Islands in the stream

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Islands in the Stream is a novel by Ernest Hemingway , which was published in 1970 - nine years after his suicide  - under the English title Islands in the Stream by Mary Hemingway.

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1st part - Bimini

Bimini Island is located in the Atlantic Ocean on the Florida Straits off Miami . The painter Thomas Hudson lives in a house on the edge of the island. It is well protected against the forces of nature prevailing on the island. It is the only house on the island with a fireplace to protect against the cold of the stormy winters. Thomas Hudson employs staff who keep the house tidy and with whom he combats the storms during the hurricane season. The marketing of his paintings takes a New York broker. The lease of a ranch in Montana and an inherited oil well give Hudson and his divorced wives financial independence.

Hudson enjoys life on the island in the Gulf Stream to the full and works in a disciplined manner despite his material independence.

He is looking forward to the visit of his three sons, who will visit him for five weeks on vacation on the island and who have "released" his ex-wives. Hudson would like to give Tom, David and Andrew space and support them in finding and accepting challenges. This concern comes into its own in the encounter with a hammerhead shark at sea and David's hour-long hunt for the giant swordfish in the calm and the heat of the sun. Thomas Hudson steers the cutter out to sea while David tries to keep the fish on a line. He doesn't let himself be talked into, especially not by his younger brother Andrew. But he listens to the advice of the experienced men on board, neither of whom takes the fishing rod so that David can face the challenge on his own. Rolling up the leash is hard work for the boy, but he doesn't let up.

"At that moment, starboard, astern, the mirror broke the sea, and the big fish came out, rose, shimmered silver and dark blue, seemed to rise endlessly out of the water." "'His sword is as long as me', Andrew said in awe “. David, who after hours of fighting has bloody hands, bruised feet (from prying against the fish) and welts from the fishing gear on his back, ultimately loses the fish that tears itself off the line. And yet the boy has triumphed over himself. In this scene most of the characters of the other two brothers are said in passing.

The holidays are coming to an end. The three boys leave. Thomas Hudson later learned by telegraph of the death of his sons David and Andrew in a car accident along with their mother on the other side of the Atlantic near Biarritz . A world is ending for the painter.

Part 2 - Cuba

During World War II , Thomas Hudson fought in the Caribbean against members of the German Wehrmacht , whom Hudson called " Krauts ". Between missions, Hudson, who is now on the verge of alcoholism , spends most of his time in Cuban bars and drinks. During a visit to the bar, he meets one of his ex-wives. He informs them of the loss of his third son, who had meanwhile become a flight lieutenant and was shot down in his Spitfire by an anti- aircraft ship off Abbeville . Short dialogues, which are based on Hemingway's inspiration from the iceberg principle , reflect Hemingway's affiliation with the Lost Generation and show Hudson's helplessness to deal with his situation. Desiring to escape the present, his ex-wife accompanies him home and they spend the night together. However, it is becoming more and more clear that Thomas Hudson cannot overcome the death of his three boys.

Part 3 - At sea

Thomas Hudson commands the crew of a cutter that, disguised as a research ship, is on the trail of German submarines . This US “research ship” receives operational instructions via radio: “CONTINUE CAREFULLY SEARCH WESTWARD”. The radio operator on Thomas Hudson's boat is of German descent and the crew don't think highly of him. The armed team is a colorful mix of nationalities. Thomas Hudson operates in the sea area off the Cuban coast, which borders Florida and the Bahamas to the north . A Cuban naval base serves as a supply base. The relationship with the Cuban Navy is friendly.

A German submarine belonging to a " wolf pack " was sunk by the US Air Force in the operational area . Probably 8 to 11 Germans were able to save themselves - probably with the rubber dinghy - on one of the small islands off Cuba. There they shot local turtle trappers and one of their own comrades. Then the murderers set off with a dinghy (open sailing boat). Thomas Hudson and his crew take up the chase. The aim is to capture the Germans. A wounded German is found on the way. The dying man has left the pain in his gangrenous wounds behind him, doesn't want medical help and doesn't say much anymore. The Germans who flee cannot get far with their sailing boat. Even so, the persecution turns out to be protracted. The cutter runs aground in shallow sea water at low tide, and the hunt has to be continued with the dinghy . It turns out that the Germans with only two machine guns are clearly inferior to Thomas Hudson's men in terms of firepower, but have the element of surprise in their position in the mangrove thicket on their side. Thomas Hudson was shot three times in the thigh at the start of the firefight. The Germans are defeated by Thomas Hudson's strong troops. Thomas Hudson doesn't think he can ever paint again. Whether Hudson, who suffers from severe blood loss , will survive his injury remains open.

The third part follows a simple plot - the description of the persecution of German shipwrecked people. And Thomas Hudson is the only one who thinks, “Why did so many of you [from the German marines] run off? ... I hope that we never get lost ”. This risk of getting lost does not exist within the boundaries of the novel. On the contrary - Thomas Hudson's crew are brash, comradely and, when it comes down to it, death-defying. In general, the Americans all have good and the Germans all bad character traits. The Germans leave their murdered victims lying around so that they are eaten by crabs , while the Americans bury the deceased enemy and mark the seaman's grave with an inscribed wooden cross. Americans respect and admire the soldiery qualities of their cornered opponent. To some extent, they want to show understanding for the murder several times. The dying German, on the other hand, only has a weak smile left for his opponent.

