Volume 15, Number 6 · October 8, 1970
At Sea with Ernest Hemingway
By Christopher Ricks
Islands in the Stream
by Ernest Hemingway
Scribner's, 466 pp., $10.00
'You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.' The faded adjuration in Islands in the Stream is from one half of Hemingway to his other half—from the lonely uncorrupted painter Thomas Hudson to the companionable corrupted novelist Roger Davis. 'That's the start': and Islands in the Stream, which is the end, is not straight or simple or good. Written mostly in 1951, ten years before he shot himself, it is Hemingway's last novel; it comes hard on the callous heels of Across the River and Into the Trees, and it opens up the Parisian reminiscences (it has its own such) which petrified as A Moveable Feast. It had grown into a four-part enterprise, but Hemingway salvaged The Old Man and the Sea, and what now remains is Part I 'Bimini,' Part II 'Cuba,' and Part III 'At Sea.'
Review, 2266 words
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