by Paul Theroux
Here, perhaps, is the reason Hemingway never published Islands in the Stream. It was autobiography—this is clear from the duplicated recollections in A Moveable Feast—but he wanted it to read as fiction. He wrote it at an age when most novelists turn to autobiography, but rather than reveal the novel as that, he published the story of Santiago and spent the last three years of his life writing a straightforward reminiscence, to which he added ambiguously in the Preface, "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction ..." It is hard to say whether he would have published the present novel, had he allowed himself to live a few years longer. This is crucial because a writer can only be held responsible for what he publishes himself and stands by; he can't be blamed for writing a bad book that he chose to leave in a bottom drawer.
Thomas Hudson is a painter. He has been divorced and he lives in different places in the Caribbean. He seems to have a separate personality for each place. In the first section of the book, on the island of Bimini, he is a reticent friend, a quiet drunk and a devoted father; he wishes with his three boys and does a little painting of the Winslow Homer variety. The second section is set largely in a bar in Havana; here Hudson is a bar-fly, drinking and betting, and talking at some length to an elderly prostitute; he does no painting. A sea chase occupies the whole of the third section; Hudson is a bullying, Bogartesque ship's captain pursuing Germans along the coast of Cuba. Three episodes, hardly stories, and except for Hudson, who alters but does not grow, the episodes bear no relation to one another. The three boys, Hudson's children, are all dead by the time the second section opens, possibly to give Hudson nothing to live for, though more likely because Hemingway couldn't think of any way of working them into the conversation with the elderly prostitute or the pursuit of the Germans. The artless novelist has his reasons for disposing of characters, usually no more complicated than the eldest boy's in Jude the Obscure, when he hanged himself and his siblings: "Done because we are too menny."
Hudson gets little satisfaction (but evidently lots of cash) from his painting. He is, for most of the book, an aggressive self-absorbed man for whom killing a big fish and disembowelling a German are ways of proving one's manhood. It is the philosophy of combat—perversely based on killing one's friend, for the noblest combat is destroying something beautiful, something one values. "In the worst parts, when I was tiredest, I couldn't tell which was him and which was me," says Dave, one of the sons, after the fish had been caught and killed. Incapable of creation, these characters see beauty in destruction; considering themselves men in the proverbial sense of the word, their ambition must be to win: to kill the lion, to floor the Negro, to catch the fish, to have always the winning hand. Achievement is irrelevant here (Hudson's painting is all but dismissed as daubing) because achievement implies solitary creation. Winning is another matter: one wins by beating one's opponent. Thus, most strangely: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."
"All fights are bad."
"I know it. But what are you going to do about them?"
"You have to win them when they start."
Failure is losing, because losing is humiliation, unbecoming to a man: "Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do." That is Hudson at his lowest point, a loser. He recovers, but others are not so lucky, for the last loser deserves it, as the winner deserves his success. The loser's mortality proves more than the winner's physical superiority—it implies the winner's immortality. So much for the fist-fight between Roger and the wealthy yachtsman, which Roger wins, saying, "That guy was no good, Tom." And Thomas Hudson agrees: "You taught him something." The implication is that the yachtsman has been taught that he will never win a fist-fight with a man Hemingway conceives to be morally superior. In this case the man should know better: Roger is a writer and the sniveling yachtsman he defeats is a publisher.
Hemingway insists on the Tightness of the philosophy. Consequently there is an interminable repetition of the words fine and good and true and wonderful and brave and necessary, all applied to bullying and mean-spirited and unworthy acts, "a wonderful chase," "a fine shot," "a beautiful kill". A sententious utterance, implying if not employing one of these words, closes each incident. After Dave hooks the swordfish and yanks on him for six hours (and twenty-five pages of the book), the motto is, "But there is a time boys have to do things if they are ever going to be men." An odd thing for a painter to say; but Thomas Hudson is no creator.
