April Selection 2008
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for April meeting, 2008
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
To Have and Have Not is the dramatic, brutal story of Harry Morgan, an honest boat owner who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who swarm the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.
In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the "haves" and the "have nots" and creates one of the most subtle and moving portraits of a love affair in his oeuvre. In turn funny and tragic, lively and poetic, remarkable in its emotional impact, To Have and Have Not takes literary high adventure to a new level. As the Times Literary Supplement observed, "Hemingway's gift for dialogue, for effective understatement, and for communicating such emotions the tough allow themselves, has never been more conspicuous."
Publisher Comments
First published in 1937, To Have and Have Not is one of Hemingway's most entertaining novels. This realistic adventure tale and subtle portrait of an unlikely love affair demonstrates "Hemingway's gift for dialogue, for effective understatement, and for communicating such emotions as the tough allow themselves
Times Literary Supplement
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.
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. 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." 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.
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.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.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.
brightlightsfilm.com, Ed Krzemienskied
My Lobotomy: Howard Dully's Journey
At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital—or ice pick—lobotomy.
Abandoned by his family within a year of the surgery, Howard spent his teen years in mental institutions, his twenties in jail, and his thirties in a bottle. It wasn’t until he was in his forties that Howard began to pull his life together. But even as he began to live the “normal” life he had been denied, Howard struggled with one question: Why?
“October 8, 1960. I gather that Mrs. Dully is perpetually talking, admonishing, correcting, and getting worked up into a spasm, whereas her husband is impatient, explosive, rather brutal, won’t let the boy speak for himself, and calls him numbskull, dimwit, and other uncomplimentary names.”
There were only three people who would know the truth: Freeman, the man who performed the procedure; Lou, his cold and demanding stepmother who brought Howard to the doctor’s attention; and his father, Rodney. Of the three, only Rodney, the man who hadn’t intervened on his son’s behalf, was still living. Time was running out. Stable and happy for the first time in decades, Howard began to search for answers.
“December 3, 1960. Mr. and Mrs. Dully have apparently decided to have Howard operated on. I suggested [they] not tell Howard anything about it.”
Through his research, Howard met other lobotomy patients and their families, talked with one of Freeman’s sons about his father’s controversial life’s work, and confronted Rodney about his complicity. And, in the archive where the doctor’s files are stored, he finally came face to face with the truth.
Revealing what happened to a child no one—not his father, not the medical community, not the state—was willing to protect, My Lobotomy exposes a shameful chapter in the history of the treatment of mental illness. Yet, ultimately, this is a powerful and moving chronicle of the life of one man. Without reticence, Howard Dully shares the story of a painfully dysfunctional childhood, a misspent youth, his struggle to claim the life that was taken from him, and his redemption.
Publishers Comments
At age 12, in 1960, Dully received a transorbital or 'ice pick' lobotomy from Dr. Walter Freeman, who invented the procedure, making Dully an unfortunate statistic in medical history — the youngest of the more than 10,000 patients who Freeman lobotomized to cure their supposed mental illness. In this brutally honest memoir, Dully, writing with Fleming (The Ivory Coast), describes how he set out 40 years later to find out why he was lobotomized, since he did not exhibit any signs of mental instability at the time, and why, postoperation, he was bounced between various institutions and then slowly fell into a life of drug and alcohol abuse. His journey — first described in a National Public Radio feature in 2005 — finds Dully discovering how deeply he was the victim of an unstable stepmother who systematically abused him and who then convinced his distant father that a lobotomy was the answer to Dully's acting out against her psychic torture. He also investigates the strange career of Freeman — who wasn't a licensed psychiatrist — including early acclaim by the New York Times and cross-country trips hawking the operation from his 'Lobotomobile.' But what is truly stunning is Dully's description of how he gained strength and a sense of self-worth by understanding how both Freeman and his stepmother were victims of their own family tragedies, and how he managed to somehow forgive them for the wreckage they caused in his life. (Sept.)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)Review:"The lobotomy, although terrible, was not the greatest injury done to him. His greatest misfortune, as his own testimony makes clear, was being raised by parents who could not give him love. The lobotomy, he writes, made him feel like a Frankenstein monster. But that's not quite right. By the age of 12 he already felt that way. It's this that makes My Lobotomy one of the saddest stories you'll ever read."
William Grimes, The New York Times
"Dully's tale is a heartbreakingly sad story of a life seriously, tragically interrupted. All Howard Dully wanted was to be normal. His entire life has been a search for normality. He did what he had to do to survive. This book is his legacy, and it is a powerful one."
San Francisco Chronicle
"In My Lobotomy Howard Dully tells more of the story that so many found gripping in a National Public Radio broadcast: how his stepmother joined with a doctor willing to slice into his brain with “ice picks” when he was all of 12 years old."
New York Daily News
Some useful book club links (external links: open new window)
- Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities