Do you know the sin it would be to ruffle the arrangement of the feathers on a hawk's neck if they could never be replaced as they were?—

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Watch how a man plays a game, says the regimental folklore, and you'll see what sort of man he is. For Ernest Hemingway, whose regimental credentials are second to none, the connection between sports and life has always been central to both the writer and the man. From even a cursory examination of the Hemingway canon and its critical commentary, one is sure to learn that Hemingway's fictional sports are stages for ritualized conflict wherein the hero is tested for his behaviour under extreme physical and psychological pressure.

The blood sports, such as hunting and fishing and boxing and bullfighting, are to be preferred. Their violence takes one to the confrontive edge. They resemble warfare rather than play and are, as such, fit metaphors for the ultimate warfare of life, whose purpose is, after all, to kill you. “They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. … You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you” (A Farewell to Arms 327). Sooner or later you lose, but what matters, as Philip Young first made clear to us, is how you play the game (Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration 55-78).

To invert a line by Robert Frost in “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” the play is work for mortal stakes in Hemingway. And if, as Frost's speaker claims, the object in living is to unite one's avocation and one's vocation, then Hemingway darkly succeeded where Frost's woodchopper did not, his code resolve wavering before the obligation to his fellow creatures, the two rough tramps who need the work of chopping that he merely loves.

Love and need for Hemingway are made of grimmer stuff. An early and justly famous Hemingway story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” illustrates not only the carefully prescribed code of streamside behavior, but also the peculiar drive toward conflict and deathful adventure in what most readers would surely, on the face of it, regard as a restorative pastoral experience—camping beside, and fishing, a lovingly remembered river. “God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling,” said Isaac Walton in The Compleat Angler (262), but Hemingway's Nick Adams is looking for something more. At first the experience is restorative for Nick, back from the war and regaining his hold on his nerves. Still, there is only the barest mention of mental conflict in the story, and Nick is repeatedly described as cheerful and content.¹ Near the end of his first day, he crawls into his little tent, happy, the form of the sentences themselves suggesting Nick's tired but satisfied sense of rightness and control over things: “He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place” (215).

In the second half of the story, Nick's fishing experiences the next day on the stream continue his pattern of deliberate and pleasurable behavior. Fishing intensifies the sense of simplicity and control that Nick seeks: he with his rod on one end; nature, alive, in the form of a fish, on the other; and a taut line joining the two. Thus far, the story has followed a simple pastoral line, the hero having withdrawn from some threatening scene on the horizon into the green world. Here the beauty and order of the setting permeate the young man's spirit and act to restore his inner equilibrium. The story might well end at this point, but it will not end until Hemingway has given it his inevitable twist toward darkness. The twist presents itself as a swamp that Nick approaches as he fishes his way down the river. It is a place where at first Nick does not want to go. “He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it” (231).

“So startling is the word ‘tragic’ here,” writes critic Richard Hovey, “that we wonder what must be the matter with Nick.”² Exactly. This brown study astonishes us all. Even more startling is our realization, by the end of the story, that Nick does want to fish the swamp, and that Hemingway wants it for him. The river must be two-hearted, both healing and tragic.³ The story closes with Nick cleaning the two big trout he has caught and walking back to his camp. “He looked back. The river just showed through the trees. There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (232). The shift from restoration to conflict, from fishing as Walton's calm and innocent recreation to a threatening test of the individual spirit, from pastoral to tragedy—this is the indispensable Hemingway note. It continues, in our own time, to yield up new meanings for our consideration.

It was in the writing of “Big Two-Hearted River” that Hemingway first felt he had it in him to become a great writer. Before the waters of the big two-hearted river deepened to the Gulf Stream and Hemingway's greatest fish story of all—perhaps his greatest book of all—The Old Man and the Sea, nearly thirty years passed. In order to treat that late Hemingway masterwork adequately, it is necessary to consider the direction of his life and work in those intervening years. During this time the Hemingway legend formed itself around his rejoinder, both personal and literary, to what he perceived as a chaotic and murderous world. He had good evidence for such a view. George Steiner, in his book In Bluebird's Castle, cites the annihilation of 70 million people in Europe and Russia between the start of the First World War and the end of the Second, roughly the years of Hemingway's development as a writer. Reminding us of myriad smaller wars, as well as the two World Wars and the new possibility of global nuclear annihilation, Philip Young writes that “we may argue against Hemingway's world, but we should not find it easy to prove that it is not the world we have been living in” (Ernest Hemingway 45).

The famous Hemingway response was a world-model, narrow but compelling, that was to enclose and direct his writing for the remainder of his career. Two essential elements of that unique Hemingway consciousness were, first, a primitivistic conception of the natural world and one's proper behavior within it, and, second, a theory of literary tragedy. What follows here is a questioning of whether these two concepts were reconcilable, codifiable, in Hemingway's work. My contention is that they proceed from fundamentally warring assumptions and that their mutual antipathy finds its most memorable—but deeply troubling—expression in the story of the battle between fisherman and fish in The Old Man and the Sea.

RECONSIDERING HEMINGWAY'S PRIMITIVISM

In his introduction to The Viking Portable Hemingway in 1944, Malcolm Cowley reminded his readers that Hemingway was often described as a primitive. But, wrote Cowley, the term needed to be shifted from its artistic to its anthropological sense. Hemingway created, Cowley maintained, Indian-like heroes who survive in a world of hostile forces by acts of propitiation and ritual, and—in the face of the failure of these acts—by stoic acceptance of what must come. Memories of Indians whom Hemingway had encountered during his boyhood summers up in Michigan are reworked, as Cowley claimed, in The Torrents of Spring, in several of the Nick Adams stories, and in Robert Jordan's behavior in For Whom the Bell Tolls (Cowley xviii-xx). Responding in kind, Hemingway referred to himself, in a letter to Cowley occasioned by the 1949 reprinting of The Portable Hemingway, as an old Cheyenne. He wrote Charles Scribner that he had “a Cheyenne great-great grandmother” and called attention in another letter to his father's “Indian blood.” Elsewhere, Hemingway proudly described his third son, Gregory, with his cool athletic prowess, as “a real Indian boy (Northern Cheyenne)” or as a “Northern Cheyenne Indian angel.”⁴ In essays published in the mid-1960s, Wallace Stegner reasserted Cowley's claim, concluding that Hemingway's were “essentially Indian virtues” (198, 184).

Recognizing that Cowley and Stegner were referring to the primitivism of Hemingway's fictional heroes and that the distinction between Hemingway the man and his literary creations must be acknowledged, it can nevertheless be maintained that the two are closely interconnected—Hemingway, for example, assuring Cowley and other recipients of his letters that he came by the Indianness of his fictional heroes honestly. More importantly, Hemingway's life and art share a paradoxical symbiosis with the natural world in which the author's primitivism is rooted. In this respect Hemingway's perceived Indian virtues deserve to be reexamined in a contemporary context for both their anthropological and their artistic significance.

In its broadest terms Hemingway's primitivism can be seen as a return to earth, Thoreau-like, to confront the essential facts of life and reduce life to its most elemental terms. Hemingway's primitivism found personal expression in his lifelong search for unspoiled natural settings and the elemental experiences that fed his appetite for conflict and violence: big-game hunting in Africa, bullfights and guerrilla warfare in Spain, World War I and II battle experiences, deep-sea fishing on the Gulf Stream, “high on the wild” in the mountains of Idaho, rejecting, as Richard Lehan notes, “all patterns of continuity—historical or literary—which took precedence over the self” (197). Hemingway put this rejection into a famous passage in Green Hills of Africa:

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow away in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don't know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like Mongolia.

… Our people went to America because that was the place to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a bloody mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always gone. … We always went in the old days and there were still good places to go.

I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could shoot and fish. That, and writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing.

(284-85)

The characteristic objection of Lehan and other critics to Hemingway's primitivism is that it is a denial of contemporary society and an avoidance of the issues faced in modern lives. But a further concern needs exploring: not that Hemingway rejects intellect and society in favor of primitive values and “rhythms of life and death and the land” (Lehan 196), but rather that he often turns against the earth itself in his version of primitivism, adopting an aggressive and isolated individualism that wars against those natural manifestations he reveres. “In rebellion against death,” as Hemingway described himself, loving the sensations and pleasures of the natural world yet also hating its implacable cycle that denied him immortality, Hemingway seemed compelled to exact a retribution from nature before it could claim him. “I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won't kill myself,” A. E. Hochner reports Hemingway saying. “When a man is in rebellion against death as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes, that of giving it.”⁵

The Hemingway body count against the earth, both in fiction and in life, is startlingly high. The letters are particularly revealing on this score. When one attempts to derive a total from the photographs and letters and writing of a lifetime, the real-life Hemingway kill record is astonishing: not only big-game animals (lions, leopards, buffalo, rhinoceros, kudu, sable, bears, elk, and so forth) in Africa and the American West, including some of the last grizzly bears outside protected ares in America, but also shoals of marlin, tuna, dolphin, tarpon, kingfish, and sea turtles—and even a sixty-foot whale that he claimed to have harpooned and lost.⁶ To this can be added the shooting of sharks for sport with a Thompson submachine gun and the killing of such nongame species as a flying eagle, giant bustards, cranes, magpies, coyotes, porcupines, and snakes.⁷

Then there is the “dirty joke” of shooting hyenas for entertainment, watching their “highly humorous” antics, “racing the little nickelled death inside,” one circling madly, pulling out his own intestines and eating them as he died (Green Hills 37-38). Even when Hemingway is obviously fabricating, as when he claims, like his fictional Colonel Cantwell, to have killed 122 men “besides the possibles,” the need for such assertion is itself revealing.⁸ Thus Hemingway exacts a considerable price from the natural world. He overcomes his own sense of guilt saying, “I did nothing that had not been done to me” and “they all had to die” (Green Hills 148, 272).

The paradox of Hemingway's primitivism, then, arises from its countertendency to war against the earth, to exploit the natural world for self-aggrandizement. His unique brand of primitivism characteristically rejects those perceptions—the interconnectedness of all life, the harmonious sense of oneness with the world, the ability to understand and use complex natural processes without destroying them, the acceptance of death as part of an inevitable and nonthreatening flow of existence—that enable the actual indigenous people to exist in the sort of nondestructive relationship with their surroundings that Hemingway paradoxically admired, and that left the country as he liked to find it. True, Hemingway does not exclude himself from the pioneering exploiters of nature in the Green Hills of Africa passage. He says, “we are the intruders,” and he claims the privilege of ruining new lands just as his white forebears had ruined ours. He understood firsthand how places like the Michigan old-growth forests were destroyed, as he reveals in the story, “The Last Good Country.” But Hemingway also clearly considered himself a defender of and a spokesman for the natural world. We recall his claim to Maxwell Perkins that the point of The Sun Also Rises “was that the earth abideth forever—having a great deal of fondness for the earth and not a hell of a lot for my generation. … I didn't mean the book to be a hollow or a bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero” (Selected Letters 229).

