SOURCE: "Hemingway and Old Age: Santiago as Priest of Time," in College English, Vol. 27, No. 3, December, 1965, pp. 215-20.

[In the following essay, Cooperman considers The Old Man and the Sea a "poem of reconciliation to the meaning and nature of age," maintaining that Hemingway fails to view old age in any other terms but through the values of pride, sacrifice, and endurance, and as a hardening rather than a softening of the qualities found in youth.]

The preoccupation of Ernest Hemingway with individual courage, will, and endurance—the need for self-contained action, ritualized form, precision of motion (and emotion), and—perhaps most important—the fear of complex motivation and the insistence upon the absolute necessity for initiative as a definition of manhood—was seriously threatened in the years preceding and following World War II.

The period before the war was a time of political ambiguities, a time which more than ever before represented the triumph of machines over men. And World War II itself was a difficult matter for Hemingway to shape into art: for one thing, it was a gigantic organization in which the politician became more important than the soldier, and the mechanic became more important than both. As for the post-World War II era of "Cold War" and continuing crisis—there was simply nothing in it for Hemingway to use; the swamp of ideological-political-military complexities offered no solid ground on which Hemingway could stand either as a man or as a writer.

Such a war, and such complexity, could not provide for Ernest Hemingway the framework of "pure" action, the concrete and formal ritual which had always been so essential to his work. Even For Whom the Bell Tolls had for its setting a preliminary skirmish—the Spanish civil war—rather than the second world conflict itself. And the novel was by no means an unmixed success; despite the fact that such Hemingway specialists as Carlos Baker see the book as a Tragedy of major importance, most critics have felt that Hemingway simply could not master (in either literary or intellectual terms) the scope of material which he undertook to use. For Whom the Bell Tolls, indeed, avoids rather than utilizes the new mechanical warfare, for by placing his protagonist in a situation of guerilla activity, Hemingway permits Robert Jordan to make those choices of will and initiative which the war itself had so often eliminated.

In ideological terms, the novel is not an account of confrontation, but rather one of total retreat, since Jordan spends a good portion of his time regretting the need for ideology altogether, and using learned-by-rote slogans, the sleeping-bag ecstasy of Maria, or the clean-cut task of "dynamiting" to turn all ideological problems into mere irrelevancies. For Whom the Bell Tolls, in short, despite its surface of social and political affirmation, is effective as narrative only at those moments when Hemingway drops the pretext of abstract or intellectual analyses, and concentrates on the sphere of self-contained action. There is a "love" relationship in which one of the individuals (the woman) all but vanishes, so that the result is less a love-affair than an exercise in auto-eroticism; there is military action that resembles an Indian skirmish more than any exposure to modern, technological warfare; and there is an attempt to eliminate ideological complexity by refusing to confront it on any terms whatsoever.

Hemingway's only other effort to produce a major novel dealing with the war against Fascism—Across the River and Into the Trees, published in 1950—gave even sharper evidence of a decline in his literary direction. In this novel there is a quality of weariness and exhaustion not simply in the book's protagonist, an aging army colonel named Robert Cantwell, but in the narrative itself.

The simplicity, the concrete "hardness" of the Hemingway style becomes bleak rather than noble; the measured cadence and rhythm of Hemingway prose becomes labored and self-conscious. Despite his moments of power, despite all his talk of dying with dignity, Robert Cantwell is a man defeated by life, a man unable to redeem this defeat by action. Not yet reconciled to his own approaching middle-age, rueful at having survived, Cantwell seems pathetically confused as to what may be done with the very fact that he has outlived the days of his youth. And so he spends a good part of the book either reminiscing about the youth itself, or repeating—in a rather enervated fashion—his own "time of wine and roses." The wine, however, has become rather too dry for pleasure, and the roses have a rather scraggled look: as though their petals were kept together with paste and nostalgia instead of youthful blood.

Romantic tragedy, after all, is the province of the young. There is nothing especially moving about the athlete or warrior who lives long enough to become rich and fat and impotent, and who dies in his own bed. Committed to romantic tragedy—the doomed and beautiful young man who wills his own death—Hemingway seemed uncertain of the value of his own protagonist, and this uncertainty is reflected in the narrative. Cantwell, who has survived the war, is admittedly "waiting" to die—and the passivity itself eliminates the heroic stance and willed sacrifice which alone can turn man's inevitable disaster (death) into victory. All the rituals, whether of action or love, have softened into repetition and shadow. It is hardly surprising that so much of Across the River and Into the Trees consists of the aging officer's memories, for the novel reads like a capitulation to age instead of a confrontation of it.

