Some strange narrative decisions by Hemingway in To Have and Have Not

For inexplicable reasons - pay-by-the-word magazine fees? - Hemingway needlessly included several chapters in the 4th story, Harry, in his novel in stages To Have and Have Not (1937); not content w/ writing a good crime novel about a charter-boat captain (the eponymous Harry) desperate for $ who agrees to run some men by night from the Keys home to their home in Cuba. The men will be carrying the proceeds from an armed robbery of a Key West bank, bringing the $ to Cuba to support their revolution. Harry plots to kill all of the men in an ambush on the southbound boat - an especially daring (if not to say stupid) move, given that Harry is one against 5 and that he has use of only one arm. Anyway, the robbery and the shootout on the boat play well (and were especially effective in the 1950 film of this work, The Breaking Point), but H strangely stops the narrative once Harry is wounded and on his way back to home port and introduces some new, and gratuitous, characters: a writer struggling with a new novel about a strike at a textile mill (must be based on someone H knew), hard drinking couples in various stages of marital breakup (must have been based on one or more of H's marital breakups), a long section about the lives and thoughts of various people on various boats in port a the marina (one of which is a clear attempt to echo Joyce's Nora soliloquy - you can almost hear EH straining against the public and critical perception of his writing - smooth, efficient, understated, often contrasted w/ Faulkner - He'll show them not to judge him too quickly!) before the narrative at last reverts to Harry on the boat entering port. I won't give the conclusion away but suffice it to say that the film adaptation consistently, right to the end, brightened and softened Harry's character, making him more sympathetic and more of a family man (and in the process scrubbing the novel of its racism, homophobia, cultural stereotypes, and drunken crudity). The book may be more real (i.e., realistic) than the film adaptation - it usually is - but the film is more palatable.