SOURCE: "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea," in College English, Vol. 24, No. 3, December, 1962, pp. 188-92.

[In the following essay, Weeks enumerates the errors in descriptive detail in The Old Man and the Sea, pointing out that the realism characteristic of Hemingway's "better work" is absent in the novella and taking this as an indication that Hemingway's "view of the world has gone soft"]

From the vignettes and stories of his first book, In Our Time, to his last, The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway repeatedly made skillful use of animals to epitomize the subjective state or the situation of his characters. Nick Adams' trout holding itself steady against the cold current of the Big Two-Hearted River, Francis Macomber's gut-shot lion standing off death in the tall grass, the huge, filthy vultures keeping a deathwatch on Harry on the plains at the foot of Kilimanjaro—objectively and precisely epitomize the crisis confronting the protagonist in each of these stories.

Yet these animals, and the others Hemingway uses to perform the same function, are nonetheless marvelously real. They possess in abundance what James called solidity of specification: they move, sound, and look like real animals.

The difference, however, in the effectiveness with which Hemingway employs this characteristic device in his best work and in The Old Man and the Sea is illuminating. The work of fiction in which Hemingway devoted the most attention to natural objects, The Old Man and the Sea, is pieced out with an extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary because one would expect to find no inexactness, no romanticizing of natural objects in a writer who loathed W. H. Hudson, could not read Thoreau, deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick, and who was himself criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for his devotion to the facts and his unwillingness to "invent."

Santiago, the only human being in the story, is himself depicted as a natural phenomenon, a strange old man whose heart beats like a turtle's, whose "feet and hands are like theirs," whose eyes are "the same color as the sea" and with which he could once "see quite well in the dark. Not in the absolute dark. But almost as a cat sees." But even these natural affinities do not prepare us for what this strange old man can do. As he sits in his skiff with more than six hundred feet of heavy line—the thickness of a pencil—slanting steeply down into the darkness of the stream, Santiago feels a fish nibble at the bait.

He felt no strain nor weight and he held the line lightly. Then it came again. This time it was a tentative pull, not solid or heavy, and he knew exactly what it was. One hundred fathoms down a marlin was eating the sardines that covered the point and the shank of the hook where the hand-forged hook projected from the head of the small tuna.

This is not fishing skill; it's clairvoyance. The signals that can be transmitted over a pencil-thick line dangling more than six hundred feet into the ocean are relatively gross. Moreover, as Hemingway himself points out in his essay "Marlin Off Cuba," in American Big Game Fishing, published in an elegant limited edition of 906 copies by the Derrydale Press in 1935, one cannot tell whether the fish taking his bait is a marlin or a broadbill for they "take the bait in much the same manner, first, perhaps picking off a few of the sardines with which the point of the hook is covered, then seizing the whole fish used as bait between their jaws to crush it a moment before swallowing it."

This hint that Hemingway may be padding his characterization of Santiago by means of fakery is abundantly confirmed by the action that follows. His combat with the fish is an ordeal that would do in even a vigorous young man. He is at sea nearly four full days, almost all of that time without sleep and during much of it hanging onto a 1,500-pound fish that steadily tows him and his boat for miles, most of it against the current of the Gulf Stream. At noon on the third day, the giant fish circles the boat and the old man harpoons it, lashes it to the boat, and sets sail for home. Almost at once the sharks attack the fish, and the old man attacks the sharks. He battles them for more than twelve hours, quitting only when he runs out of weapons. Then, competently—and evidently without sleeping—he sails his little skiff for his home port, arriving shortly before dawn.

The extent to which this is an incredible performance is made clear when we turn to Hemingway himself for some notion of how an actual old Cuban fisherman behaved under similar circumstances. In "On the Blue Water," an essay that appeared in Esquire in 1936, Hemingway wrote:

Another time an old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabanas hooked a giant 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. . . . 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.

It is hardly surprising that Santiago's clairvoyancy also enables him to be an uncanny meteorologist. While he is being towed by his fish, he looks at the sky, then soliloquizes: "If there is a hurricane you always see signs of it in the sky for days ahead, if you are at sea. They do not see it ashore because they do not know what to look for." Scientists on land, sea, and in the air equipped with delicate pressure-sensing devices and radar cannot duplicate the powers that Hemingway off-handedly—and unconvincingly—gives to Santiago. According to the Chief District Meteorologist of the United States Weather Bureau in Miami, Florida, Gordon E. Dunn, "It is usually impossible to see signs of a tropical storm for more than two days in advance and on occasion it is difficult to tell for sure that there is a tropical storm in the vicinity for even a day in advance."

