Islands in the Stream

After the war Hemingway announced a huge project — one big book of the land, sea, and air — and then spent years feeding it pages that never cohered into an announcement-sized whole. The sea portion, written mostly around 1950 and 1951, followed a painter named Thomas Hudson from Bimini to Cuba to open water; Hemingway mined it for other work, set the rest aside, and never published a word of it.

He died in 1961 with the manuscript in the vault, and in 1970 Mary Hemingway and Charles Scribner Jr. released it in three movements — Bimini, Cuba, At Sea — trimmed but substantially as he left it. The Bimini chapters, with Hudson's three sons, hold some of the tenderest writing of his career; the At Sea section turns his own wartime game of hunting U-boats from a fishing boat into narrative.

That last part was barely fiction: from 1942 to 1943 Hemingway really did patrol Cuban waters aboard the Pilar with government-issued equipment and a crew of friends, hoping to ambush a surfaced submarine. Readers and critics have been rearranging their rankings of the posthumous books ever since; Islands regularly comes out on top of that pile — the book where the machinery shows, and so does the heart.

Thomas Hudson is a painter of real reputation who has organized a hard-won peace on the island of Bimini: work in the morning, the Gulf Stream in the afternoon, discipline against loneliness. Into that peace come his three sons — young Tom, the eldest, child of the Paris marriage Hudson wrecked, and the two younger boys — for a summer the book renders with unbearable warmth: spearfishing, man-of-war birds, and David's marathon, heartbreaking fight with a giant broadbill. The idyll ends the way lightning strikes: a cable arrives — the two younger boys and their mother have been killed in a car accident in France.

The second movement finds Hudson in Cuba during the war, grief managed with cats, gin, and routine, painting abandoned; word comes that young Tom, flying for the RAF, has been shot down. The last movement gives Hudson's sorrow a job: commanding an armed fishing boat and a crew of irregulars — his real-life author did exactly this aboard the Pilar — hunting the survivors of a sunk German U-boat through the keys and mangrove channels of the Cuban coast.