So keeping with my Hemingway rotation (one book a year, alternating between one I have read and one I haven't, knowing that eventually, they will all have to be repeats), I pulled this one off my shelf a few months ago. This one is the the first of the posthumously published Hemingway books, released in 1970, nine years after his death. There has been so much stuff going on this fall it seems to have taken me a ridiculously long time to finish it. This is my second time reading it. The first time was maybe in 2009, and even though I wasn't a parent then, I knew it was a powerful story about being a father. But I wanted to go back and read it now, knowing what I know and see if I saw the same things on my first read. Of course, I saw even more.
SYNOPSIS/POSSIBLE SPOILERS:
The book is divided into three parts. The first part is shows a relatively famous painter, Thomas Hudson (which is of course Hemingway, just like he is the primary male character, protagonist, in every one of his novels) spending a summer on an island in the Bahamas with his three sons (one from his first wife, two from his second). The second part follows a day where he goes to a bar in Havana and meets his first ex-wife. All of his sons have been killed by this point. The last part is him commanding a boat on a covert U-boat hunting operation in the Caribbean in WWII.
The plot is not fast moving, but like in all Hemingway books, the slower the pace the more real and true the content. I have a lot of favorite scenes, but probably the best when his sons are spear fishing in the clear water of the gulf stream (that is the stream in title) and Thomas is standing on the bridge of his boat with a rifle, a .256 Mannlicher, looking for sharks because he knows they love the conditions that they are in. Hemingway always writes well about guns. Thomas sees a long hammerhead coming slowly in towards his boys. He shoots at it and misses, three times, and just as he is taking the last shot he has, his alcoholic, aged deckhand/cook opens up with a Thompson sub machine gun, raking the shark from head to tail, riddling it with so many .45 holes that it rolls on its belly and sinks. Thomas couldn't stop the danger from reaching his children, instead relying on a random happenstance(an old drunk with a gun that he wasn't even suppose to have) to save them. A month after his boys leave he gets a telegram saying that the two youngest were killed in a car wreck in Paris, with their mother.
One of my favorite lines come when Thomas and his crew are very close to the Germans. They have captured their boat and and are trying to find them in this string of mangrove keys. After one of his crew goes off to sweep an island alone, another crew member is talking to Thomas about him:
"I'm sorry we haven't been friends."
"Everybody is friends when things are bad enough."
"I'm going to be friends from now on."
"We're all going to do a lot of things from now on," Thomas Hudson said. "I wish from now on would start."
So what is this book about? The islands in the stream are the characters. Like the keys in the gulf stream they stand together, but somehow alone too. As fear and pain and tragedy rush around them they always stand. They meet others and love and are loved, but still they stand by themselves. I think in a lot of ways this is the truth about our own lives. The last line is a good one. Thomas is shot and dying on his boat. Willie, a older crew member who fights well but is a little unstable and gets picked on, is kneeling beside him.
"Tommy," Willie said. "I love you, you son of a bitch, and don't die."
Thomas Hudson looked at him without moving his head.
"Try and understand if it isn't too hard."
Thomas Hudson looked at him. He felt far away now and there were no problems at all. He felt the ship gathering her speed and lovely throb of her engines against his shoulders blades which rested hard against the boards. He looked up and there was the sky that he had always loved and he looked across the great lagoon that he was quite sure, now, he would never paint and he eased his position a little to lessen the pain. The engines were around three thousand now, he thought, and they came through the deck and into him.
"I think I understand, Willie," he said.
"Oh shit," Willie said. "You never understand anybody that loves you."
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