All Ernest Hemingway can see and hear, is the death and destruction of the war. But he’s looking at it as if it were a film, and he can see himself as if from the back row of an empty cinema, and there he is up on the screen, and the film looks like one of those documentaries, and he keeps looking at the camera and smiling, but it’s not really the camera he’s looking at: Hemingway is looking at himself. And for a brief moment Hemingway knows, one day, he’s going to shoot himself.

And with that thought Hemingway starts to cry, but there’s no one to hear or see him. He’s
given the staff the day off, and Mary’s gone into Havana to take a look at the shops. Perhaps now is a good time to shoot himself, he thinks. Good as any. Hemingway pours himself a drink, not a big one, just a taster. He feels better as he climbs the stairs of the tower that overlooks the Finca, opens his writing book, takes a pencil from an old tin full of pencils, and writes:

Islands in the Stream. A novel

And for three hours without a break Hemingway leans on his sloping writing board and scribbles away with pencil and after pencil until he has written over 2,000 words of the opening of the first of what he hopes will become a trilogy about the war, the trilogy he told Salinger about when they had lunch in Paris less than a year ago. And he suddenly realises that all is not lost, that something is still there waiting to be written, something that is going to be the hardest thing he has ever written, and it will be in a different style to all his other stuff: much more expressive, much more like something Lawrence might have come up with. Hell!

” But it ain’t going to come easy,” he tells himself, ” damned if it is.”

Hemingway looks at what he’s written and he knows it’s good and reads it out loud to the two dogs and four cats sprawled at his feet:

” ‘ The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbour 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 the 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.