On the Line

Two weeks ago I perused the shelves of a used book store looking for a birthday gift for my brother. In the course of my searching, my eyes lit upon a copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952). I flashed back to a dinner out on the occasion of my wedding, at which my dad rehearsed a long piece from a literary work which included--as I remembered it--an old fisherman dying in his boat. Caught up by the memory, I purchased Hemingway's short story then and there.

The "About the Author" paragraph at the end of the book declares Hemingway to be "one of the most important influences on the development of the short story and the novel in American fiction" (Scribner Paperback Fiction edition). Having failed to read any Hemingway before this book, I cannot tell you why his work is described this way. I can tell you that after the first three pages I had to read it to the end.

The Old Man and the Sea breaks all the rules of writing. It has commas galore in the wrong places. Many sentences run on while others are only fragments. It does not honor the traditions of marking by punctuation what text is narration and what is the personal thought of a character. And the whole book reads like a staccato viola piece, temptuously and tortuously choppy. Like the waves of a windy sea. Perhaps this union of form and function help to make it the masterpiece that it is.

Two characters, an old man and a boy, have active roles in the story, and in ninety-four out of the book's one hundred twenty-seven pages we only read about the old man. Yet the old man's determination, his depth of experience, and his sympathy for the sea held my attention better than the kaleidoscope of characters in, say, The Brothers Karamozov. Perhaps the most masterful work within the narrative is the blurring of the line between human and oceanic, sea and sky, heaven and world, which comes to be embodied in the old man as he enters the deadly struggle with the biggest fish ever caught. Hemingway narration keeps us on the line, wondering equally whether fisher or fished will win and whether we will find ourselves in the man or the sea.

Like the artist who suggests meaning by depicting voids, The Old Man and the Sea never offers concrete statements of theme, purpose, or moral. And in this case the story is more powerful for the darkened void, like the attractive mystery of a sea unfathomed. One could find almost any enduring theme within the narrative, if one but reads the story another time. (And I have done so, twice now.)

The "About the Author" text mentions that Hemingway, recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, killed himself in 1961. Knowing nothing about his life outside this book's one-page synopsis, I find there a great mystery. Though I agree with the rear cover which lauds The Old Man and the Sea as heralding "the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss," I hear in the story a sad twist at the end which betrays both courage and triumph. Like so much of the book, the twist is not clear and sharp but deep and murky. Yet it ends the great minuet of The Old Man and the Sea on a chord that does not resolve, which, I suspect, also characterizes the lives of those who end their own.

I am left to wonder, both of the old man and of Hemingway himself: can one conquer the sea, or only weather its storms?

After my first read of the short story, I realized that the piece my dad recited was not Hemingway at all, but Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. When I bought this book, I was trolling in the wrong waters. But to my joy, I have caught a big fish after all.

Thanks to Annie's Book Stop in Manchester, New Hampshire for putting some classics right up front.

~ emrys