But it is when Santiago's fish makes its first appearance that the fakery truly begins to flow. For example, the old man perceives at once that it is a male. Hemingway heroes almost always measure themselves against male animals, whether they are kudu, lions, bear, bulls, or fish. The tragedy enacted in the bull ring becomes a farce if you replace the bull with a cow. The hunter, the torero, the fisherman prove that they have cojones by engaging another creature that has them beyond dispute. Santiago's marlin is both huge and possessed of incredible endurance. He tows man and boat for nearly three days.

But the marlin presents problems. Its cojones are internal. "The sexes are not recognizable in these animals except by internal dissection," according to Gilbert Voss, an icthyologist with the University of Miami Marine Laboratory. Confronted by this dilemma—by the need to pit his hero against a male fish on the one hand, but a fish whose sex he won't be able to determine by dissection before the sharks devour all the evidence, on the other—Hemingway resorts to the fakery of having Santiago identify him at once as a male. In an effort, perhaps, to make this bit of fakery more believable, Hemingway has Santiago recall an experience with marlin in which he was able to distinguish the male from the female.

He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panicstricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail which was sharp as a scythe. . . . When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, . . . and then, . . . hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep . . . He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.

Santiago's story of the devoted male marlin actually creates more problems than it solves. It is a preposterous piece of natural history, combining sentimentality and inexact observation. The Associate Curator of Fishes of the American Museum of Natural History, who was also a friend of Hemingway's, Francesca LaMonte, noticed an interesting parallel between Santiago's story and one Hemingway recounts in his marlin essay in American Big Game Fishing:

Another time . . . my wife caught a 74-pound white marlin which was followed by three other marlin all through the fight. These three refused bait but stayed with the female fish until she was gaffed and brought aboard. Then they went down.

Miss LaMonte comments on this story that "You will note that the sex of the other fishes is not stated." Hemingway has Santiago incredibly enough identify the uncaught fish as males but in his essay he is more realistic.

Santiago and his fish are yoked by Hemingway's method of using the animal to epitomize some aspect of the man. The result, as Carlos Baker admiringly puts it, is "gallantry against gallantry." It is in fact more nearly fakery against fakery: a make-believe super-fish duelling a make-believe superfisherman.

It must be conceded that leaving aside these two formidable adversaries, there are brilliant flashes of Hemingway realism in The Old Man and the Sea. The sharks, for example, are depicted with remarkable vividness as they rush the dead marlin and savagely tear it apart. The shovel-nosed sharks with their "wide, flattened, shovel-pointed heads . . . and their slitted yellow cat-like eyes" are made "good and true enough" so that they are convincing as sharks and as embodiments of pure evil.

With the mako shark, however, Hemingway has not wholly resisted the impulse to fake. He has claimed for the mako that he can swim "as fast as the fastest fish in the sea" and equipped him with eight rows of teeth "shaped like a man's fingers when they are crisped like claws. They were nearly as long as . . . fingers . . . and they had razorsharp cutting edges on both sides." E. M. Schroeder, of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, an authority on the sharks of the Atlantic, and other shark experts seriously doubt that the mako is as fast as the fastest fish. And they find support from Hemingway who in an article in Game Fish of the World says that the mako can "run faster than most," and in another article mentions the tuna and wahoo as "the fastest fish in the sea."

To describe the mako as having eight rows of teeth, as Hemingway does, is a great deal like saying that a five-year-old child has forty or so teeth. Only two rows of the shark's teeth are functional; the others are replacements which become functional as the forward teeth are lost or destroyed. Also, according to Professor Voss, only the main teeth in the mid part of the shark's jaw are as long, slender, and sharp as Hemingway describes all the teeth as being. Just as Santiago and his fish are given extraordinary powers they could not in fact possess, the biggest and most dangerous of the sharks, the mako, is made more menacing than he actually is.