The fact that Hemingway was attempting to deal with the problem of old age, however, was a significant development in his work, and in this sense Across the River and Into the Trees was a milestone in his career. If the book did fail, it nevertheless served as a kind of preliminary to The Old Man and the Sea —a far smaller book, and a far less ambitious one, but a novel that served as a poem of reconciliation to the meaning and nature of age itself, and the manhood and courage and fierce love of creative will which redeem the flesh from its own decay.

The virtues of the Hemingway hero had always been the virtues of the young: to kill "cleanly" and risk being killed; to drink manfully, speak simply, love beautifully (and briefly), and to avoid all entanglements of either responsibility or complexity. As Harry Levin remarks: "The world that remains most alive to Hemingway is that stretch between puberty and maturity which is . . . a world of mixed apprehension and bravado before the rite of passage, the baptism of fire, the introduction to sex." Certainly it is difficult to imagine Frederic Henry as a fifty-year-old exsoldier—unless, perhaps, we imagine him as Colonel Cantwell, "waiting" to die, and brooding upon approaching age and impotence.

So essential is the "proper" confrontation of death to the work of Ernest Hemingway, that the problem of growing old seems quite irrelevant; few of his heroes are likely to grow old, and none of them will live to die in bed if they can possibly help it. As to a man outliving the days of his sexuality: this is simply too horrible to contemplate. Even the hunter in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" dies of a wound rather than of old age, and at the time of his death, furthermore, is served by a sophisticated woman—a tribute to his strength and at least one kind of potency.

For Ernest Hemingway, far more than for most men, the spectre of age was a terrible spectre indeed; the very virtues upon which he had based his art and his life were virtues of the young. Even in his later years Hemingway was delightfully "boyish" (or regrettably so, depending on one's point of view); the problem of age was never far from his mind nor, for that matter, from his conversation—and in this connection Lillian Ross's New Yorker piece on Hemingway (May 31, 1950) is of particular interest. "As you get older," said Hemingway, "it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."

The problem, of course, is to decide what sort of heroism is possible as a man gets older, and in this respect Hemingway in 1950 was still looking backward rather than forward, so that for him (as for Robert Cantwell in Across the River and Into the Trees) old age itself was simply a matter of holding on to youthful appetites and youthful abilities as long as one could. "What I want to be when I am old is a wise old man who won't bore," he remarked to Miss Ross, while Mrs. Hemingway was saying "Papa, please get glasses fixed," and while the waiter was pouring wine:

"I'd like to see all the new fighters, horses, ballets, bike riders, dames, bullfighters, painters, airplanes, sons of bitches, cafe characters, big international whores, restaurants, years of wine, newsreels, and never have to write a line about it. . . . Would like to make good love until I was eighty-five. And what I would like to be is not Bernie Baruch. I wouldn't sit on park benches, although I might go around the park once in a while to feed the pigeons, and also I wouldn't have any long beard, so there could be an old man who didn't look like Shaw." He stopped and ran the back of his hand along his beard, and looked around the room reflectively. "Have never met Mr. Shaw," he said. "Never been to Niagara Falls either. Anyway, I would take up harness racing. You aren't near the top at that until you're over seventy-five. Then I would get me a good young ball club, maybe, like Mr. Mack. . . . And when that's over, I'll make the prettiest corpse since Pretty Boy Floyd. Only suckers worry about saving their souls. Who the hell should care about saving his soul when it's a man's duty to lose it intelligently, the way you would sell a position you were defending, if you could not hold it, as expensively as possible, trying to make it the most expensive position that was ever sold. It isn't hard to die." He opened his mouth and laughed, at first soundlessly and then loudly. "No more worries," he said. He picked up a piece of asparagus and looked at it without enthusiasm. "It takes a pretty good man to make any sense when he's dying," he said.

The note of buoyancy combined with uncertainty, of readiness for death juxtaposed with fear of aging, of awareness of the inevitable combined with an almost wistful assertion of youthful power, and—finally—a kind of subdued self-perspective in which Hemingway seems to be doubting his own verbal posture—all these clashing elements were intrinsic to Hemingway's own position, as they were to the position of his protagonist in Across the River and Into the Trees.

