poetry.  Although her poems were not meant to educate the readers, but rather to present her thoughts on current issues, Millay gave people in the 1930s a reason to live through the rough times of the depression: if there was love, although love was not all, there was a reason to keep striving.  And nothing, nothing, should ever replace love, “not meat nor drink.”