Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The
Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the
weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River
and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954
(an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that "no son of
a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards").
A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman
going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's
favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and infirm to
partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work:
"The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection
on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and
his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords."
Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception that won him his
initial fame:
If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career. --James Marcus |