SOURCE: "The Old Man and the Sea: Vision/Revision," in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "The Old Man and the Sea," Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968, pp. 18-26.

[In the following two-part essay, the first part of which appeared in 1952 and the second of which is a 1966 commentary on the earlier reaction, Young first praises The Old Man and the Sea's perfect construction, exciting story, and tight action, and regards the tale as one about life: that struggle against natural forces that cannot be overcome but which can be met with dignity. In the second part of the essay, Young recants some of his earlier praise of the work, pointing out its "affectation of simplicity," and likens Hemingway's book to a fish he had hooked as his great prize and that was later devoured by the critics.]

I

This book has many roots in the rest of Hemingway's work. Much of it goes back to an essay, "On the Blue Water (A Gulf Stream Letter)," which the author published in Esquire, in April of 1936. In this piece he tried to explain what there is about deep-sea fishing in the Stream that makes it exciting—the mysteries of that largely unexplored place, the indescribable strangeness, wildness, speed, power and beauty of the enormous marlin which inhabit it, and the struggle while their strength is bound to a man's, his thick line "taut as a banjo string and little drops coming from it." He also included a paragraph of more specific interest:

Another time an old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabañas hooked a great marlin that, on the heavy sashcord handline, pulled the skiff far out to sea. Two days later the old man was picked up by fishermen sixty miles to the eastward, the head and forward part of the marlin lashed alongside. What was left of this fish, less than half, weighed eight hundred pounds. The old man had stayed with him a day, a night, a day and another night while the fish swam deep and pulled the boat. When he had come up the old man had pulled the boat up on him and harpooned him. Lashed alongside the sharks had hit him and the old man had fought them out alone in the Gulf Stream in a skiff, clubbing them, stabbing at them, lunging at them with an oar until he was exhausted and the sharks had eaten all that they could hold. He was crying in the boat when the fishermen picked him up, half crazy from his loss, and the sharks were still circling the boat.

Here, of course, is the germ of the novel.¹ And the old man himself, Santiago, is also an outgrowth of past performances. Just as Col. Cantwell presented the Hemingway hero aged for the first time beyond his young manhood, so Santiago is the first of the code heroes to have grown old. Particularly he is related to men like Jack, the prizefighter, and Manuel Garcia, "The Undefeated" bullfighter, who lose in one way but win in another. Like Manuel, Santiago is a fighter whose best days are behind him, who is too old for what his profession demands of him and, worse, is wholly down on his luck. But he still dares, and sticks to the rules, and will not quit when he is licked. He is undefeated, he endures, and his loss therefore, in the manner of it, is itself a victory.

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated," is how Hemingway put it this time. And so the theme—"What a man can do and what a man endures" ("plenty," as Santiago admits of his suffering)—is also familiar. So are other things—Hemingway's concern with fishing as a deeply meaningful occupation, for instance, and his awareness of death, expertly delivered and received, as the source of much of life's intensity. In a way we have even known the boy before, for in providing that sentimental adulation which in his need for love and pity the other hero once required, Manolin has taken over some of the functions hitherto performed by the heroine.

There is little that is new, either, in the technique. The action is swift, tight, exact; the construction is perfect, and the story is exciting. There is the same old zest for the right details. And there is the extraordinary vividness of the background—the sea, which is very personal to Santiago, whose knowledge of it, and feeling for it, bring it brilliantly and lovingly close. Again there is the foreign speech translated—realistic, fresh and poetic all at once. In short, The Old Man and the Sea, in manner and meaning, is unmistakable Hemingway. But where characteristic methods and attitudes have on rare occasion failed him in the past, or have been only partly successful, this short novel is beyond any question a triumph.

This is the first time, in all of Hemingway's work, that the code hero and the Hemingway hero have not been wholly distinct. Wilson the guide, Cayetano the gambler, Morgan the smuggler—all embodied ideals of behavior the Hemingway hero could not sustain. They balanced his deficiencies; they corrected his stance. Of course Santiago is not Hemingway, and is not the Hemingway hero; he is the code hero, based on the experience of an unfictional Cuban fisherman. But now the relation of the author and the code hero is very close. Though Hemingway was thought with the phrase to be acknowledging his eccentricity, whereas Santiago makes it clear that he means he is formidable, both figures were given to remarking "I am a strange old man." And both men were preoccupied with their "luck"—a kind of magic which people have in them, or do not. Indeed it is the only flaw in the book, beyond our involuntary recollections of the heroine, that there are times when the old fisherman sounds a little like Col. Cantwell: "Do not think about sin," Santiago tells himself with uncharacteristic sarcasm. "There are people who are paid to do it."

What this means, among other things, is that Hemingway was narrowing the gap that had always existed between him and his code heroes. Actually he narrowed it to the point where it is possible to show that on one level The Old Man and the Sea was wholly personal: as he seemed obscurely to acknowledge his demotion in Across the River by removing the stars from Cantwell's shoulders, so here Hemingway seemed, but more obviously, to promote himself back. Harry, dying in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," was himself a writer, and the Hemingway hero, but not even that story contained a more transparent or confident discussion by the author of those constantly absorbing problems of his professional past, present and future. The Old Man and the Sea is, from one angle, an account of Hemingway's personal struggle, grim, resolute and eternal, to write his best. With his seriousness, his precision and his perfectionism, Hemingway saw his craft exactly as Santiago sees his. The fishing and the fishermen turn out to be metaphors so apt that they need almost no translation: Santiago is a master who sets his lines with more care than his colleagues, but he has no luck any more. It would be better to be lucky, he thinks, but he will be skillfully exact instead; then when the luck comes he will be ready for it. Once he was very strong. "The Champion" they called him, and he had beaten many rivals in fair fights. The boy agrees: "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you." Still there are many who do not know this, and the whole reputation is gravely imperilled by a streak of bad luck. And so the ex-champion musters his confidence: "I may not be as strong as I think. . . . But I know many tricks and I have resolution."

Santiago needs these things, for he is still out for the really big fish. He has assured the boy he is a strange old man; "Now is when I must prove it." (The times that he has proved it before "meant nothing. Now he was proving it again.") And he does prove it. The sharks may eat his fish, and spoil everything, as they always try to do. But even a young fisherman in the prime of his strength would have done well to land this marlin, and so at the end Santiago is secure in bed, dreaming happily of the lions. (As for these lions, they play like cats on beaches "so white they hurt your eyes"—as white, we might think, as the "unbelievably white" top of Kilimanjaro that Harry dreamed of, the magical goal of the artist, where the leopard froze. And so we could say here, as Hemingway said of Harry, that Santiago is happy in the end because he knows that "there was where he was going.")

But this time it is the public and not the private parable—the generalized meanings which underlie and impregnate the action—that matters most. On this level there is no allegory in the book and, strictly speaking, no symbols. The marlin Santiago catches, the sharks that eat it away and the lions he dreams of are not so much symbolic of other things as broadly suggestive of them. To pin them down by naming equivalents they do not have would be to limit and decrease, vulgarly and gratuitously, the power of what Hemingway had written. On the public level the lions, for instance, are only so vague as the "poetry" in Santiago, and perhaps the sign of his nostalgia for his youth. The marlin is not even anything so general as "nature"—which would justify the most obvious trap, a man-vs.-nature allegory—for as brothers in this world and life, inextricably joined by the necessity of killing and being killed, Santiago and the fish are tightly bound up in the same thing. If we ask ourselves what The Old Man and the Sea is "about" on a public and figurative level, we can only answer "life," which is the finest and most ambitious thing for a parable to be about. Hemingway has written about life: a struggle against the impossible odds of unconquerable natural forces in which—given such a fact as that of death—a man can only lose, but which he can dominate in such a way that his loss has dignity, itself the victory.

The stories of all the best parables are sufficient to themselves, and many will prefer to leave the meanings of this one unverbalized. Such a reading, however, would comprehend less than Hemingway clearly intended. By stripping his book—as only this novelist can—of all but the essentials, and Santiago himself of all but the last things he needs for his survival (the old man owns almost nothing, and hardly even eats), and by the simplicity of the characterization and the style, Hemingway has gently but powerfully urged a metaphor which stands for what life can be. And it is an epic metaphor, a contest where even the problem of moral right and wrong seems paltry if not irrelevant—as in ancient epics, exactly—before the great thing that is this struggle.

If all this sounds a little "classical," it is because this tale of courage, endurance, pride, humility and death is remarkably so. It is classical not only technically, in its narrow confines, its reduction to fundamentals, the purity of its design, and even in the fatal flaw of pride (for Santiago exceeded his limits and went out too far). It is also classical in spirit, in its mature acceptance, and even praise, of things as they are. It is much in the spirit of the Greek tragedies in which men fight against great odds and win moral victories, losing only such tangible rewards—however desirable the prizes and heartbreaking the losses—as will dissipate anyway. It is especially like Greek tragedy in that as the hero fails and falls, one gets an unforgettable glimpse of what stature a man may have.

The story has affiliations, too, with Christian lore. These are not so much this time in its spirit, despite the virtues of pity, humility and charity with which it is invested. They are in its several allusions to Christian symbolism, particularly of the crucifixion. This orientation was not entirely new to Hemingway. Nearly forty years ago he published a little play, "Today Is Friday," in which a Roman soldier who was present at Calvary kept saying of Jesus: "He was pretty good in there today." In Across the River and Into the Trees the Colonel, whose heart goes out to anyone who has been hit hard, "as every man will be if he stays," has a twice-wounded and misshapen hand, which he is very conscious of. Renata, running her fingers lightly over the scars, tells him she has strangely dreamed it is "the hand of Our Lord." Now it is Santiago's hands, and the noise that comes from him when he sees the sharks ("a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood"), which first relate his ordeal to an ancient one. Then when at the end he carries his mast uphill to his cabin, and falls, exhausted, but finally makes it, and collapses on his cot, "face down . . . with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up," the allusion is unmistakable.

All this does not indicate that Hemingway was embracing, or even necessarily approaching, the Christian faith. Such passages as the one on the possible nonexistence of sin explicitly disavow it, as does the running insistence on the story as a wholly natural parable, confined to the realms of this world and what we know by experience. Instead Hemingway is implying another metaphor, and seems to say here, as in Across the River: the world not only breaks, it crucifies, everyone, and afterwards many are scarred in the hands. But now he has gone further, to add that when it comes, and they nail you up, the important thing is to be pretty good in there like Santiago.

One of the virtues of this short novel is that its meanings emerge from the action with all the self-contained power of the marlin breaking the surface of the ocean. Hemingway did not drag up anything, and one of the means whereby he kept the parable from obtruding is the baseball—that force in Santiago's life which, beside the lions, is all the life he has beyond his calling. Baseball stars are the heroes of this simple man; their exploits are the incidents, and their pennant races the plots, of his mythology. Baseball works a charm on the pages of this book. The talk about it is vastly real, it gives a little play to the line when unrelieved tension would be dangerous, and the sober conversations about it, which Santiago conducts with himself and with the boy, are delicious in their own right:

"The Yankees cannot lose."

"But I fear the Indians of Cleveland."

"Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."

"I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland."

"Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago."

Nowhere in the book is there the slightest touch of condescension in the humor of this childlike preoccupation. Hemingway gave it without irony, without patronizing his characters, without unkindness. This is because he profoundly respected his characters, and wrote his book with a tenderness that was new to him and to his work. And that is an important perception, because it leads to the heart of the book's power.

"I love more than any son of the great bitch alive," said the Colonel in Across the River, and although he said it "not aloud" it sounded foolish anyway. But it sounds a little less silly now: The Old Man and the Sea is a powerful book, and a large part of its power is the power of love.

Santiago's respect for his foe, the marlin, which is love, actually, as for a brother, is surpassed by Hemingway's respect for both that fish and Santiago himself, and for the whole of life which this battle epitomizes, and the world that contains it. An extraordinary thing had happened, for somehow or other a reverence for life's struggle, which this contest dramatizes, and for mankind, for which Santiago stands as a possibility, had descended on Hemingway like the gift of grace on the religious. This veneration for humanity, for what can be done and endured, and this grasp of man's kinship with the other creatures of the world, and with the world itself, is itself a victory of substantial proportions. It is the knowledge that a simple man is capable of such decency, dignity, and even heroism, and that his struggle can be seen in heroic terms, that largely distinguishes this book. For the knowledge that a man can be great, and his life great, might be in itself an approach to greatness. To have had the skill, then, to convince others that this is a valid vision is Hemingway's achievement.

This is to say, among other less abstract things, that Hemingway had reached the point where he was able to affirm without forcing, or even apparent effort, certain things about brotherhood, man, and life which he had tried and crucially failed to affirm in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Indeed, since Santiago is a man alone and without the boy—for, after all, a man faces certain final things alone—and since the old man catches his fish, Hemingway had sharply qualified the pronouncement of To Have and Have Not, which was even more forced. The Old Man and the Sea is pregnant with implications about the contestants and the contest, but this time there is no need to say anything about them outright. It seems you never have to say it if you really mean it.

It is the heartening vision of this story, then, and the deep sense one has of a writer who is at long last completely at home in this life and world, which chiefly account for the power of the book. The rest of its force is the result of its remarkable surface virtues. And it may be that the action—so taut that beads of water seem to jump off the lines, all in a world miraculously alive and lasting—will seem one day the greatest thing after all. Hemingway's hope for his short novel, that "all the things that are in it do not show, but only are with you after you have read it," is mostly fulfilled; and, in the end, vicarious experience is the finest gift literature has to offer. It is the genius of Hemingway that our response is intense, rich, and deep. Without that, the vision and the meanings would count for nothing.

