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:
Just before it was dark, as they
passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the
light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a
yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first
when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and
bending and flapping wildly in the air.
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