There is a great deal of killing in the book, practically all of it gratuitous, as when the swordfish is killed or Thomas Hudson shoots a land crab that appears on his path ("... the crab disintegrated ... Poor old crab, he thought...") or the Germans are shelled. Murder is necessary and it is a shame it makes one feel bad:
Then why don't you care about anything? he asked himself. Why don't you think of them as murderers and have the righteous feelings that you should have ... Because we are all murderers, he told himself. We all are on both sides, if we are any good, and no good will come of any of it.
But you have to do it. Sure, he said.
We all are on both sides: "I couldn't tell which was him and which was me," says Dave when the fish is dead; and "He was a pretty good guy," Willie says of the German he's blown to bits. The philosophy demands the sentimentality of pity. And grief is self-pity. Here is Hudson revealing the death of his son to the mother of the boy, his ex-wife:
"That isn't it," she said. "Tell me, is he dead?"
"Sure."
"Please hold me tight. I am ill now." He felt her shaking and he knelt by the chair and held her and felt her tremble. Then she said: "And poor you. Poor, poor you."
After a time she said: "I'm sorry for everything I ever did or said."
"Me, too."
"Poor you and poor me."
"Poor everybody," he said, and he did not add, "Poor Tom."
A very large number of suicides, by various means, are mentioned in the novel as well, remarked upon with a kind of queer joy. Obeying the perverse logic of destruction, the destroyer as hero, it is consistent that after subduing or killing every powerful thing on earth, the man, to maintain the image of his invincibility, kills himself. The warrior runs upon his own sword. Self-slaughter is the only acceptable end for the destroying hero; any other death is humiliating defeat. Hudson does not commit suicide. At the end of the book, wounded by Germans for whom he has developed an eager affection, he is full of self-love and self-loathing which, combined, turn to pride and a satisfied self-pity. Motto: "You never understand anybody that loves you."
The Hemingway Stamp, that cauliflower earmark that characterises his worst fiction, is everywhere apparent. Hudson reflects on catnip: "There still should be some catnip in the shelf of drawers of the cat room if it hasn't gotten too dry and lost its force. It lost its force very quickly in the tropics and the catnip that you raised in the garden had no force at all." Hudson has a drink: "... strong with the real Gordon's gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow ... It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink." The descriptions of food and wine are given lovingly, while lovemaking is reduced to utter vagueness: "He did something ... She did something else..."
The novel is offered as something of a departure for Hemingway, with "a rich and relaxed sense of humor." But nearly all the humor depends on seeing bullying or ridicule as comic: attempting to set a dock on fire, humiliating the yachtsman or taking the mickey out of a tourist or "a fine old whore," or teasing a sleepy-headed servant. In each case there is a victim who is weak or passive; he is made a figure of fun and one is meant to find him contemptible and so laughable. The humor has Thomas Hudson and his friends in stitches, and in many places Hudson says how much he is enjoying himself, but he is an embittered, heartless, unquestioning and deluded man. Physical superiority is what Hudson cares about but he is old and life is unbearable for him.
The disappointment and the sour regret give the nove
l the tone of a suicide note. It is sad to think that Hemingway wrote it, and understandable that he left it in a bottom drawer.
A Love-Scene After Work Writing In The Tropics
[1971]
One of the most pathetic illustrations in all literature about the difficulty of holding a job and writing a novel at the same time occurs in Anthony Trollope's Autobiography. He has been sent to Scotland "to revise the Glasgow Post Office", and in order to assess the labors of the letter carriers he must trudge alongside them all day as they deliver. He is determined to do a good j ob; when a letter carrier goes to the top floor of a house, Trollope follows. It is mid-summer and hot. "The men would grumble," Trollope says, "and then I would think how it would be with them if they had to go home afterwards and write a love-scene."