Can there can be fashioned a tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero? This becomes a crucial question in Hemingway, perhaps even more so for his readers today and in the future. Tragedy, Joseph Meeker has claimed, is in its essence a denial of the earth and its nobility or heroism in favor of a vaulting human protagonist who refuses to accept even the natural bounds placed upon all people (Comedy, 1974, 51-59). While this sense of defiant individualism warring against the natural order is not found in all tragedy, and Meeker's generalization must be qualified, it is evident that much of Hemingway's work reflects this aggressive assertion of human will over the abiding earth. Hemingway's stoicism, his deference to ritual and taboo—these may be primitivistic, but they are accompanied by little evidence of the autochthon's humility before the powers of the natural world and the inevitability of death. For Hemingway death was a cruel and hateful trick, malevolently claiming the best and bravest for its first victims. Hemingway's aim is always to control and manage what he conceives of as hostile forces.

The characteristic Hemingway ethic places heroic selfhood above the wider sense of obligation to the earth to which the author's avowed primitivism might be expected to bind him. In Hemingway's famous definition, “moral is what you feel good after.” This contrasts pointedly with an earth-centered ethic such as that expressed by Aldo Leopold, who wrote that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.”⁹ Nature exists in Hemingway's work and life primarily as a backdrop for aggressive and destructive individualism, the same individualism which, written large, has authored ecological devastation and poisoned the organic origins of the contemporary society that Hemingway turned to nature to escape.

For Hemingway and the late nineteenth century into which he was born, the powerful evolutionary discoveries of the midcentury had been popularly distilled into Herbert Spencer's catchphrase “survival of the fittest,” a partially understood concept that seemed to characterize the natural world as only a vast killing ground. It was a perception that shared at least one misunderstanding with the earlier romanticism it replaced: that nature was simple. A fuller comprehension of evolutionary nature by Hemingway might have understood fitness to include those best equipped by evolution to survive not only through their killing ability but through other means of adaptation by way of other natural processes, such as cooperation, reciprocation, niche filling, or simply leaving more offspring. It might have demonstrated to him that patterns of interdependence within nature and between organisms and their natural environment are even more complex and more rigorously demanding than those on the human, societal level and are not subsumable into the one paradigm of dog eat dog.

Something of Hemingway's biological thinking is evident in his passage dealing with the great, indifferent power of the sea to cleanse itself, as he described the Gulf Stream, into which Havana dumps its daily bargeloads of garbage: “The stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn-out light bulbs of our discoveries, and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream” (Green Hills 150).

Yet Hemingway might have come to realize by the end of his life that even the sea—a brilliantly stylized metaphor for time in this passage, but also, still, the sea—was not inexhaustible in its powers of renewal. Recalling his father's claim that there would not be a trace of the Havana garbage a few miles downstream, Hemingway's son, Gregory, child of a later age, wrote in his memoir that “even the sea can endure only so much,” as he described the degradation of the Gulf Stream waters in more recent times (25).

Hemingway, not as primitivist but as literary modern, had in an important sense left the world itself—the heroic, enduring earth—far behind. As a modern and as an artist, he was a maker of his world, and he found and refined his unique selfhood in repeated acts of will and creativity that shaped, over and over, world and event and character into the paradigm he perceived. But his making, his proclaiming of his own uniqueness, also necessitated a destruction or diminishment of the natural world that he loved and revered. The harmonious sense of self and world is not sufficient for the artist Hemingway. Instead, he turns—as had Nick Adams in the prophetic early story, “Big Two-Hearted River”—from the healing open river to the swamp, the stage setting of tragic adventure.

To summarize, those who find Hemingway engaged in returning us to our primitive origins may have so misunderstood primitivism as to assume that Hemingway's compulsive, ritualized repetition of the life-death confrontation was its central experience. Rather, it is the central experience of tragedy, an art form which, in its tradition in the literature of the Western world, is unique. Hemingway's imposition of a theory of literary tragedy upon his primitive settings and apparently primitivistic characters and value systems was not without its price.

TRAGEDY AND THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

Originated by the Greeks and shaped by Judeo-Christian beliefs, literary tragedy is exclusively a product of the Western and modern world, a distinctive creation arising from the same aggressive conquest of nature that Hemingway recounts in his Green Hills of Africa statement. For the essence of much tragedy is its focus upon hubris, the elevation of the individual will above all other considerations. The tragic hero, as Meeker writes,

demonstrates that unique human individuals are capable of experiences that go beyond the capacity of humanity in general. … Neither the laws of nature nor the laws of men are absolute boundaries to the tragic hero, but are rather challenges which he must test by attempting to transcend them. … The suffering which accompanies his struggle or results from it is merely a price that must be paid for his momentary freedom from the restraints accepted by all other creatures. … Personal greatness is achieved at the cost of great destruction … but … any price is justified for the fulfillment of the unique personality.

