The Old Man and The Sea

I am reading ocean fiction this summer.  My first two columns were about contemporary ocean novels with female lead characters, Manhattan Beach and The Essex Serpent.  Today, a very different novel, an old guy author and an old guy protagonist, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea.

Does he catch the fish?  Yes.  A huge marlin, longer than his boat, 19 feet. Every day he set sail, but for two months the old man, a heroic fisherman, had not caught a single fish.  But this day Santiago hooks a big fish and for the next three days he and the marlin become one, chaser and chased, as it pulls him ever eastward away from Havana, into the Gulf Stream.  The marlin leaps, circles, slows, and finally Santiago kills it with his harpoon, lashes it to the boat side, and sets his course home to Havana. He imagines the money he will make from this catch, and the people who will find dinner from this massive fish.   But quickly sharks attack the lashed catch, and although an exhausted Santiago kills four sharks, by the time he returns home there’s only the head and skeleton, what might have been.

I read this book in high school, and remembered only the chase, not sure if the old man finally got the fish, or made it home.  Surely someone dies.  Well yes, the fish died, but not the man.  After three long painful days and nights alone at sea, he does finally land, hauls his boat up, and carries his mast back to his shack, as fisherman do, to make sure no one takes their precious cargo, and it is a Christ like scene, the tired man carrying the wooden beam on his back, just as he had imagined himself, his sore hands nailed and crippled.

Hemingway too was an older man when he wrote this in 1952.  After early success, he had struggled personally and professionally, and just two years earlier, his book Over the River and Through the Woods, had been universally panned.  He seemed like another old man with no luck.  Then he published this novella, first in Life Magazine, and it sold 2 million copies in a week.  Two years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and this work was specifically cited, as well as his earlier work.  But Hemingway’s troubles continued, and in 1961 he shot himself.  Not really that old, only 62, but like Santiago, a tired man with failure as well as success, after a hard life of wars and women and drinking and adventures on four continents.

Santiago sails alone, but he keeps in mind his two friends, a boy who cares for him on land and cries when he sees the marlin carcass, and Joe DiMaggio, who Santiago admires, himself the son of a fisherman.  He dreams of his dead wife, but otherwise there are no women in this story.  You could say it is a lonely man’s story.  But there is the sea.

“He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her.  Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman.  Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines, and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had bought them money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine.  They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy.  But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors.”

For all his macho hunter persona, Hemingway seems, like Santiago, to embrace the sea as a lover, not a contestant or enemy.  He and the old man both won and lost, landed huge prizes, but came home with just a carcass.  It’s a sad tale, but one that lasts.  Like the boy, I ended the novel in tears.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter