“The Old Man and the Sea” (1952)

“The Old Man and the Sea” was a kind of media event unto itself, Ernest Hemingway’s “last major fictional work published during his lifetime” (Wikipedia), published in its entirety first in the glamorous Life magazine with a photo of the author all over the ding-dang cover. It won a Pulitzer and “was the only work explicitly mentioned when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.” The obvious comparisons and perhaps the ambitions too are stuff like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Jack London’s Call of the Wild. If it ranks behind all of them that still puts it within range of Mount Rushmore status, for those inclined. The novella also rates comparison with Hemingway’s own “Big Two-Hearted River” in the way that it basically just observes. It feels more labored and exhausted but it’s still a reasonably good last gasp. The arc of the story—physically, literally—is out to the deep waters of the Gulf Stream from Cuba and back again. It is as simple (and Hemingwayesque) as it could be, all detail focused on what the old man fisherman must do next with his resources and skills as situations develop. As admirably as it may be done there’s little we haven’t seen from Hemingway before. There was a lot of sideline chatter at the time about writer’s block and weak recent novels. A lot was on the line commercially. Its sheer competence was greeted with relief by those under his influence. Later, more carping reviews began to complain of bonehead simplicity and other sins. I read this when I loved Hemingway very much, at 19 or 20, and swore by its straightforward compaction. More recently I didn’t find it as breezy and readable. It’s certainly straightforward and simple, but I was more bored this time by all the MacGyver making-do antics. Yes, yes, life and death, but the references to baseball seemed notably strained. All my problems with Hemingway’s valorization of the stoic are here. It’s what he does. I don’t think “The Old Man and the Sea” lives up to all the attention—a lot of what made it a big deal are more like sideline issues. So it’s hard to know what to make of it, but it’s probably as good a place as any to end a consideration of Hemingway’s shorter fiction. I probably missed a few from the ‘30s, ‘40s, maybe even ‘50s.

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