Read Islands in the Stream Online
Authors: Ernest Hemingway
Islands in the Stream
Hemingway’s
“Big Book About the Sea”
ISLANDS IN
THE STREAM
With a variety of themes and moods, dynamic action scenes and—unexpectedly—a rich and ribald sense of humor, ISLANDS IN THE STREAM tells a story closely resembling Hemingway’s life.
Thomas Hudson is “a good painter.” His solitary life of artistic self-discipline on the lush Caribbean island of Bimini is interrupted by a visit from his three lively sons. In a thrilling descriptive scene, David, the middle boy, shows his courage when attacked by a shark and his endurance while fighting a thousand-pound swordfish. It is an initiation into manhood.
Years later, Hudson is in Cuba mourning the death of his oldest son. A chance encounter with his first wife renews their passionate commitment to each other.
In the final episode, a masterpiece of action and adventure, Hudson captains an improvised Q-boat hunting down the survivors of a German submarine. This assignment requires a kind of discipline wholly different from his creative life as a painter—but no less important to his integrity. It is Thomas Hudson’s most important battle.
“I don’t have to be proud of it. I only have to do it well.—Thomas Hudson
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
“A complete, well-rounded novel, a contender with his very best ... It is 100-proof Old Ernest!”
—The New York Times Book Review
“There are brilliant descriptions in the famous Hemingway style ... When he describes the close bonds of love and hate between a group of men who are engaged in a tight and dangerous adventure with death as the ultimate stake, he remains unbeatable in his craft.”
—Maxwell Geismar,
Chicago Sun-Times Showcase
“Remarkably alive with voice and muscle ... Hemingway never displayed a brawnier wit ... There are memories of Paris as pungent and vivid as anything in A Moveable Feast. And the fishing episode ... is only slightly less dazzling than Santiago’s struggle in The Old Man and the Sea.”—Charles Lee, Philadelphia Bulletin
“Incredibly moving and powerful.”
—Robert Kirsch.
Los Angeles Times Calendar
“This book contains some of the best of Hemingway’s descriptions of nature: the waves breaking white and green on the reef off the coast of Cuba; the beauty of the morning on the deep water; the hermit crabs and land crabs and ghost crabs; a big barracuda stalking mullet; a heron flying with his white wings over the green water; the ibis and flamingoes and spoonbills, the last of these beautiful with the sharp rose of their color; the mosquitoes in clouds from the marshes; the water that curled and blew under the lash of the wind; the sculpture that the wind and sand had made of a piece of driftwood, gray and sanded and embedded in white, floury sand.”
—Edmund Wilson,
The New Yorker
“Many of the episodes contain the most exciting and effective writing Hemingway has ever done.”
—John W. Aldridge,
Saturday Review
“Marvelously alive, moving quickly and showing glimmers of joy and humor that you might never have noticed in his work before.”
—Bruce Cook,
National Observer
“A part of American literary history, and his fans must read it, as they read all the rest with varying degrees of emotion, exhilaration and just plain joy.”
—William Hogan,
San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“An immensely touching book.”
—Hal Burton,
Newsday
“I fell in love with the book at first sight ... caught up by the Hemingway voice (never truer nor more relaxed) ... A lovely, loving work, deeply sad and deeply felt.”
—Mary Ellin Barrett,
Cosmopolitan
“As haunting as any fiction that Hemingway ever wrote.”
—Nicholas Joost,
St Louis Globe-Democrat
“The work of an estimable writer ... Hemingway’s voice is still effective, hauntingly so.”
—Bernard Oldsey,
The Nation
Books by Ernest Hemingway
ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES
*BY-LINE: ERNEST HEMINGWAY
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
A FAREWELL TO ARMS
*THE FIFTH COLUMN AND FOUR UNPUBLISHED
STORIES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
THE GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA
THE HEMINGWAY READER
IN OUR TIME
*ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
MEN AT WAR
MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
*A MOVEABLE FEAST
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
THE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO AND OTHER STORIES
THE SUN ALSO RISES
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
THE TORRENTS OF SPRING
WINNER TAKE NOTHING
*Published by Bantam Books
ISLANDS
IN THE
STREAM
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A NATIONAL GENERAL COMPANY
This low-priced Bantam Book
has been completely reset in a type face
designed for easy reading, and was printed
from new plates. It contains the complete
text of the original hard-cover edition
.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
A Bantam Book
/
published by arrangement with
Charles Scribner’s Sons
PRINTING HISTORY
Scribner’s edition published October 1970
2nd printing
.....
October 1970
Book-of-the-Month Club edition published October 1970
Bantam edition published February 1972
Excerpts appeared in
ESQUIRE
September 1970
Map by Samuel H. Bryant
Copyright © 1970 by Charles Scribner’s Sons
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1970 by Mary Hemingway.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by
mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For information address: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
597 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.
Published simultaneously in the united States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc., a National General company. Its trade-mark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a bantam, Is registered in the United States Patent Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10019.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Charles Scribner, Jr. and I worked together preparing this book for publication from Ernest’s original manuscript. Beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernest’s. We have added nothing to it.
MARY HEMINGWAY
Part I
BIMINI
I
The house was built
on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach.
It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting in the edge of the Stream and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.