(Comedy, 1974, 50-51)

Meeker may slight the extent to which, in modern tragedy, world and protagonist must jointly be found guilty in the fall of the individual. In “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Arthur Miller, for example, argues both as critic and playwright that tragedy is born out of our sense of something wrongfully denied to the individual by society. But although a greater ambiguity may be present in the portrayal of outside forces and the individual in modern tragedy, Meeker's claim for the genre's insistence upon human uniqueness and self-fulfillment remains valid. That this central consideration is the unique product of Western thinking—and is thus not a human universal—is affirmed by several critics of tragedy and is underscored by the response of Asian scholar Naozo Ueno to The Old Man and the Sea. Of Santiago's defiant response that “man can be destroyed but not defeated,” Ueno writes that this same assertion “echoes over and over again in the literature of the West, from the pronouncement of Lucifer in Paradise Lost to the final passage of Tennyson's ‘Ulysses.’ Man becomes supreme and different from any other creature on earth through his assertion of will power. This is where the Orient cannot follow.”¹⁰

Biologist David Sloan Wilson claims, in this regard, that “[m]odern western thought is derived from the Greek system and is mistaken by western social scientists as universal human nature” (248). Tellingly, modern existential tragedy has claimed Hemingway as one of its primary exponents, as John Killinger's Hemingway and the Dead Gods reveals. Existential tragedy, Killinger argues, stresses even more strongly than its classical forebears the elevation of the individual as “separated from all other beings, human or nonhuman,” “the only vital entity of existence,” with all that such a concern implies as to the worth and relevance of all entities outside the self (2, 97).

Man's need to achieve on a grand scale, to realize himself without any limitation, to attack that which hedges and limits him, even if it means as assault upon nature itself—this defiance informs much of the tragic spirit. The tradition of tragedy appealed strongly to Hemingway on one level, because it fused his desire to assert the importance of the individual with his need to strike back at what he regarded as cruel and purposeless fate. But on another level, tragedy located the author of that fate in the same nature whose evidences of unquestionable nobility and beauty likewise compelled Hemingway's allegiance.¹¹ Hemingway's aim, as much expressed by his last major novel as it was intended for his first—to write a tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero—was caught upon this dilemma: that tragedy depicts an earth which, although it may be present only metaphorically in the drama, must yield up its nobility to a human hero whose usurping of that nobility is accompanied by profound misgivings. For this vexation of the heart, the greatest primitivist Hemingway hero, Santiago, the fisherman of The Old Man and the Sea, gives evidence that tragedy is not something that one feels good after.

In The Old Man and the Sea the elements of primitivism and tragedy are given their most searching treatment, resulting in what has often been seen as the capstone of Hemingway's fictional achievement. Included in the high praise for the novel is the claim that it is Hemingway's final testament of acceptance, his coming to peaceful terms with the natural world.¹² This assessment of the novel as an all-embracing affirmation of life is commonly found in criticism of the book, indicating a widely shared reader experience.

At the same time the central figure of the story, an old Cuban fisherman who catches an enormous marlin far out on the Gulf Stream and then loses it to sharks before he can return to land, represents the indisputable tragic hero, strongly affirming the spirit of man in conflict with natural laws. That Hemingway can successfully hold in tension these competing forces, the abiding sea and the tragic will of man, through so much of the novel is in no small measure attributable to his choice of hero. Santiago is a virtual Pleistocene archetype in his keen biophilial awareness and his store of skills, which seem to be the distilled accumulation of generations of tradition. With his crude skiff and his hand lines, he is as close as one could imagine to a virtual Stone Age fisherman living in the mid-twentieth century. Santiago is intended to be both the vessel of his author's conception of primitivist natural nobility and of tragic consciousness. But he becomes, by the end of the story, a tragic hero whose sense of the nobility of nature proves inadequate and unequal to his pride.

Among the most thorough of all the treatments of naturalistic and humanistic elements in the book is Bickford Sylvester's “Hemingway's Extended Vision: The Old Man and the Sea.” Sylvester argues for Hemingway's portrayal of “a fundamental natural principle of harmonious opposition,” “a natural law man is permitted to follow” (85, 94). Yet such a principle, though operative through much of the story, does not adequately explain Santiago's persistent sense of sin as he struggles to justify to himself his killing of the nobility of nature, the great marlin, much as he loves the bodies of the heavens and thinks of them as his friends and yet would be challenged to destroy them, given the opportunity: “‘The fish is my friend too,’ he said aloud. ‘I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.’ Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought” (75).

It is man's nature to kill, and Santiago is a man—more properly still, for all of his natural associations, a Hemingway man—in whom there is such pride as to lead him to strike, Ahab-like, at the sun and the stars themselves, had he been given the opportunity. Indeed, Santiago's claim is more outrageous than that of Ahab, who at least posited a sun that had insulted him. It is as if, for the Hemingway man, the sun's existence itself is sufficient insult.

Man was born lucky, thinks Santiago, not to have to face this challenge, since—the implication seems clear—he would accept any challenge offered him even if, as in the killing of the sun, it meant his own destruction and that of all life. Reading this in our own time, it seems impossible not to find irony in Santiago's readiness to wreak cosmic annihilation by his own hand. “I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers” (75). That is, it is good that we are spared the irresistible opportunity to make war on the universe. It is sufficient to be limited to killing the noble creatures of the earth, our own true brothers. The latent irony here becomes stronger in the hours following the marlin's death, when the arguments about the rightness of his act move back and forth in Santiago's mind between guilt and necessity, those two elements which, as Paul Tillich claims, are the essence of tragedy (see Sewell 178).

So the book takes us more deeply than any of Hemingway's other works into the conflict between tragic individualism and the magnificence of nature. Conscious of the defects of his own moral system, Santiago is both his own assertive hero and his own chastising chorus, alternately proclaiming and questioning his tragic pride.