Any person who has tried to work and write understands that remark. Trollope knew a further difficulty: writing in the tropics. The West Indies and the Spanish Main was written in Trinidad, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Cuba, on board ship, in stuffy hotel rooms, in terrible heat. And he was working in the West Indies—surveying the postal service. Trollope was an unusual man, a great whist player, an avid horseman, a curious and observant traveler, a devoted civil servant (framer of postal treaties, inventor of the pillar box). He was a prolific novelist and a hard-working editor. Trollope's energy is a rare thing, and so is his candor: "But the love-scenes written in Glasgow, all belonging to The Bertrams, are not good."
A job, especially one that requires alertness, always menaces the novel. A job overseas is different; there are many advantages in being an expatriate worker, but there are more disadvantages, and after working abroad for nine years as a teacher in the seasonless monotony of three tropical countries I have decided to chuck the whole business and never take a job again. I have to admit that some of my objections are petty. I am made unreasonably angry when one of my unsmiling superiors, summoning me through his secretary, bites on his pipe, and mispronouncing my name, demands that I must do this or that. I suppose the rudeness angers me; it is the Singaporean's least endearing quality. But it is a Chinese rule. The most powerful are the least polite; a promotion means a diminution in civility, which is a quality—not a virtue—of the very low. The weak have no choice but to be polite.
"Excuse me, sir," says a student. "Eddie Fang says you are a novelist. Are you going to write a novel about Singapore?"
"No thanks," I reply. "But you've lived here your whole life—why don't you write one?"
"Can't." He flinches and adds: "There's nothing to write about."
There have been excellent English schools in Singapore for a hundred years. Singapore claims to have the best school system in Asia. English is the official language. No Singaporean has ever written a novel in English. Once there was a girl here who wrote poetry, but she went to Iowa and never came back. The highlight of the UNESCO-sponsored Festival of Books in Singapore was a children's fancy-dress contest; Raffles, Cinderella, Robin Hood and Lord Krishna were winners.
"Well, if there's nothing to write about, then how am I supposed to write a novel about Singapore?"
"Eddie Fang said you used to live in Africa. And you wrote some books about Africa. So I thought—"
Sometimes during a conversation like this (I am asked the question twice a week) I say, "I'm writing a novel about a writer in Singapore who wants to write a novel about Singapore and can't." No one laughs at that.
No one laughs at much. The Singapore government, which is a mixture of paranoia and paternalism—inspiring the fearfulness of childhood, when authority always seems irrefragable in its strength—exhorts her citizens to be busy. The Singaporeans' play looks like work; people made into children are fearful about breaking rules, and very tense they become very humorless. They don't want to be caught laughing—anyway, what's so funny? Humor is the sort of independent mimicry that requires the same rebelliousness writing does. Humor also emphasizes differences in people, in their speech and habits; it has a tendency to distort gleefully in order to express a truth. At Morning Coffee, which is a tropical ritual observed as thoroughly as Afternoon Tea is in a temperate climate, I tell a joke. The several Chinese at the table fall silent, although the joke is quite harmless. If it was about physical deformity or race they might laugh. Then one says, "That's very interesting," and looks grave. My Indian friend giggles; like me, he's an expatriate. He offers a joke of his own. The Chinese stare at him.
A few days later the Indian asks me if I plan to stay in Singapore. I tell him I intend to leave, to quit teaching entirely and take up writing full time.
"So you vant to be another Faith Baldvin?" he says, and titters into his coffee cup. But he is not mocking. He also reads Oliver Goldsmith for pleasure.
Conrad said (in "A Glance at Two Books", Last Essays): "... a book is a deed ... the writing of it is an enterprise as much as the conquest of a colony." This means a daily effort of laborious concentration. It cannot be haphazard, weekend flurries of composition, and who can get up as early in the morning as Trollope? By stages one encloses oneself in one's novel, erects a barrier that shuts out the real world to duplicate it. Obviously, if one is married and has a job and children and friends, one can't write one's book as if one is serving a prison sentence, going into isolation and emerging when the work is done. On the other hand, one doesn't write a book by observing a landscape or hearing a phrase at a party and then going home and scribbling the observation in the margin of the text. "Are you writing a book about Singapore?" the student asks. I'm not; if I do it will be elsewhere.