From the jumble of hopes for continued youth and fears of age, however, one element emerges as perhaps the greatest fear of all—a fear that had been close to Hemingway from the crisis of his World War I experience: that is, the fear of passivity, the nightmare, a recurrent nightmare for Ernest Hemingway, in which the individual is deprived of his manhood by becoming an object rather than originator of action. Whether sitting on a park bench and "waiting for death," or growing crochety and senile in an easy-chair, or whining and complaining in a hospital bed (while the hands of stranger-women clean the body and obscenely kill the soul), the overriding fear is not loss of life ("It isn't hard to die," said Hemingway) but loss of will: the failure of manhood itself. And it was the divinity of manhood—a mystique defined by the sacred trinity of willed sacrifice, pride, and endurance—which Hemingway worshipped (and worried) throughout his life.

The problem, in short, was not how to avoid becoming an old man, but rather how to avoid becoming an old woman—and whether indeed an individual could be one without becoming the other. Whether Hemingway himself ever achieved a satisfactory solution to this dilemma is not for us to judge, although the circumstances of his death would indicate that he could not and would not abide a final weakening of those powers which were so intrinsic to the protagonists of his stories.

In the last decade or so of his life, at any rate, Hemingway was searching for a posture which would enable him to cope with the fact of his own age—and in a basic sense, Across the River and Into the Trees reflected the urgency of just such a search. Hemingway's temporary but vivid solution was a change of personal role: he would dramatize what he could not avoid. "Because of his own absolute youthfulness, he regards old-growing as an utter and complete tragedy," remarked one of his friends, "and he is not going to degrade himself by maturing or anything absurd of that sort. All the same, since he has a sense of costume, he will emphasize his decline in all its hopelessness by sprouting a white beard and generally acting the part of senex. We are going to get a lot of this inverted youth from him henceforth" (quoted by Carlos Baker, Hemingway and his Critics, p. 9).

If the early Hemingway had been an almost legendary figure of youthful and virile adventure, the older Hemingway would take up the role of Grand Old Man, the battle-scarred veteran, the aging but still indomitable combatant. Hemingway "The Champ," indeed, would become "Papa" Hemingway—the Citizen of the World still rough-edged and manfully poetic, but mellowed by experience and years, and come to full bloom as a connoisseur of life, bullfighters, women, fishing, and war.

The resources of age rather than the powers of youth would henceforth be Hemingway's public role, and this was to provide the substance for his literary role as well. For The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952, is the story not of youthful disillusion, or youthful political idealism in a framework of social affirmation, or youthful love in a world of chaos, or youthful frustration and anguish (bolstered by a code of manly non-sentiment), or not-so-youthful reminiscence relating to youth itself, but rather the story of an aged champion for whom power of will has replaced the power of flesh, and the wisdom of true pride and humility has replaced the arrogance of either simple pessimism or romantic self-sacrifice.

Humility and true pride, however, are not qualities likely to be possessed by the Crusading Idealist (such as Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls), or by heroes of nostalgia (such as Colonel Cantwell in Across the River and Into the Trees), or by protagonists of alienation—protagonists who, like Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms, refuse to play the game of life (and death) if the rules are not of their liking. The qualities of humility and pride must be forged in the smithy of a man's own soul; only when the individual neither requires nor uses external crutches—either of affirmation, negation, or nostalgia—can he achieve that power of selfhood (which for Hemingway is synonymous with manhood) that old Santiago the fisherman achieves in his open boat, alone with his pain, his endurance, his love for the noble marlin that is his opponent, his defeat, and his ultimate triumph.

This triumph, of course, is a victory in spiritual terms—for it is only in spiritual terms that a victory can ever be real. Ultimately, the only "Cause" is a man's own being, his own truth; romantic love is an illusion of youth, and political or social motivation is either so complex as to be meaningless, or so corrupt as to defeat its own rhetorical purpose. Unlike Robert Jordan, Santiago does not attempt to justify his struggle in terms of externals; unlike Frederick Henry, he does not attempt to worship a sacred object—a kind of "Love-Goddess" for whose sake all things may be sacrificed. For Santiago, the only justification for life is living, and the only justification for death is dying: he is a fisherman and the marlin is a fish, and—joined together by a larger pattern in which each is merely a part—they fulfill their true roles.