“The truly great killer … must be a simple man,” Hemingway had once contended (Death in the Afternoon 232). Santiago reveals a compassion and a complexity in his repeated questioning of his killing of the marlin that makes him less than a good killer. A very special primitive, he has too much of the modern's—that is to say, Hemingway's—self-awareness for the naive, all-engrossing sense of simplicity that Hemingway saw in the great killers of the bullring. Santiago's failings as a killer are, at the same time, the reason for our interest in him and the mark of his advance over the assertive individualism of his predecessors in the Hemingway canon. Yet he is a killer, after all, and he goes down chanting, however uneasily, the old Hemingway verities.

One might posit, in Santiago's final dream of the lions at play on the beach, the image that closes the book, a new vision of a peaceable kingdom, an expiation of the sense of sinful killing with which Santiago has charged himself. Arvin Wells argues that the lions “have put aside their majesty and have grown domestic and familiar. It is as if they gave themselves up to the old man, to his love, without the necessity of further trial or guilt or suffering, and that they suggest a final harmony between the old man and the ‘fierce heart of nature’” (101). But this dream of the lions must be balanced against the rest of the book, against Santiago's climactic cry for destruction but never defeat and his reminder to the boy, Manolin, that they must fashion a new killing lance to replace the one he has lost in his epic battle.¹³

As great as it is, The Old Man and the Sea is no testament of acceptance. The self-exaltation of tragedy does not permit it to be. In Hemingway's fine but narrow world, there is no room to maneuver except at the edge of death, no arresting of the cycle in which one must go forth to kill one's brothers, turning to the natural world as the arena for human greatness but effecting thereby its further diminishment.

For Santiago nature is something other than a system in which “each thing has its place in a giant symbiosis” (Williams 178). Rather, it is a “great sea with our friends and our enemies,” creatures judged in Santiago's mind according to how they serve or hinder him (Old Man and Sea 120). The friends are those who promote Santiago's freedom and happiness, the enemies those who restrict that freedom and happiness. The two sides are clearly marked out in the narrative. The porpoises are good: “They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish” (48). The Portuguese man-of-war is an enemy, agua mala, a “whore,” beautiful but with filaments poisonous to man (though not to the small fish who swim among these filaments). Santiago loves to see the turtles (friends) eat the men-of-war, and he likes to walk on them, popping them under his feet, when they are washed up on the beach (35-36). The sharks are bad because they prey upon the turtles and upon his catch, although he admires the Mako shark for its bravery and beauty. The rest of the sharks are despised as scavengers. We are told that Santiago eats the eggs of the benevolent turtle for strength and that he drinks a cup of shark-liver oil each day as a protection against colds and grippe and to help his eyes (37). Whether Santiago recognizes his obligations to both his sea friends and enemies for his good health is not revealed.

If The Old Man and the Sea approaches a humanistic ethic or a truce with nature that pleased many of Hemingway's critics, one finds no evidence that this testament of acceptance could transcend its anthropocentrism. It does not include a recognition that the villainous shark, for example, is no less necessary to the nobility of the sea than the marlin and the porpoise and the turtle; that the elimination of the shark would threaten the other species on whom it preys; that, by taking the wounded or the feeble or the slow or the old, the shark ensures the survival of the healthiest and strongest; that the shark, by trimming the numbers of fish, keeps their proportions appropriate to the food supply. Hence there is more at issue in Santiago's self-doubts than Greek hubris or Christian pride. Beyond these, there is the greater folly of his assumption that the only order to the biotic world is that which his limited understanding can provide.

Aldo Leopold once claimed that we need to learn to think like a mountain, which depends on its predators to keep its deer population from exploding and denuding its slopes of vegetation, eventually causing starvation and erosion and thus the death of deer and mountain alike (137-41). Thinking like a man may characterize the shark and the man-of-war as our enemies. But thinking like the sea—if Hemingway could at last have fully conceived that tragedy in which the earth endures as hero—requires a longer view, an awareness that these creatures, too, are members of an ecosystem that man is not privileged to exterminate for real or assumed self-benefits, nor to attempt to shape to his own often self-destructive purposes.

As Chaman Nahal observes, in Santiago's “‘They beat me, Manolin. They truly beat me,’” (124), “they” is “the plurality of life that surrounds the old man—the plurality that includes the old man, but also includes the gulf weed, the shrimp, the man-of-war bird, the delicate tern, the schools of bonito and albacore, the tuna and the flying fish, the dolphin, the turtle, the plankton, the warbler, the big marlin and all the sharks” (179). But this realization, the fullest implication of Santiago's “‘I went out too far,’” seems to elude Santiago, who still attributes his beating to the sharks. To Manolin's “‘He didn't beat you. Not the fish,’” Santiago replies, “‘No. Truly. It was afterwards’” (124).

If The Old Man and the Sea is, as Clinton Burhans, Jr., claims, the “culminating expression” of Hemingway's concern for “the relationship between individualism and interdependence,” it still falls short of considering that interdependence in its fullest sense (73). That conception could be realized only by integrating all parts of the world that the novel yearns to encompass into a perception larger than the transcendence or salvation of the individual human agent within it.

“THE EARTH ABIDING FOREVER”

When Hollywood was filming The Old Man and the Sea off Cuba during the summer of 1955, Hemingway joined the film crew and led the hunt for a marlin of one thousand pounds or more to be used in the fish-fighting scenes. But although they caught four-hundred-pounders, the giant fish were not there that season and the filming had to be stopped. The following spring Hemingway and the film crew moved to Capo Blanco, Peru, reputed to have big marlin. After thirty-two days and only one suitable big fish—films of which were unusable because of bad light conditions—this expedition, too, was scrapped. The story was eventually filmed almost entirely in a tank on a Hollywood sound stage and featured a marlin made of foam rubber and plastic.¹⁴

Whether or not Hemingway might have seen some relationship between the scarcity of big fish in these later years and the general and unrestrained practice of hauling them in for photograph and market and freezer, we do not know. But Gregory Hemingway's account at this time of his father's returning a marlin to the sea (“something I'd never seen him do before” saying, “‘I'd rather release him and give him his life back and have him enjoy it, than immortalize him in a photograph’” [73]) is perhaps significant in view of continuing references in Hemingway's later letters and writings to the unresolved dilemma expressed by Santiago.

In a hunting article published in 1951, Hemingway announced that “the author of this article, after taking a long time to make up his mind, and admitting his guilt on all counts, believes that it is a sin to kill any non-dangerous game animal except for meat” (“The Shot” 369). A year later he wrote to Harvey Breit, in a reference to Faulkner's “The Bear,” that “I think it is a sin to kill a black bear, because he is a fine animal that likes to drink, that likes to dance, and that does no harm and that understands better than any other animal when you speak to him. … I have killed enough of them since I was a boy to know it is a sin. It isn't just a sin I invented.”¹⁵ During his 1953 African safari, Hemingway was more interested in watching animals than in killing them.¹⁶

These intimations of a change in sensibility, occurring at about the time of the writing of The Old Man and the Sea, suggest that Santiago's inner struggle between feelings of wrongdoing and necessity may be related to his creator's own questioning of long-held beliefs as he approached the end of his career. Hemingway's love for nature was a central and immutable tenet in his system of beliefs. Like some latter-day Antaeus, seemingly invincible so long as he remained in touch with his sustaining earth, Hemingway orchestrated his life and work to accommodate his need for that contact. Did he question at last whether the imposition of a tragic and aggressive individualism upon his loved earth had claimed too high a cost?

Certainly, up to the final stages of his career, Hemingway's was essentially not an Indian's but a mountain man's mentality in its relationship to the wild, an attitude that could assert that “a country was made to be as we found it” and yet could, in the name of defiant individualism, lead the assault by which it would be ruined. The next generation would find itself trying to make the best of a diminished thing. Hemingway's sons, whom he had carefully instructed in hunting and fishing, found, at last, that they could not follow these pursuits on their father's terms. Jack, the eldest, became a Fish and Game commissioner in his home state of Idaho, charged with enforcing the game laws for which his father, as a younger man, had had slight regard.¹⁷ Patrick, the second son, became a professional hunter and then a teacher at the College of African Wildlife Management in Tanzania, where African students learn principles of wildlife preservation and management (4). Gregory, the youngest, also attempted, then gave up, a career as a hunting guide in Africa: “I shot eighteen elephants one month, God save my soul” (10).¹⁸

Yet it is the father's aggressive and tragic individualism that has memorably defined an age. Art, Hemingway said in Green Hills of Africa, was what lasted. “A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance except those who practiced the arts. … a work of art endures forever” (109). Art endures, but the earth endures also, and whether it endures as poisoned wasteland or nuclear cinder—an ironic tribute to the assertive will and its goads to fame or power—or as the last good country is now a question of more than speculative importance. The earth has become—even in the evolutionary eye blink since The Old Man and the Sea—more than a protean form for the artist. It exists now as a locus of profound human concern, threatened as never before. The private anxieties of Nick Adams, back on the Big Two-Hearted River, have expanded to encompass a universal dread. To the great power of Hemingway's best work to make us see and feel, to teach us how it was, we can also add that it has dramatized for us how we have reached our precarious present.

It is, of course, unfair to hold Hemingway accountable to the ecological standards of a later time. The issues raised here go beyond those of contemporary environmentalism, looking back with twenty-twenty hindsight, because they have always been Hemingway's concerns as well. Despite his fixation upon the dealing of death, any summing up of the ecological Hemingway must acknowledge that among the animals his insights are as unmatched as his conquests. What ties us to animals, in literature or in life, is our evolutionary heritage and the deep sense of interconnection between us and them. W. D. Hamilton voiced a common sociobiological view in his claim that “[p]ractically none of our basic behaviour, perhaps only our linguistic behaviour and even that uncertainly, is wholly unique to humans” (259). Darwin postulated in his works a psychological as well as a biological line of continuity between humans and nonhuman animals. Hemingway's artistic portrayals of such encounters seem a dramatization of the validity of Darwin's hypothesis. One thinks of Santiago's memory of the female marlin he had once hooked, whose mate stayed with her all through the fight, and when she was hauled into the boat, “the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep” and stayed down. “That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them” (49-50).¹⁹ Similarly, the Hemingway reader may remember how, in “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Hemingway takes us into the consciousness of the wounded lion and the animal's sense of what he must do, thus expanding our circle of moral awareness and responsibility beyond that of only the human participants.²⁰

The more we study ethology, the less “anthropomorphism” seems readily dismissable, the less a “fallacy.” As Reg Morrison points out in The Spirit in the Gene, anthropomorphism “used to be considered sloppy science,” as if such thinking might undermine the respect due us as the only species possessing consciousness. We hear less of that today, Morrison notes, as increasing evidence of our close linkage to other animals becomes known. Yet, in an ironic sense, the taboo against anthropomorphism is correct: “Indeed, no animal displays human behavior. Quite the reverse. Humans display only animal behavior. Watch the action without the sound track and this truth becomes obvious” (xiv). Further, such movingly authentic depictions as Hemingway gives us of contact between human and nonhuman animal minds seem to support Frederick Turner's hypothesis of a sensory language that preceded the development of spoken language. Within such a perspective our relationship with animals reacquaints us with “a larger kind of sensing,” an “urlanguage we share with other parts of nature than ourselves” (“An Ecopoetics” 135-36).

