A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream, A Contextual Biography (review)

In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway asserts that the Gulf Stream contains a “flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset” (149). Hemingway’s observations about the Gulf Stream are that this flowing current of water contains representations of the world’s past in the form of floating cultural artifacts. Likewise, Mark P. Ott’s A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream, A Contextual Biography amasses the various artifacts floating in Hemingway’s biography, fiction, and criticism to create a contextual biography. Ott explores Ernest Hemingway’s relationship with the waters of the Florida Straits and focuses on connections between Hemingway’s interactions with the Gulf Steam and his fiction. A Sea of Change operates like Hemingway’s description of the Gulf Stream, as a collection of ideas which flow and ebb without a cohesive thread to link the observations. Ott works to connect the disparate elements into a coalesced exploration. The connective element drawing the disparate collection into a whole is Ott’s argument that Hemingway’s involvement with the Gulf Stream provided not only material for Hemingway’s fiction and non-fiction, but that his experiences created the opportunity for an evolution in his writing style.

Book-length biographical studies of Hemingway begin with Carlos Baker’s 1968 Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story. Ultimately, these studies make a transition from being concerned with Hemingway’s experiences to becoming more concerned with the contextual investigation of his life in relation to his fiction. Ott’s A Sea of Change follows in the wakes of the early contextual biographies of Hemingway which explored the influence which Hemingway’s time spent in the Florida Straits had on his life and his writing. Specifically, Ott appears to be augmenting the observations of James McClendon’s Papa: Hemingway in Key West, Michael Reynolds’s Hemingway: The 1930’s, Nick Lyons’s Hemingway on Fishing, Stuart B. McIver’s Hemingway’s Key West, and Hilary Hemingway and Carlene Brennan’s Hemingway in Cuba, with emphasis on the influence of Hemingway’s experiences in the Gulf Stream to his fiction.

A Sea of Change contributes to the canon of Hemingway contextual biography by exploring Hemingway’s relationship with the Gulf Stream through an investigation of the previously unpublished “Logs” from the Gulf Stream fishing trips. Ott asserts that Hemingway in the “Logs” is “trying to make a record of events so that he could recover them for his fiction” (19). Beginning with an exploration of Hemingway’s “Logs” from 1933 and 1934–35 and proceeding through discussions concerning Hemingway’s transition in style from To Have and Have Not to The Old Man and the Sea, Ott focuses on placing Hemingway’s fiction in the context of his Gulf Stream experience. Ott’s premise is that the “Logs” operate as a catalogue of Hemingway’s experiences in the Gulf Stream, and additionally, the “Logs” also perform as a literary database which Hemingway accesses for his future fiction, most importantly To Have and Have Not and The Old Man and the Sea.

Ott excavates the “Logs” as artifacts, which showcase Hemingway’s ability to function simultaneously as an artist and a scientist, an abstractionist and a realist. Ott states “The fishing logs reveal Hemingway to be a complex, subtle, and evolving writer, a man on whom nothing was lost” (109). Ott’s approach allows for some interesting rereadings of Hemingway’s writing style and content in regards to To Have and Have Not and The Old Man and the Sea. Ott links Hemingway’s fiction to his scientific meanderings such as his contribution to Connett’s American Big Game Fishing which Ott declares “demonstrates how Hemingway’s contact with the Gulf Stream was transforming him as a writer and thinker” (53). Through his investigation of the “Logs,” Ott presents Hemingway...