Mornings in the tropics—an hour or two—are for teaching, afternoons for sleeping; the lighted pause of early evening is spent in a bar or drinking on a veranda. Writing at night is out because of the heat, and the desk lamp attracts insects that make shadows as they strafe the pages. But also, teaching in the tropics is undemanding, hours are fewer, classes smaller, and I've given all my lectures before. I can dig out last year's lecture on The White Devil or Middleton's comedies and with a little planning I can free myself during the best hours of the day, the glittering spring-like morning, from seven to ten or eleven. I write in longhand so I can memorize everything I've written; committing a novel to memory makes it possible to think about it, extend it, and correct it in any idle hour.
I consider myself to have been very lucky. Both in Uganda and Singapore my bosses were writers themselves; they were interested in my work, and I think they made some allowances for me. Mr Moore used to ask me how my poems were coming along, and Mr Enright and I used to commiserate in the Staff Club; he would look around at the drinkers, when we were talking about writing, and say, "They think it's easy!"
The best job for a writer, a job with the fewest hours, is in the tropics. But books are hard to write in the tropics. It is not only the heat; it is the lack of privacy, the open windows, the noise. Tropical cities are deafening. In Lagos and Accra and Kampala two people walking down a city street will find they are shouting to each other to be heard over the sound of traffic and the howls of residents and radios. V. S. Naipaul is the only writer I know of who has mentioned the abrading of the nerves by tropical noise (the chapter on Trinidad in The Middle Passage). Shouting is the Singaporean's expression of friendliness; the Chinese shout is like a bark, sharp enough to make you jump. And if you are unfortunate enough to live near a Chinese cemetery—only foreigners live near cemeteries, the Chinese consider it unlucky to occupy those houses—you will hear them mourning with firecrackers, scattering cherrybombs over the gravestones.
Sit in a room in Singapore and try to write. Every sound is an interruption, and your mind blurs each time a motorcycle or a plane or a funeral passes. If you live near a main road, as I do, there will be three funerals a day (Chinese funerals are truckloads of gong-orchestras and brass bands playing familiar songs like "It's A Long Way To Tipperary"). The day the Bengali gardener mows the grass is a day wasted. Hawkers cycle or drive by and each stops; you learn their individual yells, the bean-curd man with
his transistor and sidecar, the fish-ball man on his bike, the ice-cream seller with his town crier's bell (a mid-afternoon interruption), the breadman in his Austin van, leaning on the horn; the elderly Chinese lady crouching in her sam foo and crying "Yeggs!" through the door, the Tamil newsboy, a toddy alcoholic, muttering "Baybah, baybah". Before the British forces left there was a fish-and-chip van; it didn't beep, but there were yells. The Singaporean doesn't stir from his house. He waits in the coolness of his parlor for the deliverers to arrive. The yells and gongs, at first far off, then closer, console him. It is four-thirty, and here comes the coconut-seller ringing his bicycle bell. He has a monkey, a macaque the size of a four-year-old, on the crossbar. The coconut-seller is crazy; the buyers make him linger and they laugh at him. A crowd gathers to jeer him; he chases some children and then goes away. After dark the grocery truck parks in front of your house; the grocer has a basket of fish, a slaughtered pig, and the whole range of Ma-Ling canned goods ("Tripe in Duck Grease", "Chicken Feet," "Lychees in Syrup") and for an hour you will hear the yelp and gargle of bartering. You have written nothing.
The heat and light; you asked for those in coming so far, but it is hotter, though less bright than you imagined—Singapore is usually cloudy, averaging only six hours of sunshine a day. That persistent banging and screeching is an annoyance that makes you hotter still. You are squinting at the pen which is slipping out of your slick fingers and wondering why you bothered to come.