So the author's level of understanding of these connections—Hemingway among the animals—is deep and insightful, even if its implications could not overcome his drive toward tragic individualism. Still, I hope not to seem to claim that Hemingway would have been a greater author if he had reflected sound environmental values. The opposite is nearer the truth. The great power of much of his work arises from the tensions between the competing pulls of defiant individualism and the abiding earth. But part of the cost of that greatness is a diminished earth and a version of primitivism whose price was still being reckoned by Hemingway at the end of his career, as it is by his audience even today.

The right relationships between self and earth were of such crucial importance to Hemingway—and to those readers who, like me, have been deeply influenced by his depictions of the individual in nature—that it seems likely that they would have continued to engross him, had his life and career carried forward into the environmental awareness of the late 1960s and beyond. Intimations of a threatened nature, the necessity for self-restraint, for a sense of stewardship toward the earth, do emerge in his later writing. And his posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden, which Hemingway worked on from 1946 until his death in 1961, is notable for the narrator's expression of his deep disgust, as a boy, at the excesses of elephant killing in Africa by his father. Indeed, the boy's loyalty shifts from his father to the elephants. It is an echo, or perhaps a premonition, of Gregory Hemingway's own appalled confession.

As Hemingway, at the end of his career, may have been essaying new relationships—less destructive forms of human dignification—with an enduring earth, so also, to the credit of his genius, he had already anticipated that his followers would move beyond him in a continuing development of consciousness. “Every novel which is truly written,” he said in Death in the Afternoon, “contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from” (192). In this account of the course of literary evolution, Hemingway has written his own best defense while also anticipating the necessary and inevitable departure from him of the next generation of writers, whose understanding of their own place in the natural world would be formed, in part, from Hemingway's tragic conflicts with the earth.

Notes

1. As Keith Carabine points out, the story is “euphoric” despite the “nightmare at noontide” emphasis in most of the criticism (39-44). Philip Young's Preface to The Nick Adams Stories explains how the proper chronological placing of the story, after the World War I stories, makes its submerged anxieties more understandable.

2. Hovey 33. See also Monk.

3. The connections for Hemingway between fishing and tragedy are further revealed in his description to F. Scott Fitzgerald of his idea of heaven: “a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside” (Selected Letters 165).

4. Hemingway, Selected Letters 681, 659, 867, 679, 847.

5. Hochner 152. Hemingway voices similar sentiments in Death in the Afternoon 233 and in Selected Letters 449. See also Drinnon 29.

6. See Selected Letters 277, 370, 374, 416, 636, 644, 648, 729, 771-72. See also Plimpton 35.

7. Selected Letters 416, 582. See also Leicester Hemingway 107, 120, and pictures between 224 and 225; Jack Hemingway 101.

8. See Selected Letters 697 and Across the River 123.

9. Death in the Afternoon 4; A Sand County Almanac 262. In his perceptive essay, “The Happiness of the Garden: Hemingway's Edenic Quest,” John Leland reaches a similar conclusion to that expressed here, saying that “no real land can sustain the demands of the Hemingway hero.”

10. Ueno 74. Meeker also sees tragedy as a peculiarly Western cultural tradition (42).

11. While Joseph Wood Krutch claimed in The Modern Temper in 1929 that tragedy was no longer possible in modern life because we have lost confidence in the nobility of humanity, tragedies, or some equivalent to them, continue to be written and critics to deal with them. Wirt Williams's The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway (1981) examines Hemingway's works from the perspective of the tragic condition, though not from the ecological viewpoint taken here. Major earlier critical books on Hemingway by Philip Young, Carlos Baker, and Jackson J. Benson all found tragedy to be central to Hemingway's art. In considering the possible endings of The Garden of Eden, Robert E. Fleming cites the pattern of tragedy running through all of Hemingway's work and thought as evidence that the optimistic ending of the Jenks edition of the novel is counter to Hemingway's probable intentions (“The Endings”).

12. See, for example, Faulkner's tribute in Shenandoah and the essays by Gurko, Jobes, Burhans, and Sylvester in Jobes. Although he does not see the story as tragic, Earl Rovit perceptively links the novel to “Big Two-Hearted River,” a connection that I have followed here.

13. Wolfgang Wittkowski underscores the combative fighter-in-the-ring quality of Santiago, and how this opposes and subsumes his Christian aspects.

14. For details of the filming, see Laurence.

15. Selected Letters 771-72. On Hemingway's verbal rapport with bears, see Hochner 32.

16. See Burwell 77, 137, 208. See also Hemingway, True at First Light 98.

17. See Donaldson 83-84. For a remembrance of Hemingway's positive fishing ethics and of the changes in his attitude toward “killing your limit” over his later years, see Jack Hemingway 18, 80.

