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While reading Islands in the Stream, the last book that Hemingway wrote before he died, I am struck by the sadness that runs throughout the novel. Hemingway controversially considered Turgenev the greatest writer there ever was. While I love Turgenev's writing—from the sentimental First Love across the melancholy Diary of a Superfluous Man to the masterpiece that is Sketches from a Hunter's Album—it takes a certain kind of passionate partiality to call him the greatest writer there was.
More than Turgenev, the Islands evoke Chekhov's desolate Steppe for me. This may appear strange: Bimini's sun-licked beaches, improbably clear and fruitful waters, and carefree, rough-and-tumble island life versus life in the spare, vast, and unyielding Russian/Ukrainian plains. But it is not about the setting. As Thomas Hudson, the protagonist in Islands, reflects in response to a rising feeling of nostalgia for Africa, "Hell… I can always go there. You have to make it inside of yourself wherever you are."
This brings me back to sadness. As Hemingway suggests, it does not matter where in the world you are. You might be anywhere else. What matters is where you are inside yourself. You can escape into your setting only for so long; eventually, you are pulled back into yourself against everything around you (which always wins). This dynamic, for someone who is attentive to it, can be saddening, provoking thoughts about the finitude of human life, the fleetingness of experiences, and the inability to ever truly share them with another person.
This is a different kind of sadness from that caused by a particularly sad event, say, the death of a loved one. Events like that draw you in; they break attention away from your self. At least, they do initially, before there is the possibility of self-pity. In literature, imaginary events can make a reader sad like real-life events. This is the mystery and part of the beauty of fiction. It can be cathartic, as Aristotle already pointed out in his Poetics.
But the subtle kind of sadness that hangs between the land and a person, like droplets of dew clinging to grass only during the time between night and day, cannot be so easily resolved. It doesn't readily appear out in the open. It is the primordial sadness of life itself—the sadness of living, of being alive—that can only be dissipated by the other ancient power: joy. But it cannot be escaped, nor can it be forgotten.
Nabokov wrote of Chekhov's works that they were sad for humorous people, that "only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness," and that for him things "were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun.”
You have to try to find the fun in Islands. So far, Thomas' boys, his three unruly sons, mostly make the fun. Yet they will leave the island soon, as Thomas knows: back to land.
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You can order Islands in the Stream here (it’s the edition that I have).
You can read Chekhov’s The Steppe in this fantastic collection.
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