Islands in the Stream - Ernest Hemingway

Yeah, I'm still chugging along on the Hemingway kick. Probably another month at this rate, unless I take a break. Islands in the Stream is another one of those works his fourth wife arranged to have published some time after his passing. She says in a foreword that it's basically the original manuscript, minus some cuts she made that she felt certain he would have made as well. They could have afforded to make some more cuts. There are some sections where the conversations run on far too long over the same territory. That's a problem I've had with some of the other books, but it was worse here, when it was bad. Still, if they're going to publish it after his death, probably better to leave it as much his book as possible, since one can't be sure what precisely he'd choose to take out, given the chance.

I do wonder how Mary Hemingway felt, reading over these stories, seeing how wistful he was for his first wife? I suppose if you're someone's fourth spouse, you kind of accept that they'll have fond memories of the earlier spouses. Islands in the Stream is ostensibly fiction, but Hemingway is the base for Thomas Hudson. Hudson's a painter, rather than a writer, but he lives on the same islands, had one son who grew up in Paris with his first wife, two sons from the second wife, patrolled for U-boats off the Cuban coast during World War 2. So it's a more fanciful account of his life than A Moveable Feast, but it's also a significantly darker tale than that remembrance.

Hudson is a man far enough along in life to recognize his past mistakes, but to have set himself the task of not dwelling on them. The people important to him are drifting away, and he tries to accept that, use the loneliness to be productive, but he can't quite pull it off. He needs people, but being around them opens wounds and throws him off. He's trying to come to grips with the passage of time, with loss, maybe with the sense he's wasted his talents (or his life), but I'm not certain he pulled it off in time. Not that it matters, the opportunity to put any realizations he might have had into practice doesn't present itself.

As I said, it's a dark book. All three of his sons die across the course of the book, along with an ex-wife. Not sure what that represented for him. That basic fear parents have of losing their children, either in the final sense, or just in the way children and parents grow apart sometimes. Maybe regrets, the feeling he's let them down somehow, pushed them too hard, not been there enough. The whole sequence of Davey trying to bring up that marlin - one of the best sequences in the book - had an air of that after. Hudson feeling he ought to have stepped in, not let the boy exert so much effort only to fall short, as though it damaged the kid somehow. Maybe he feels he put too much of his desires into the boys, made them feel they had to connect with him through the things he liked, rather than him learning about the things they cared about. All the conversations the boys have with him are about things related to him: fishing, Paris, books, writers, painting, horses. I don't have any real picture of things the boys like to do that aren't connected to him some how.

'There are probably politer ways and more endearing ways of leaving a girl than simply, with no unpleasantness and never having been in any row, excusing yourself to go to the men's room at 21 and never coming back. But, as Roger said, he did settle the check downstairs and he loved to think of his last glimpse of her, sitting alone at the corner table in that decor that suited her so and that she loved so well.'