Cruising with Hemingway's Islands in the Stream
Two years ago, I turned 30 in New Orleans. It was perhaps the only time I’ve traveled somewhere convinced I’d love it and then didn’t.
Where I expected French-inflected jazz, I instead got swampy Senor Frogs; where I anticipated a long weekend of romance with my husband Emmett, I instead spent four days fretting about the meaning of my milestone birthday – the goals I hadn’t accomplished, the places I hadn’t seen, the things I hadn’t experienced. Neuroses, it turns out, can follow you anywhere. My trip passed as a strange blur of fried seafood, frozen cocktails, and frizzy hair.
But strange or not, it was my milestone birthday trip. And I promised Emmett that when he turned 30, I’d return the favor and we’d go on a vacation of his choosing. Last month, he chose a cruise to the Bahamas.
My feelings about cruises are well-known by all my friends and family, and better detailed by David Foster Wallace than by me. I’ve been on three in my life. Always with unlimited food. Always featuring comfortable rooms. Always to sunny destinations. Always with people I love. And yet I always step off the boat after seven days feeling a little bit dampened, a little bit despondent. This one was no different. My luck with 30th birthday trips is bad, even if the birthday isn’t my own.
While sailing around the Caribbean may seem like natural subject matter for a blog dedicated in part to exploring the world, cruises are more about the absence of place than the presence of it. There’s something surreal about it, really. Thousands of people gather together to experience total detachment from location – to glide through anonymous ocean, with nothing visible in any direction. To stay in windowless state rooms, sleeping late because time of day is impossible to discern. To begin to lose track of ourselves.
Though, to be fair, we did disembark in three places. The first was Port Canaveral. There, I wilted in the Central Florida heat, watching warily while Emmett swam along a stretch of Cocoa Beach where a woman had drowned just 24 hours before. We then took a taxi to the town’s canals, which were in the news for an algae bloom that turned their waters tomato soup red. The canals, it turns out, have none of Venice’s charm, and we were unable to spot the promised Campbell’s color. We did, however, see a few lizards and listen to the buzz of a million insects before catching another taxi back to the ship. Along the way, our driver gave us an oral history of the region. Strip clubs, domestic abuse, and drunk driving figured heavily into it.
Next, we swung by Grand Stirrup Cay, a private island in the Bahamas owned by Norwegian Cruise lines. It was soulless and unremarkable and entirely artificial. The less said, the better.
Finally, we visited Nassau. We wandered aimlessly, again in mirage-producing heat, but we did manage to get some sense of place. We passed locals, saw street art, and schlepped to a rum distillery purely for the air conditioning. A comparative victory.
All week long, we took few pictures, saw little of our destinations, and purchased no souvenirs. The maxim of cruising seems to be that you don’t go on one to be enriched, except perhaps with white flour.
Even literature, my longtime life-improving boredom-buster, let me down on this trip. My cruising companion was Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published story of a man named Thomas Hudson who is always referred to by his full name, even 450 pages in. Here, Hemingway seems to have taken his “write how you are but make it straight” advice a little too literally. Hudson is a barely-veiled facsimile of Hemingway himself. Like Hemingway, Hudson had three sons. Like Hemingway, Hudson loves cats. Like Hemingway, Hudson likes to fish and drink and limit his use of adjectives.
Had I not been in the middle of the ocean with little Internet, no television other than never-ending cruise commercials, and no other unread books, I likely would have thrown this book overboard by page 30. Instead, I slogged through all three parts of this novel. The first part, set in the Bahamas, recounts a summer adventure with Hudson’s three teen sons. The second – and strongest – part is set in Cuba, where Hudson is grieving their deaths and drowning his sorrows with frozen margaritas. The last part trails Hudson captaining a ship that’s hunting the Caribbean for WWII-era Germans (yes, you read that right).
At its best, Islands in the Stream is a novel about death and grief and coping (or not coping) with it. At its worst, it’s a woefully under-edited descent into a world where beer is a breakfast beverage, where black people are called “Negroes with flat faces,” and where the word vicious is in constant (over)use, employed to describe everything from women’s profiles to sibling teasing.
Hemingway’s treatment of women is particularly one-dimensional, almost meme-ably so. There are few female characters in Islands in the Stream, and the ones that do appear are ornamental. As Hemingway writes, “he liked having them there, sometimes for quite a long time. But in the end he was always glad when they were gone.” Take for example, the way in which Hemingway describes a guest of his protagonist:
“Thomas Hudson was glad to see that her legs were as good as her face and as good as her breasts that he had seen under the sweater. Her arms were lovely and all of her was brown. She had no makeup on except for her lips and she had a lovely mouth that he wanted to see with no lipstick on it.”
That said, some of the writing here is great. Hemingway has interesting things to say about the nature of loneliness, of productivity as a distraction, and of happiness. Here are some of my favorite bits:
“He had been happy before they came and for a long time he had learned how to live and do his work without ever being more lonely than he could bear; but the boys’ coming had broken up all the protective routine of life he had built and now he was used to it being broken. It had been a pleasant routine of working hard; of hours for doing things; places where things were kept and well cared for; of meals and drinks to look forward to and new books to read and many old books to reread. It had many of the inventions that lonely people use to save themselves and even achieve unloneliness with. But since the boys were here it had come as a great relief not to have to use them.”
“He has been able to replace almost everything except the children with work and the steady normal working life he had built on the island. He believed that he had made something there that would last and that would hold him. Now when he was lonesome for Paris he would remember Paris instead of going there. He did the same thing with all of Europe and much of Asia and of Africa.”
“Happiness is often presented as being very dull but that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It had always seemed more exciting than any other thing and as capable of great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.”
That last passage, about the excitement of happiness, really hit me. I’m a person who can find cause to complain about just about anything (including, as you’ve just seen, a cruise around the Caribbean with the love of my life). My husband is the opposite – a person who sees the fun and humor in just about every situation. Ask him how our trip was, for instance, and you’ll hear a very different story from the one I just told you. He’s why we’re a good team. And I’m why we’ll probably never go on another cruise again.