Influences from The Old Man and the Sea

Hemingway had originally planned to use his novel The Old Man and the Sea as part of a great work he was going to call The Sea Book . Some aspects of this book can be found in islands in the stream . Positive response to The Old Man and the Sea led Hemingway to rewrite the story as an independent work.

Insight into the author's psyche

Hemingway often processed biographical facts in his works, such as his personal experiences during his big game hunts in The Green Hills of Africa and in The Truth in the Morning Light . His experience during his time in Key West and Cuba, which was characterized by numerous excursions for deep-sea fishing in the Gulf Stream, and his allegedly practiced submarine war against the Germans, formed the creative basis for his novel Islands in the Stream . Although the author always shared his own experiences with his audience through his prose, after reading the novel it becomes clear why Hemingway never gave the manuscript of Islands in the Stream for publication and the work only through the initiative of his fourth Ms. Mary and the publisher Charles Scribner was published post mortem : It gives a deep insight into Hemingway's family circumstances and especially into the vulnerable psyche of the author, who tried to establish the image of the warrior and predator throughout his life . Another reason may have been that he wanted to withhold all too obvious references to his sons or wives from the public.

The protagonist of the novel, the painter Thomas Hudson, tells of the time he spent with his eldest son Tom in Paris in the 1920s, where he met other artists such as Picasso , Braque and James Joyce . He mentions his most famous work, Ulysses . Again, the parallels to Hemingway's life in Paris emerge when, as a penniless writer among expatriate artists and writers, he raised his young son together with his first wife, Hadley, and was greatly impressed by these artists and writers as a young man. One recognizes the author himself in Thomas Hudson and in his son Tom Hemingway's eldest son John, who was born in 1923 and is called “Bumby” in Paris - A Festival for Life . Hemingway's sons Patrick and Gregory also show clear similarities to Thomas Hudson's sons David and Andrew, even if the former, unlike the sons of the protagonist, survived their father. The boys' detailed descriptions reveal how analytically Hemingway must have looked at his own sons.

But in contrast to The Green Hills of Africa , which Baker describes as a factual report, Islands in the Stream is a fictional novel, although this work is full of allegories and the processing of the author's own experiences and fears.

Two key questions of this novel, published as one of Hemingway's last works, are what function the accidental death of the two sons David and Andrew together with their mother at the end of the first part of Bimini in the novel , which is decisive for the main character , and why Hemingway in the second part even let the last son die in the war. In the third part of the novel, on the hunt for the survivors of a German submarine crew, Hemingway has Thomas Hudson say to himself: "Don't get vengeful now ... be happy that you have something to do ..." And one of the cutter crew says to Thomas Hudson: "You are torturing yourself to death up there [on the bridge of the cutter] because your boy is dead". This makes it clear that the protagonist sees the only way out of his insatiable pain, as in Whom the hour strikes , the pursuit of a seemingly just cause for which he is now ready to make the greatest sacrifice.

The death of loved ones and the deep tragedy and subsequent inner destruction of the protagonist are central leitmotifs in Hemingway's work, from which the power of his fiction derives and which portray the close proximity to human existence, from love to death. Even in In Another Country Hemingway leaves the wife and child of Frederic Henry, who was already marked by the war, to die and leaves them behind as a destroyed character. But despite this defeatism , Hemingway understands like no other how to let the actors draw a fatalistic and archaic will to live from defeat , even if only to do justice to life itself. The tragedy becomes the essence but also a matter of course for the life and fate of individuals.

Like no other work by Hemingway, Islands in the Stream gives an insight into the author's emotional world and his love for his wives and sons. His personal tragedy is that all his life he was unable to express this love to the outside world and to let his loved ones or his audience participate in it.

Literati

Tom met James Joyce as a child in Paris : "He was long and thin and had a mustache and a beard like a line down his chin, and he wore thick glasses and when he walked his head was straight." One can learn how to swear properly from his books. One must read Ulysses . Tom is proud to have been a friend of Joyce's. In addition to the Ulysses , Tom also tries to understand Gautier's works .

On Ezra Pound in Paris, Tom recalls also: "Mr. Pound always looked at you so friendly and always foamed at the mouth ”.

German-language literature

source

  • Ernest Hemingway: Collected Works in Ten Volumes . Volume 5: Islands in the Stream . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1977, 394 pages, ISBN 3-499-31012-0 .

expenditure

  • Ernest Hemingway: Islands in the Stream . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-499-22607-3 (= rororo-Taschenbuch 22607 ).

German first edition

Secondary literature

  • Carlos Baker: Ernest Hemingway. The writer and his work. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1967 DNB 455602115 .
  • Hans-Peter Rodenberg: Ernest Hemingway. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-499-50626-2 , pp. 67-74.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Part 1, Section 6; P. 106 of the rororo edition 1977.
  2. ↑ Part 3, Section 8, end; P. 309 of the 1977 edition of rororo.
  3. ↑ Part 3, Section 21, penultimate page of the work; P. 388 of the 1977 edition of rororo.
  4. ↑ Part 3, Section 4; P. 292 of the rororo edition 1977.
  5. ↑ Part 3, Section 4; P. 306 of the rororo edition 1977.
  6. ↑ a b Part 1, Section 5; P. 57 of the 1977 edition of rororo.