18. Gregory Hemingway's daughter, Lorian Hemingway, grew up rebellious and followed a chaotic existence as a drifter and alcoholic for many years. She broke free at last, through fishing and the help of fishing elders, and caught herself a life, as she records in her remarkable memoir, Walk on Water. Fishing in her life became the healing restorative, the redemption through water, that was never enough for her grandfather, whose legacy haunted her.

19. The male fish may have jumped for other reasons, Harvard animal behaviorist Marc D. Hauser might caution. In his book Wild Minds, Hauser questions many interpretations of animal behavior but also finds that animals have core emotions, communicate, use tools, solve problems using symbols, learn by imitation, and so forth. See, for example, 4-10, xviii-xix. Generally, Hauser's judgments accord closely with Hemingway's observations.

20. See Love, “The Ecological Short Story” 50-55. Further connections between Hemingway and animals are explored in several articles in Robert Fleming, ed., Hemingway and the Natural World.

Works Cited

Burhans, Jr., Clinton. “The Old Man and the Sea: Hemingway's Tragic Vision of Man.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea. Ed. Katharine T. Jobes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1968. 72-80.

Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Carabine, Keith. “‘Big-Two-Hearted River’: A Reinterpretation.” The Hemingway Review 1.2 (Spring 1982): 39-44.

Faulkner, William. “Review of The Old Man and the Sea.” Shenandoah 3 (Autumn 1952): 55.

Fleming, Robert. “The Endings of Hemingway's Garden of Eden.” American Literature 61 (1989): 261-70.

———, ed. Hemingway and the Natural World. Moscow: U of Idaho P, 1999.

Hamilton, W. D. Narrow Roads of Gene Land. Vol. I of Evolution of Social Behavior. New York: Freeman, 1996.

Hauser, Marc D. Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think. New York: Holt, 2000.

Hemingway, Ernest. Across the River and into the Trees. New York: Scribner's, 1950.

———. “Big Two-Hearted River.” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner's, 1953. 209-32.

———. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner's, 1932.

———. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner's, 1981.

———. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner's, 1929.

———. The Garden Of Eden. New York: Scribner's, 1986.

———. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner's, 1935.

———. The Nick Adams Stories. New York: Scribner's 1972.

———. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner's, 1952.

———. “The Shot.” Repr. By Line: Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. New York: Bantam, 1968.

———. True at First Light. Ed. Patrick Hemingway. New York: Scribner's, 1999.

———. The Viking Portable Hemingway. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1944.

Hemingway, Gregory. Papa: A Personal Memoir. Boston: Houghton, 1976.

Hemingway, Jack. Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman. Dallas: Taylor, 1986.

Hemingway, Leicester. My Brother, Ernest Hemingway. Cleveland: New World, 1962.

Hemingway, Lorian. Walk on Water: A Memoir. New York: Simon, 1998.

Hemingway, Patrick. “My Papa, Papa.” Playboy 15:2 (December 1968): 197-98, 200, 263-64. 268.

Hochner, A. E. Papa Hemingway. New York: Bantam, 1967.

Hovey, Richard. Hemingway: The Inward Terrain. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1968.

Jobes, Katharine T., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1968.

Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1960.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. The Measure of Man. New York: Bobbs, 1954.

———. The Modern Temper. New York: Harcourt, 1929.

———. More Lives Than One. New York: Sloane, 1962.

Laurence, Frank M. Hemingway and the Movies. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1981.

Leland, John. “The Happiness of the Garden: Hemingway's Edenic Quest.” The Hemingway Review 3.1 (Fall 1983): 44-53.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. 1949. San Francisco: Sierra Club/Balantine, 1966.

Love, Glen A. “The Ecological Short Story.” The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. Ed. Blanche H. Gelfant. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 50-55.

Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Scribner's, 1974.

Miller, Arthur. “Tragedy and the Common Man.” Rpt. Tragedy: Plays, Theory, and Criticism. Ed. Richard Levin. New York: Harcourt, 1960.

Monk, Donald. “Hemingway's Territorial Imperatives.” Yearbook of English Studies 8 (1978): 125-40.

Morrison, Reg. The Spirit in the Gene: Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999.

Nahal, Chaman. The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway's Fiction. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1971.

Plimpton, George. “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway.” Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Hill, 1961. 19-37.

Rovit, Earl. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Twayne, 1963.

Sewell, Richard. “The Tragic Form.” Tragedy: Plays, Theory, and Criticism. Ed. Richard Levin. New York: Harcourt, 1960.

Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water. New York: Dutton, 1980.

Steiner, George. In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971.

Sylvester, Bickford. “Hemingway's Extended Vision: The Old Man and the Sea.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea. Ed. Katharine T. Jobes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1968. 81-96.

Turner, Frederick. “An Ecopoetics of Beauty and Meaning.” Biopoetics: Evolutionary Interpretations in the Arts. Lexington, KY: ICUS, 1999. 119-38.

Ueno, Naozo. “An Oriental View of The Old Man and the Sea.” East-West Review 2 (Spring 1965): 67-76.

Walton, Isaac. The Compleat Angler: 1653-1736. Ed Jonquil Bevan. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: Norton, 1973.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Hogarth, 1973.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

Williams, Wirt. The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

Wilson, David Sloan. Rev. of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, by David M. Buss. Evolution and Human Behavior 20 (1999): 279-87.

Wittkowski, Wolfgang. “Crucified in the Ring: Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.” The Hemingway Review 3.1 (Fall 1983): 2-17.

Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1965.

———. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1966.