Isolation and Loneliness

Ernest Hemingway – Islands in the Stream

A picture of the sea, chosen for its vastness (implied) - taken from the Arabic Wikipedia page on the sea via. google.

LONELINESS was definitely the most palpable feeling I experienced when reading this novel. Even during passages such as when Thomas Hudson’s children were around, even during passages when he was conversing with other men and women (mostly the latter) - it felt as if Thomas Hudson was completely isolated. I don’t feel like this was actually literally expressed in the text so much as, once again, felt.

            Picking a passage of description at random, from anywhere will yield definitely beautiful prose, and probably will be tinged with this loneliness:

           

Where Thomas Hudson lay on the mattress his head was in the shade cast by the platform at the forward end of the flying bridge where the controls were and Eddy came aft with the tall cold drink made of gin, lime juice, green coconut water, and chipped ice with just enough Angostura bitters to give it a rusty, rose colour, he held the drink in the shadow so the ice would not melt while he looked out over the sea. Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, Bimini, p.73

Here, the main feature on display seems to be the cold way in which Thomas Hudson relates to his world – the way he perceives it, Id est: the run-on sentence which (takes up the entire extract) only obtains some semblance of order and punctuation when an alcoholic beverage is described. The sea and shade here (which connotes the sky and sun, perhaps) are undeniable symbols of vastness – what are they contrasted with? Necessarily Thomas Hudson, who is, throughout, described with an isolating aloofness that necessitates his full name being written out each time, also Eddy who is here and elsewhere as vague a character as can be achieved. Here, in fact, Eddy is described as essentially being the bearer of the drink, so much as the drink actually takes up half of the sentence. Which is to say, isolation contrasted with alcoholism.

            There is the question as to what the alcoholism of Thomas Hudson is in aid of. Sure, towards the end it is Thomas Hudson’s way of avoiding the reality, or perhaps passing through the reality of, the demise of his children and the departure of the various people he has cared about:

For years he had kept an absolute rule about not drinking in the night and never drinking before he had done his work except on non-working days. But now, as he woke in the night, he felt the simple happiness of breaking training. It was the first return of any purely animal happiness or capacity for happiness that he had experienced since the cable had come. Ibid. p.176

Here, in fact, this is made explicit. However, it does not seem to be a case of “drinking to forget” in the conventional sense. Rather, here, however, we see that Thomas Hudson drinks to satisfy what he describes as an “animal happiness or capacity for happiness”. What is the animal aspect of this emotion? Thomas Hudson seems a man, if his eventual demise at the hands of war is to be considered (along with his apparent capacity for making the difficult decisions concerning war/his crew’s lives would suggest), is a man of discipline and duty – or at least, a larger part of him considers these things to be important on a grander scale than “indulgence”.

            Even in his closing moments, it is the battle which concerns Thomas Hudson first and foremost. While on this subject – and as a change of subject which doesn’t have an end insofar as the novel is just that consistently rich – the ending line of dialogue: “You never understand anybody that loves you” taken out of context could seem like a generic piece of philosophy which invites the reader to perhaps reconsider what it is that makes Thomas Hudson’s life resonate so: certainly it is not the (not quite overbearing) masculinity of the protagonist (50% feminine readership, potentially), certainly it is not the experience of profound loss (which is not, I hope universal). Realistically, it is perhaps a combination of the effortless prose’s simplicity and terse evocativeness – it is the actually universal feeling of having to deal with bad things.