II

Why are these inaccuracies of any consequence? No one thinks less of Keats's sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" because in it Keats confused "stout Cortez" with Balboa as the discoverer of the Pacific; nor have the numerous anachronisms in Shakespeare's plays diminished his reputation or our enjoyment of his plays. Don't we read imaginative literature with an entirely different attitude toward fact from the one with which we consult an encyclopedia? The answer must be yes, but a qualified yes. We do not read either Keats or Shakespeare with the same expectations or assumptions as those we have when we read Hemingway. Hemingway is above all a realist; his aim had always been to communicate the facts exactly; and his reputation rests squarely on his success in doing so. As we read a Hemingway story or novel, his preoccupation with factual detail is immediately apparent. It is nowhere more apparent than in his heroes' respect for accuracy and a firm grip on the facts. Frederic Henry speaks for Hemingway, too, in what is probably the best known passage in A Farewell to Arms when he says: "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates." In short, the facts. And, likewise, those characters whom Hemingway places in contrast to his heroes are most readily distinguished not by their lack of honor, their insensitivity, or their political allegiances but by their sloppy handling of the facts. There is no clearer example of this than the tourist couple at the end of The Old Man and the Sea who look down into the water from the Terrace, see the skeleton of Santiago's great marlin, and ignorantly mistake it for a shark.

And Hemingway saw himself as a realist, too. His task in The Old Man and the Sea, as he saw it, was to give us a real old man, a real fish, and a real sea that would, if he had made them truly and well, mean many things. This is a reasonable definition of the goal of any realistic writer and provides us with a useful gauge of Hemingway's achievement. However, many critics have turned Hemingway's gauge upside down and upon discovering that the story of the old Cuban fisherman's ordeal can mean many things have praised it without troubling themselves to discover if the old man, the fish, and the sea are indeed "real," if they are indeed made "good and true."¹

The realism of Hemingway's first published stories is not an arbitrarily selected technique: it is an inevitable part of his world view. Confronted by the violence and meaninglessness of the world he saw as a boy in upper Michigan, as an 18-year-old police reporter on the Kansas City Star, and as a young man on the Italian front in World War I, in the Greco-Turkish War, and in the cities of Europe in the 1920's, he cultivated a bare, stoical, tight-lipped style that was an ideal instrument for exploring that God-abandoned world. The bullfighters, expatriates, soldiers, boxers, and guerillas were rendered vividly but truly and objectively. And their stance, if they were among the initiated, was much like the style that depicted them, one of tense control, like Nick Adams' trout holding itself steady against the current of the Big Two-Hearted River.

But the style has gone soft in The Old Man and the Sea because the view of the world has gone soft. Santiago's universe is not the chaotic universe in which Nick Adams, Frederic Henry, Jake Barnes, and Robert Jordan encountered meaningless violence and evil. It is more nearly a cozy universe in which fish have nobility and loyalty and other virtues no one since St. Francis of Assisi—and least of all Ernest Hemingway—would have suspected them of. It is a universe so chummy that the hero calls various birds his brothers. The sharks introduce a semblance of evil into this warm universe, but it tends to be a stagey, melodramatic evil almost too villainous to be believable. The same is true of the big Portuguese man-of-war trailing its poisonous tentacles as it sails by Santiago's skiff fully six months before an animal this size would normally appear in Cuban waters.

The soft, fuzzy tone of The Old Man and the Sea reaches its nadir in that scene shortly after sunset when the incredible old man, still being towed by his incredible fish, looks into the heavens and sees the first star of this universe shining out. Hemingway comments: "He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends." This cosmic camaraderie is patently false and forced. This is not the violent, chaotic world that young Hemingway discovered and explored with a style whittled from a walnut stick. In that world the stars were cold and remote—as stars really are. In the world of The Old Man and the Sea, they are "friends" whom the author in a patronizing intrusion identifies for us—incorrectly. Rigel does not appear in Cuban skies at sunset in September but some five hours after Santiago sees it. It is, perhaps, a trifling error, which, even if we happen to be aware of it, does not surprise us in a novel in which so much else is inexactly observed or tricked out in an effort to extort more feeling than a reasonable person would find there.

The honest, disciplined quest for "the way it was" finally ran down. The Old Man and the Sea stands as an end point of that quest. Yet it is not without greatness. To call it an inferior Hemingway novel still leaves it standing well above most other novels of our time. But some of its greatness is that of a monument serving to remind us of earlier glories.

Notes

¹ Much has been written about Hemingway's technique as a realist: his extraordinary skill in communicating the feel of experience. But with one exception, no one has extensively tested the reality of his fiction in terms of its correspondence to verifiable fact. The exception is Arturo Barea's "Not Spain but Hemingway," Horizon [England], III (May 1941) 350-361. [Reprinted: Carlos Baker, Hemingway and His Critics, New York, 1961.]