The relationship between Santiago and the marlin is self-contained and self-meaning; not only is their struggle without hate, but—because the struggle itself is a link in that holy chain of life-and-death whose sole reason is its own existence—the contest becomes an act of love, almost of worship. And for Ernest Hemingway (much to the irritation of his more socially oriented or religiously orthodox critics) no act of worship could be defined in terms of group therapy. Santiago is indeed timeless; an aged monument to that power of will which finally emerges as the only means to defeat age itself, he remains a monument that stands for and by nothing but its own existence. His sainthood consists not in redeeming temporality, but rather in willing its irrelevancy.

The Old Man and the Sea, in short, marks a return on Hemingway's part from some attempt at social involvement to justify action, to an examination of action itself—and a hymn of praise to the sacred nature of such action, when purified by will and uncorrupted by external cause. "From the first eight words of The Old Man and the Sea," says Robert P. Weeks ("He was an old man who fished alone . . ."), "we are squarely confronted with a world in which man's isolation is his most insistent truth."

Human isolation: the basic fact of our existence, the "insistent truth" that men so often disguise by verbiage or theories, by titles or property, by all the various cosmetics and comforts offered by society, by entrenched religion, or by fleshly lusts called (or miscalled) spiritual allegiance, that they forget the isolation itself. Only in Santiago's old age, when the lusts of the flesh have cooled and the egoism and ambition of youth are no more than distant echoes, does he act in such a way that the act becomes its own truth: that is, he achieves divinity of manhood by means of the ritual or trinity of action consisting of willed sacrifice, pride, and endurance.

That such a ritual of manhood has only a limited relationship to brotherhood or unity in the orthodox sense, is indicated by the fact that Santiago himself despises and hates those forms of life which are neither worthily beautiful nor noble; if he kills but loves the great marlin, he butchers and spits at the scavenger-sharks, and his attitude toward the Portuguese man-of-war (the bladder of "beautiful poison" that floats by his boat) is one of unrelieved loathing.

There is nothing of "love thine enemy" in Santiago's attitude toward those forms of life which either through appetite or a passive show of poison (or, as in the case of the tourists at the end of the book, simple ignorance) are outside the pattern of nobility and beauty, forms of life which—because they risk nothing, do not fight purely, or feed on carrion—provide no means for a man to celebrate the sacred ritual of his own manhood.

This theme of the "initiated" versus the "outsider" is, of course, a recurrent one throughout Hemingway's work, which celebrates a brotherhood of the worthy and noble rather than any sort of universal love. The very definition of worthiness and nobility, moreover, depends upon whether the creature in question (bull, fish, or woman) is capable of being used, or absorbed, into the ritual of manhood. Since this ritual is a means (indeed, for Hemingway the only means) of establishing non-temporality through assertion of will, "nobility" becomes a matter of usefulness, while "beauty"—always in terms of the ritual itself—is defined according to its manageability.

The story of Santiago, then, clearly represents a return, or rather, a reemphasis and intensification, of the theme of isolation—the individual confronting his own destiny, and redeeming this destiny by means of a ritual of manhood which becomes its own justification. Having survived the great strength of his youth, Santiago has passed beyond all merely material ambitions and desires. There is a transcendent glow about the old man, who is himself a symbol of noble creation—that is, willed creation—with its sorrow and glory, pain and love. Divinity itself, after all, is Supreme Will ("Let there be light!" says the voice of God) rather than desire; as the embodiment of ageless will, Santiago the fisherman (who dreams of "lions") becomes an echo of the divine.

Part of the dramatic effect of The Old Man and the Sea, however, may be weakened by the fact that Santiago—despite his use of wisdom instead of mere strength, and of knowledge and wit instead of mere arrogance—is in many ways a romantic picture of old age itself. His very oldness is monumental and rocklike; his endurance becomes a statement of desire rather than a human reality. For Ernest Hemingway, looking toward his own old age and attempting to construct a means of coping with it, the vision of Santiago must indeed have seemed a noble possibility. That the Santiago-solution is largely allegorical, however, is something that Hemingway could not or would not face: it is not, after all, every old age that can go out to sea in an open boat and catch giant marlin.

In the refusal (or inability) of Ernest Hemingway to see old age in any other terms but the values of pride, sacrifice, and endurance—the ritual of will he worshipped all his life (in Santiago's case forged and made harder rather than softer by old age itself), and in his insistence that the old man must be a young man grown tougher and purer, Hemingway may well have been setting up his own final tragedy.