"It's as though I had gotten finally what I had been working for all my life," Hemingway also said, and there are many ways in which it would seem that he had. One of the more subtle ways lies in the fact of Santiago's survival: all the rest of the characters Hemingway projected himself deeply into have, if they struggled and attained the code, died in the process; at the end of this story Santiago is confident, happy, and ready for more. In addition, though The Old Man and the Sea is not necessarily Hemingway's greatest book, it is the one in which he said the finest single thing he ever had to say as well as he could ever hope to say it.

And so the question occurred to the faithless: then what was left for this one to do? To ask such a question was to reckon without the personal triumph Santiago represented and to forget what the old man said when the boy asked if he was strong enough then for a truly big fish: "I think so. And there are many tricks." Besides, this was indeed a strange old man.

II

If one were rewriting instead of revising this book, one thing he would greatly tone down is his praise for The Old Man and the Sea, with which he went farther out than Santiago.² (One critic, Marvin Mudrick, wrote recently that I treated it as if it were one of Beethoven's last quartettes.) The feeling is now that although the tale is here and there exciting it is itself drawn out a little far. Even the title seems an affectation of simplicity, and the realization that Hemingway was now trading on and no longer inventing the style that made him famous came just too late. Redolent of self-admiration, Manolin's boyish worship of the old man is harder than ever to take. The boy himself once seemed a "substitute heroine," but the book by brother Leicester Hemingway supplied a better insight:

Ernest was never very content with life unless he had a spiritual kid brother nearby . . . someone he could show off to as well as teach. He needed uncritical admiration. . . . A little worshipful awe was a distinct aid. . . . I made a good kid brother when I was around.

Heroine or kid brother, this need was almost always part of the trouble when Hemingway was around in the novels; self-praise is always most embarrassing. And, this time, identifying with his "code hero" brought on confusion as well. Thick as a "pencil," and set out with more care than the opposition's, Hemingway was thinking more of his own lines than Santiago's; allegory overwhelms reality when we are told that the young boy carries this fishing line—three-quarters of a mile of it—plus a harpoon and the gaff to the boat. (A gaffe indeed, unless, as we are not told, the lad was actually a giant.) Similarly it does not make very much sense to say that Santiago "went out too far": he did after all boat his fish out there, and the sharks that took it away from him are not confined to waters distant from land. It is not so much that Santiago was a fisherman in whom the writer saw himself; rather that Hemingway was a writer who thought he could disguise himself as Santiago. The autobiographical element unfortunately triumphs again: it wasn't Into the Caribbean but Across the River where somebody felt he went out too far. Hemingway, taking a view of that failed novel which occasionally overrode his concern for his sea story, went way out and hooked his great prize, a book to keep a man all winter, but then the critics ate away at it until there was nothing left. Not as strong as he had been once, he felt that he was still the master of many tricks and still up to bringing in the big one—which, in his opinion, may have been the same small book that was the allegory of his vicissitudes.

Notes

¹ On October 21, 1965, one Anselmo Hernandez, a gnarled, weathered old man allegedly 92 years old, made it to Key West, Florida, in the midst of thousands of anonymous refugees from the Castro regime. He became conspicuous, however, by announcing that he had "inspired" Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea: "I knew Hemingway for thirty years. . . . He said he would write a novel about me and he did." This claim, widely printed in the press with a current photograph of the old fisherman, was immediately dismissed by Mrs. Hemingway, who commented that a dozen Cuban fishermen made the same boast—further that although her husband had known Hernandez well the book was not based on any one person. Her statement was accepted as authoritative. But on seeing the photograph of Anselmo Hernandez, and seeming to recall both the image and the name in connection with the novel, the present writer dug up another picture (published by Vogue in June of 1953), and disputed Mrs. Hemingway on two counts. This earlier photograph was taken by Leland Heyward, producer of the film based on the book, and it shows a threesome seated in a bar "on location,"—purportedly the author of the story, Ernest Hemingway, together with the actor who was to play the old man, Spencer Tracy, and with the old man himself, who was identified only as "Anselmo." The Anselmo Hernandez whose picture was in the newspapers of October 22, 1965, is older and thinner and unmistakably the Anselmo of the 1953 photograph. Surely the character of Hemingway's old man is no transcript of any Anselmo's; it is chiefly the character of the author-fisherman himself. But if the experience of the old man in the book is not based on exactly what happened to an actual, single fisherman then Hemingway in 1936 gratuitously invented what he pretended in Esquire to report. And if Hernandez is not the same old man then Hemingway was party to a second deception when he sat for Heyward's photograph. Neither deceit is probable: Hemingway had a fondness for facts as well as fictions.

² [Professor Young has revised the first sentence of this passage for [the 1966] reprinting.—Ed. note.]